Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.

Another scholarly journal has apparently decided that no book should be reviewed by somebody named in the book’s acknowledgements. Margaret Bent has over seventy names in her main list, and she warmly thanks or praises dozens of others in the course of her book, which is a definitive report on the state of play in research on the motet repertory of the years 1300–1420. It is safe to say that nobody who is at all qualified to review the book is omitted. That is partly because Bent has been inviting authorities from across the world to speak at her monthly All Souls seminars for over thirty years, and since the time of the Covid lockdown the seminars have been seen internationally on Zoom, with respondents also from across the world. An astonishing and massive public has contributed to making her book what it is. (Declaration: I am indeed named, but I learnt so much from the book that I feel required to make my statement.)

This article establishes the overwhelming association of the key of E♭ minor with expressions of profound melancholy. Subthemes include deep depression, ghosts, and spiritual darkness, represented by ombra style markers, sea storms represented by the tempest style, and representations of Scotland and Ossianic melancholy. C. F. D. Schubart’s well-known statements on E♭ minor are examined concerning its use, though those statements themselves may have been conditioned by prior usage of the key, contemporary tuning systems, and the prevalent psychological association of flat-side keys with melancholy. Topical analysis is served by the history of E♭ minor, which differs greatly from its relative major.

During the early twentieth century, Catalonia experienced a period of great cultural and musical development through the Noucentisme movement, which aimed to elevate its national culture to a symbol of high art. The xeremies (shawms) of the cobla ensemble, which played the sardana genre, were integrated into symphonic and chamber repertoire. This required the technical improvement of the tible (treble) and tenora (tenor) xeremies, but also encouraged the invention of new instruments in the shawm family. The barítona (baritone shawm) was premiered in 1930 by the Banda Municipal de Barcelona and represents a milestone in Catalan music in the tumultuous period before the Spanish Civil War.

Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists’ fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the ‘highest’ in the natural world.

Louise Farrenc’s Nonet, which features an allusion to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, premiered to positive reviews in 1850. Around the same time, Farrenc successfully petitioned for her salary as a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire to match that of her male colleagues. Indeed, much of Farrenc’s career involved subtly challenging the gender norms and social boundaries of nineteenth-century France. In this article, I examine Farrenc’s career in terms of nineteenth-century French feminist praxis. I analyse Farrenc’s sociohistorical context to demonstrate how she played by and subverted gender norms, and examine her Conservatoire students’ careers to illustrate her support of female students, providing them with instruction and performance opportunities. Finally, I read Farrenc’s Nonet as a musical challenge to normative gender roles, a nod to the declining popularity of her colleague and rival Henri Herz, and a response to the 1848 Revolution.

The magician Robert Heller performed virtuoso piano repertoire as part of his magic act while touring in the 1860s. He linked other musical performances in his shows to minstrelsy and spiritualist seances, and briefly featured an unsuccessful musical effect, ‘Tartini’s Dream’, that illustrated the limits of transnational marketing. Expectations of recital audiences shifted in the 1870s, leading to questions about Heller’s capacity to play ‘serious’ repertoire. Throughout his career, he benefited from an emergent celebrity culture that treated conjurers and virtuosos as kin, with musicians like Liszt, Thalberg, and Paganini frequently described in magical terms. Heller’s musical virtuosity functioned as an illusory effect, transforming the piano’s sound while masking his physical presence.

This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners’ affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners’ experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.

Through ethnographical, historical, archival, and analytical lenses, this article explores Zheng Xiaoying’s (1929–) Mandarin re-translations of Das Lied von der Erde as a prism that refracts critical light on intersections of translation, epistemology, interculturality, and post-/decoloniality. The article first provides a reception history of Das Lied in China to contextualize Zheng’s re-translations, and then examines her archives to discuss the cultural dynamics of translation and musical knowledge-making in China. The article ends with a provocation from Hong Kong to reflect on the stakes of celebrating translation as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonial goals, and to position translation in intercultural musical exchange as an arbiter of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.

Discussions of sample-based music are traditionally single-authored, despite the frequency of multi-genre content found within this repertoire. This article builds a case for a new approach for future analyses, justified by highlighting repertoire that embeds samples from different genres, times, and cultures and that calls upon a variety of disciplinary expertise to attend to these disparate contents. Multi-voice commentary is an approach that includes insider voices to speak to the content of sample-based music, building a reception network that runs counter to single authorial modes, broadening the narrative around sample-based music and its lineage. Certain sample-based works are most in need of this new approach, based on situations of ‘sampling up’, ‘down’, or ‘sideways’, tendencies developed from Nader’s concept of ‘studying up’ and Walser’s writings on ‘appropriations from below’. Theoretical ideas from Fish and Barthes are also brought into this discussion to further the case for a multiplicity of readings.

Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.