Music historiography generally describes opera seria as an archetypal genre built on two premises: role typology and the number and placement of arias. Approaches from the perspective of theatre scholarship (Gilles de Van) and musical dramaturgy (Dahlhaus, Bianconi, Feldman, Heller), however, highlight the importance of the constellation of characters and the complementarity of actions in the construction of the drama. Adopting the latter perspective, this article explores the distinctive characteristics of the twenty-six dramas written by Metastasio, considering the singular constellations found in each of them (in terms of status, kinship and emotions) as well as the convenienze teatrali imposed by the business of opera. We show how Metastasio built a twofold dramaturgy in his dramas to meet both the expectations of dramatic literature and the requirements of musical expression of emotions. This explains why the primo uomo (Poro) could be the antagonist of the hero (Alessandro) in Metastasio's Alessandro nell'Indie.

After its launch on 30 November 2022 ChatGPT (or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, gaining one hundred million users in just two months. Developed by the US-based artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI, ChatGPT is a free, text-based AI system designed to interact with the user in a conversational way. Capable of answering complex questions with sophistication and of conversing in a breezy and impressively human style, ChatGPT can also generate outputs in a seemingly endless variety of formats, from professional memos to Bob Dylan lyrics, HTML code to screenplays and five-alarm chilli recipes to five-paragraph essays. Its remarkable capability relative to earlier chatbots gave rise to both astonishment and concern in the tech sector. On 22 March 2023 a group of more than one thousand scientists and entrepreneurs published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on further human-competitive AI development – a moratorium that was not observed.

According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.

Socialist Yugoslavia and Zambia became dynamic Cold War partners in the Non-Aligned Movement, with extensive cooperation in economic development, national defence, and international diplomacy. This article explores the roots of this “East–South” cooperation by looking at the pioneering contacts between North Rhodesian and Yugoslav trade unions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how Yugoslav trade union officials opened up new perspectives for the Yugoslav organized labour movement as it reached out to the “global” at a time of rising decolonization and incipient non-alignment. Further, it offers a nuanced perspective on Cold War trade union internationalism and sheds new light on the politicization of the Zambian labour movement. The article shows that the national trade union federations and their officials on both sides were proactive sociopolitical actors, paving the way for future diplomatic contacts akin to “workers’ proto-diplomacy”.

In a recent think piece for the new-music media site I Care If You Listen, the London-based writer and director Jessica Bailey advocates for accessible notation practices in classical-music pedagogy (‘Earned, Not Learned: How Classical Music Notation is Not Built for Neurodivergent Students’ https://icareifyoulisten.com/2024/06/classical-music-notation/ (18 June 2024)). As an avid pianist with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Bailey finds numbers and symbols more challenging than words and letters, and she recounts how forbidding conventional music notation was for her. Bailey developed her own workarounds, but advanced music study was essentially off limits. She now wonders what doors might be opened to her and other neurodivergent musicians through even small adjustments to notation systems. Drawing a connection between the accessible pre-grade piano-method books of her childhood and modern digital solutions like Lime Lighter and the Odla tactile console, Bailey ponders how notation technologies might help us ‘reimagine and re-programme the sheet music model’.

This article examines the lived experiences of the older body—the embodiment of old age—from the perspective of older people. It uses letters written from 1680 to 1820 by twenty-two women and men aged between sixty and eighty-nine, selected from a corpus of over 391 letter writers. We begin by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people, as well as their understanding of the relationship between these experiences and their later years. The article finds that old age was experienced as highly variable and was subject to an ongoing process of recalibration. Central to that process was the corporeality of the aging body as experienced in the context of a range of social factors. The corporeality of the body was a factor for all but was not always framed negatively or even situated in the context of aging. The article then turns to the responses of older people to the life-stage of old age. The article finds them self-directed and proactive in continuing to live well. This is significant evidence for a self-consciously active, engaged, and embodied old age in early modernity. These older letter writers tended not to disavow old age but to accommodate and even embrace it.

Decades before educators were forced to confront the disruption posed by widely accessible generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, language learners, instructors, and researchers began dealing with its game-changing predecessor: machine translation (MT). Researchers began assessing MT systems and proposing language teaching applications for them as soon as universities and schools gained access to them in the mid-1980s (*Anderson, 1995*; Ball, 1989*; Corness, 1985; French 1991; Lewis, 1997; Richmond, 1994*). These inquiries accelerated in the early 2000s, when internet-enabled computer labs and increasingly smarter devices put free online MT services such as Babel Fish and Google Translate (GT) at students' fingertips, triggering concerns over output quality, academic dishonesty, and the short-circuiting of actual learning. In recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of research on MT's role in and impact on language teaching and learning, with many dozens of peer-reviewed articles published in the past five years alone, as documented in a handful of comprehensive literatures reviews (Gokgoz-Kurt, 2023; Jiang et al., 2024; Jolley & Maimone, 2022; Klimova et al., 2023; Lee, 2023). The present article provides a timeline of this rapidly expanding research domain.