What can queer theory, and drag performance, contribute to music semiotics? This paper proffers ‘dragging’ as a socio-cultural semiotics that demonstrates how musical meanings are dynamically queered through drag lip-sync performance. Departing from approaches to meaning and semiotics in musicology and popular music studies, I intervene with direct insights from queer theory. I draw out oscillations between queer theoretical perspectives on temporality and (post)structural concepts such as assemblages and mediation as they have been incorporated into music studies. ‘Drag’, not just an art form, is here developed as a specific kind of spatial-temporal mediation: dragging is understood as the displacement and heterochronization of meaning, where musical objects are dragged ‘out of time’ and ‘out of space’ into the alien world of queer experience. Dragging as a conceptual instrument allows us to begin answering questions of how meanings – and their political stakes – coalesce inside and outside, within and without, music.

This article amplifies current understanding of the Afro-diasporic composer-violinist Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-George, by exploring his 1770s musical career in relation to Mozart. Director of the progressive Concert des amateurs during Mozart’s visit to Paris in 1778, Bologne was one of the leading exponents of a virtuosic style of symphonie concertante writing that became a touchstone for Mozart following his return to provincial Salzburg. A comparison of the musical spheres inhabited by Bologne and Mozart nuances our understanding of developments in ‘concertante’ composition and the performative dimensions of the medium, enabling a broader, more inclusive history to emerge.

This article explores classical music education through analysing findings from a project on embedding ‘youth voice’ within instrumental teaching and learning. Drawing on theorizations of classical music as a genre, I describe how the young people in this project saw classical music’s genre conventions as working against a youth voice approach. The article also outlines the ways in which youth voice was shaped through social relations in this space as well as the ‘institutional ecology’ of music education. I argue that embedding youth voice approaches in instrumental education will only be effective if the genre itself is open to transformation.

Florentín Giménez (1925–2021) stands as one of the most prolific Paraguayan composers. Published in six Cancioneros (‘Songbooks’), his more than 800 canciones populares (‘folkloric or folk-style songs’) testify to his productivity and distinctive approach to this particular genre. Based on the examination of his six published Cancioneros, along with an analysis of Giménez’s musical recordings and personal interviews with the composer, this article first provides biographical context and introduces these songs through a series of representative cultural themes that emphasize some of Giménez’s ideas about musical and extra-musical expressions of cultural identity and Paraguayan nationalism. Following a discussion of Giménez’s vocal compositions, the article focuses on the composer’s self-proclaimed musical advocacy, and highlights three of his most iconic and widely known songs: ‘Así canta mi patria’ (‘Thus My Country Sings’), ‘Ka’aguype’ (‘In the Forest’) in the Guaraní language, and ‘Muy cerca de ti’ (‘Very Near You’). By considering these three Paraguayan folk-style songs, I aim to demonstrate that throughout his career, Giménez’s music has become illustrative of a cultural identity informed by Paraguayan music and socially imagined ideas, including the sentiment of nationalism, which he expresses through a profound admiration for his country.

The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.