This article is an attempt to understand music theory from the perspective of written and sounding media. It examines three radically different music-theoretical practices, which operate with different forms of written notation and different musical instruments, and have surprisingly different purposes in mind: the monochord-based theory of Franchinus Gaffurius (1518), the siren-based theory of Wilhelm Opelt (1834) and the piano-and-score-based theory commonly practised in our age. The instruments used in these three music theories hold the key to a fuller understanding: they can be understood as ‘epistemic things’ – that is, in producing sounds, these objects simultaneously produce knowledge about music. From a media-archaeological perspective, I suggest, these three music-theoretical practices stand emblematically for Pythagorean, digital and textual approaches to music.

This article explores the patronage relationship between Harriet Grote and Jenny Lind during the latter's visits to London in 1847, 1848 and 1849. Aiming to highlight the often neglected affective dimensions of individual music patronage in this period, it discusses Grote's activities as Lind's agent and chaperone as well as her efforts to support Lind in more personal ways and to create a home-like environment for her. It is argued that Grote's varied roles as Lind's patron should be interpreted in the context of an intense personal interest in the singer, and are characterized by a complex combination of public and private types of support. These, in turn, correspond to public and private music practice as settings for patronage, revealing the interdependence of these two modes of music-making in the period, especially in the case of elite music culture.

This article considers the statuomaniacal impulse sweeping Paris in the first years of the twentieth century, and how contemporary interest in the animation of antiquities resulted in new ways of seeing. Despite the shared aspects of setting and choreographic inspiration, Daphnis et Chloé and L'après-midi d'un faune staged profoundly divergent conceptions of how bodies could and should move, a result of emerging optical modes.

Drawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means of mediating between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music's best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno's notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge's contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

In the 1950s, using electronic devices to make music seemed a new paradigm for composers eager to remove the effects of interpretation on their relationship with their audience. The promise was that compositional ideas could be directly made into sound with the help of a technician whose task it was to carry out instructions. By making a new realization of Stockhausen's Studie II, composed in 1954, I interrogate many of the original techniques and practices, and show that there are many sites which require interpretation and raise issues of performance practice. The implication of these discoveries is that there may be advantages to an analysis of early electronic music of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the practice of instrumental music, and that where there are references to ‘technicians’, great care should be taken to understand and appreciate the range of musical skills often required by such individuals. This approach to realization also raises serious questions about the ontology of electronic music.