The social and political upheavals that rock our world are rarely treated in the world of contemporary ‘art music’ composition. Popular music reaches a larger public and seems more at ease in addressing these themes. But is it intrinsically linked with such content in its musical expression, or only through its lyrics? Would art music, for its part, lose its ‘purity’ by abandoning its stance of abstraction in approaching these subjects? This article draws on examples from my works Kein Licht (2017) and Lab.Oratorium (2019). Kein Licht, a ‘Thinkspiel’, imagines a future in which humankind’s appetite for energy consumption has led our species to the verge of extinction. The semi-staged Lab.Oratorium addresses the humanitarian crisis of immigration into Europe. Both works reflect the evolution of traditional genres (opera, oratorio) with theatrical elements.

Several collections of lesson books for practising mensural music published in Spain during the eighteenth century, known as canto de órgano, have been overlooked in musicological scholarship. These canto de órgano lessons allowed students to be trained in a wide variety of repertoire, from renaissance polyphony to modern-style monody. This article provides an initial overview of these printed collections and identifies noteworthy parallels with the didactic repertoires of other regions, such as Italian solfeggi. To that end, I present context and different Spanish opinions of the period on the usefulness of solfeggio collections and specific examples of collections that could serve as models of style. I analyse the way in which solfeo was practised, before proposing a classification. In assessing these works against other sources, I suggest that these lesson books were useful not only for the practice of reading music, but also for the cultivation of good taste in interpretation, improvisation and composition.

This article analyzes women’s experiences of human papillomavirus (HPV) in Turkey under gendered health governance, a lack of public vaccine coverage, and conservative moral norms. Interviews with twenty-three mostly urban, university-educated women show that the diagnosis is experienced as shame, anxiety, and individualized responsibility. The burden is deeply felt despite the high cultural capital of the sample, indicating that stigma and access barriers to vaccination are not mitigated by individual resources alone. After diagnosis, women perform extensive emotional and moral labor, arranging follow-ups, insisting on condom use or choosing abstinence, and calculating disclosure risks to partners and family. Men are largely absent from prevention and care. Clinical routines also produce moral judgment and turn medical risk into a disciplinary test of respectability through marital-status questioning, limited privacy, and admonishing talk. The case in Turkey aligns with global feminization and moralization of HPV yet is distinctive for increasing official familism, rising conservatism on sexuality, and a prolonged lack of HPV vaccine coverage, as well as related civil-society campaigns and pay-it-forward schemes. In such a context, assigning risk management to women creates a double burden of dealing with moral discourses and caring for their and others’ health. Even if free HPV vaccination begins, equitable uptake will require non-moralizing clinical communication, confidentiality, and partner-inclusive, de-gendered prevention.

This special issue presents the perspectives of five composers—Hilda Paredes, Andile Khumalo, Marisol Jiménez, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Philippe Manoury—on music and politics today. Originating in the online lecture series ‘Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Music’, presented in 2021–22 by Universität Bern, McGill University, and Université de Montréal, the articles in this issue expand the composers’ original lectures into statements on the political contexts of their music and the potential of contemporary composition to effect social change. Their works address inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and violence, as well as the global threat of irreversible climate change. Another shared theme is the legacy of colonialism, both as a driving force of these social crises and a continuing challenge for composers who must reckon with Eurocentric attitudes and assumptions. These reflections on the transformative possibilities of musical creation illustrate a wide range of strategies for political engagement and praxis.

Cross-linguistically, the existence of ‘double case’ configurations (e.g., nom-subject and nom-object) presents an empirical challenge to theories of case where anti-identity, or distinctness between two NPs, plays a key role (e.g., Yip, Maling & Jackendoff 1987). This study investigates the factors that influence the distribution of nominative object constructions in Korean. In a novel acceptability judgment experiment, we find that sentences with nom-objects are rated less acceptable than those with acc-objects. In a corpus survey, sentences with nom-objects commonly have topic-marked subjects. We propose the Morphological-Thematic-Grammatical (MTG) Alignment Hypothesis, which posits that sentences are maximally acceptable when there is maximal alignment between morphological case marking, thematic role, and grammatical function. In nom-acc constructions, this alignment is achieved because the highest-ranked subject (Keenan & Comrie 1977) is marked with highest-ranked nominative case (Otsuka 2006) and functions as a higher-ranked agent or experiencer. The lower-ranked object, meanwhile, has lower-ranked accusative case and functions as a lower-ranked patient. In contrast, nom-nom (and dat-nom) constructions fail to achieve this alignment. Our analysis treats the relevant constraints (e.g., distinctness, alignment) as interacting with each other to produce cumulative effects on acceptability.

Rates of judicial dissent vary dramatically between Southern Africa’s appeal courts, even though judges frequently circulate between their benches. This variation cannot be explained by the ideological distance between judges or by their judicial philosophies. Differing institutional arrangements provide better but still incomplete explanations. These arrangements reflect dramatic transformations in the region’s judicial cultures. Analysing these diverging cultures illuminates why some forms of dissent have proved particularly contentious, and why styles of adjudication favouring dissent in some areas of the law have aroused particular hostility. There is thus no straightforward ‘norm’ that promotes or undermines judicial consensus in the region.

This festschrift essay honors the academic life and work of Douglas Laycock, one of the most important scholars and advocates in American law and religion. This essay offers tribute to a mentor from whom I took three classes and an independent study in law school, for whom I worked as a research assistant, and with whom I have remained in close conversation during my two decades in the academy. It also offers an insider’s account of Laycock’s intellectual project and influence—punctuated with stories, observations, and nuggets of wisdom drawn from a close reading of his scholarship and briefs. This essay traces Laycock’s career from his early academic work to his later role in landmark Supreme Court litigation, ultimately seeing Laycock’s deepest legacy as lying not only in the doctrines he helped shape, but in a model of intellectually serious, cross-ideological engagement that both inspires us and calls us to account.

The two books discussed in this review essay speak to issues of projections implied in Western political thinking in the distinction between the “West” and the “East”. This includes a tradition in “Western” discourse to project features with negative connotations, such as “despotism”, onto a construed “Eastern other”, thus obliterating comparable structures of hierarchy in the “own”, and it is also linked to the heavy ideological load that concepts of “East” carry when it comes to geopolitical projections of otherness, and often enmity. In Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, Jie-Hyun Lim undertakes a sweeping critique of the projections just mentioned and links this with a critique of nationalism as well as current mass politics. In Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, Kolja Lindner is concerned with reconciling postcolonial perspectives with at least some of Karl Marx’s work, insofar as it has been criticized for Orientalist and modernist bias.