In Des Canyons aux étoiles. . ., a work commissioned to celebrate the American bicentennial, Olivier Messiaen defines the United States through representations of Utah's birds and canyons. Focusing on the phenomenological power rather than the pictorial intentions of Messiaen's music, this article examines ways that Messiaen uses textural saturation and varied repetition to draw the listener into a musically mediated Bryce Canyon. The music challenges a stable subject/object relationship for the listener by promoting humility and awe within the landscape over more visually oriented touristic encounters. Simulations of immersion serve implicit political and evangelistic goals as city-dwelling listeners are invited to embrace dwelling in the natural environment as a means of revaluing faith and breaking free from what Messiaen perceived as the twin hindrances of mechanized civilization and secularism.

By the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle, We'll Meet Again (1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak's ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music's historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading, however, given that Ambient music's dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno's Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog's Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.

Composer Udo Kasemets (1919–2014) emigrated to Canada in 1951 from Estonia following the Second World War, and during the 1960s undertook a number of initiatives to mobilize experimental music in Toronto. This article investigates Canavangard, Kasemets's publication series of graphic scores which appeared between 1967 and 1970. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan's spatial theory of media, Kasemets saw the transformative potential of non-standard notational practices to recalibrate the relationships between composer, performer, and listener. Kasemets's 1963 composition Trigon, which was frequently performed by his ensemble during the decade, illuminates the connections between McLuhan and experimental music. In my analysis of the work, I argue that Trigon manifestly puts into performance many of the rhetorical strategies used by McLuhan to describe the immersive, intersensory environments of post-typographic media ecologies. Kasemets believed that abandoning standard notation would have extraordinary ramifications for musical practice going forward in the twentieth century, similar to how McLuhan saw the messianic power of electronic media to destabilize the typographic universe. Canavangard, as much more than a short-lived publication series of graphic scores, maps the convergences of music, culture, and technology in post-war Canada.

Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the result of the referendum on constitutional reform held in Italy on 4 December 2016. The votes against (59.1%) won by a significant margin, with an unexpectedly high turnout at the polls and more than 33 million citizens voting. Using as a point of departure the polls carried out prior to and following the referendum, in which Italians said they were essentially in favour of the reform proposed by the prime minister, the essay focuses on the mistakes made by Matteo Renzi that discouraged Italians from voting Yes. These touch on all aspects of the referendum: 1) the parliamentary process, 2) its combination with electoral law, 3) institutional communication, and 4) his political analysis and strategic approach. The final section evaluates the effects of the referendum result on the Italian political system, emphasising the setback to reformism and the strengthening of the anti-system parties that support leaving the Euro (in particular the Movimento 5 Stelle).

This study highlights the complexity of French grammatical gender as a lexical property at the interface of morpho-phonology and the lexicon. French native speakers (n = 168) completed a gender assignment task with written stimuli illustrating common versus uncommon nouns, vowel-initial versus consonant-initial nouns, compounds and grammatical homonyms; they also indicated the strategies they used to assign a gender to stimuli. The findings showed strong lexical and gender effects suggesting that grammatical gender must be acquired for individual lexical items as morpho-phonological cues alone are unreliable and vary greatly.

This squib attempts to bring more precision to the understanding of object omission in English by investigating the referential behavior of omitted objects. Allerton (1975) and Fillmore (1986) understand omitted objects as being indefinite, by which they mean that omitted objects are unknown and insulated from their potential referents available in the context. However, this squib presents data that challenge this understanding of indefiniteness, and proposes that the indefiniteness of omitted objects may be more precisely understood as their indeterminacy over their potential referents.

This article examines and compares the evolution of animal husbandry practices in several civitates of Gallia Belgica and western Germania Inferior, as documented by archaeozoological data. It focuses on two neighbouring civitates, those of the Nervii and the Tungri, its aim being to explore the factors that influenced diversity in husbandry practices. In general, it appears that cattle played an important role in the Early Roman animal economy of these civitates. There is evidence that large cattle were primarily bred for use as draught animals. At the same time, the intensive processing of cattle on professional butchery sites, and indications of cattle-related craft activities in urban environments, demonstrate that within the market economy animal exploitation was focused on cattle. Nevertheless, several aspects of animal husbandry practices exhibit geographical differences. Evidence of surplus production of pigs in the countryside of Gallia Belgica suggests that different kinds of agricultural specialization existed within the loess belt. There are also differences in the adoption of Roman agricultural innovations in terms of morphological changes in cattle.

This special issue of the European Journal of Archaeology discusses aspects of animal husbandry in a number of provinces of the Western Roman Empire. In this introduction, we describe the general characteristics of animal husbandry in pre-Roman and Roman times to assess any changes that may have occurred after the Roman conquest. The results suggest that the territoriality typifying the first millennium bc had a significant impact on production, resulting in a decrease in cattle size and frequencies across Europe. Nevertheless, not all the regions reacted in the same way, and regional communities that focused their animal production on pigs implemented more sustainable husbandry practices over time. By bringing together studies carried out across Europe, this journal issue highlights the existence of cases of both change and continuity across the Empire, and the (uneven) impact of the market economy on animal husbandry and dietary practices in climatically different regions.