This article uses the case study of the Revue musicale, founded by Jules Combarieu and Romain Rolland in 1901, to analyse the shape of French musicology at the outset of the twentieth century and, in particular, how social issues surrounding research in the social sciences had an important influence on the orientation of the discipline in subsequent decades. Occupying a position at the heart of French musicological activity in the early years of the century, the project was quickly challenged, leading to the creation of the Mercure musical in 1905, which would eventually become the Revue musicale SIM, published by the Société Internationale de Musique (Section de Paris), in November 1909. After an initial presentation of the journal's editorial project, the article then analyses the founders’ intellectual objectives and explores the links between the journal's structure, its anticipated objectives and the evolution of the discipline through the various publications that followed.

Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was the first monarch whose Accession Day (17 November) became an occasion for celebration. Poetic tributes to the day frequently evoked images of singing, music-making and dancing, evidence of which can be found in extant single-sheet publications, manuscripts and prayer books, as well as records of now-lost songs in the Stationers’ Register. These songs for Elizabeth's Accession Day reveal how cheaply printed or orally circulated music could become a medium for royal propaganda. Such genres spanned diverse social classes and contexts: from the educated to the illiterate, from street to church; from private household devotions to civic festivities. This countrywide singing was officially encouraged by church and government, as well as fuelled by the local enthusiasm of civic or parish authorities, individual households and commercial printers. It both created an image of England as a harmonious kingdom and attempted to instil such unity in difficult times.

This article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

This article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.

This article presents an analytical and cultural reading of the 1932 song ‘Der Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba tanzt nur Rumba’ by the German vocal group the Comedian Harmonists. It incorporates Erving Goffman's stigma theory to propose an alternative interpretation of performances of commercial rumba and jazz by members of a Weimar cosmopolitan youth culture that pushes beyond paradigms of appropriation and exoticism. The author argues that songs seemingly exoticizing an Other could rather serve as a means of articulating concerns of an Othered Self in the context of the rise of National Socialism. The article contrasts a close reading of the Comedian Harmonists’ performance of the song with performances by Leo Monosson and the Melody Gents and incorporates the contrasting experiences of the lyricist Fritz Rotter with those of the Comedian Harmonists to show how ‘Der Onkel Bumba’ presented jazz/rumba as an indicator for both utopian idealism and looming dystopian horror.

This article examines postcolonial affect as expressed in the Belgian-born Singaporean citizen Robert Casteels's L’(autre) fille aux cheveux de Bali (2002), in which it is shown that sonic identities (gamelan and Chinese instruments; quotations from Debussy and Bartók) give way to the ambiguous, modulating relationality of dis/affiliation, dis/affinity and a/proximity. Micro-changes in musical affect lead to the loosening of enculturated or acculturated emotional and perceptual responses associated with established identities. Musical affect thus serves as a corrective to neatly differentiated identities that are constructed in narratives of imperial exoticism, postcolonial autonomy or multicultural harmony.