What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.

This article provides a revisionist account of thirteenth-century refrain use, challenging the presumed connection between the refrain and oral song traditions. The distribution patterns in the surviving sources reveal no strong connection between refrain use and the rondet, the song genre often posited as the refrain's point of origin. Further, a significant corpus of refrains circulated only within the motet repertory, independently of monophonic song. Close comparison of refrain concordances in surviving sources reveals careful attention on the part of composers and scribes to the preservation of their melodic identity. Together, these findings suggest new contexts for understanding the refrain. The author relocates refrain use within clerical practices of quotation, particularly auctoritas, exploring case studies in which refrains are interpreted exegetically. In motets, chansons avec des refrains and a vernacular translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, refrains are treated as sources of vernacular knowledge and objects of commentary.

During the seventeenth century, the Medici family sought to legitimize its power by using art to communicate a political message, referring constantly to a precise code of sacred imagination and religious devotion. This article focuses on Antonio Veracini – a violinist in the service of Vittoria della Rovere – and on his op. 1, which shows a perfect agreement with the aesthetic ambitions of the grand duchess and with her double role of regent and defensor fidei. In the light of recent studies that reconsider the traditional historiographical approach to what has been called the ‘bigotry’ of Cosimo III, Antonio Veracini's sonatas – in comparison with two other coeval collections of trio sonatas dedicated to Grand Prince Ferdinando (by Pietro Sanmartini and Giovan Battista Gigli) – show a full awareness of the expressive potential of the sonata, transforming it into a musical genre capable of conferring not only ‘pleasure’ and ‘delight’ but also symbolic significance within specific cultural contexts.

Using the famous death-themed Cantata 82 as a case study, this article offers a model for situating J. S. Bach's cantata output in the wider cultural sphere of early eighteenth-century Leipzig life. Looking beyond the immediate and well-studied liturgical and theological contexts, the article reconstructs a broader range of associations that Bach's music may have evoked for his contemporary listeners, drawing out allusions to operatic topics, popular fears of deadly diseases, fictions of heavenly music and macabre dances of death. By locating the question of musical meaning in the interpretative space between the piece and its historical listeners, the article offers an alternative to conventional hermeneutic approaches that view Bach's cantatas as conveying a singular and clearly audible message of Lutheran doctrine.

This article offers a contextual reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Richard Strauss's 1927 opera Die ägyptische Helena. For Hofmannsthal and Strauss, the marital rift between Menelas and Helena caused by her infidelity operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in pan-Germanic politics, society and the arts – thus highlighting the concomitant necessity for unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. By recasting the story of Menelas's and Helena's homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, Hofmannsthal and Strauss pointed to the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. As this article demonstrates, Die ägyptische Helena stands as an artwork both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.