The emergence in 1756 of the Journal encyclopédique, published in Liège (later in Bouillon), encouraged an international readership to view cultural developments across national boundaries. An anonymous review of Rameau's new version of Zoroastre was prefaced by ‘Mémoires d'un musicien’, whose author recalls significant events in his musical education and life history to date. These include extended travels to England and Italy. The narrator describes meeting Handel and also Marie Sallé in London, and details various contents of Handel's library supposedly seen and discussed on more than one visit, deduced as occurring late in 1746. These accounts are analysed and contextualized, and a report on archival searches for the author's identity provided, together with an English translation of the 1756 text.

During the later 1960s, the Kinks wrote many songs confronting the dominant reception trope of reading the rock star as iconic ‘youth’ who ‘authentically’ presented his or her life on stage. The present article approaches this issue through Edward T. Cone's and other work on voice and persona in music. Several specific Kinks songs from the period are analysed, focusing on the divergence between vocal ‘protagonists’ and other personae or voices appearing in the music, which make it difficult to map the protagonists onto the writer/performer directly. The methods explored have broader implications for analysing rock songs as musical-cultural artefacts.

This article traces the discourses which have dominated the musicological study of creativity over the last 50 years or so, focusing on the concept of improvisation and its relationship to composition, particularly as applied to musics outside the notated Western tradition. Arguing that such discourses have served specific ideological purposes, the author illustrates the ways in which these continue to be implicated in an essentializing and orientalist exercise of power over ‘other’ musical traditions. Considering the specific case of Iranian classical music, the author discusses the impact of Western discourses on concepts of musical creativity in Iran and, through detailed musical analyses, illustrates the problematic nature of such discourses in the context of this musical tradition.

This article argues that music offers experiences of change that are at odds with our common understanding of time. Specifically, I question the widespread belief that onward motion is a condition of musical temporality. I approach this issue through metaphor theory, which tends to argue for the necessity of metaphorical experiences of time and music in terms of motion. I argue that music's changing sound evokes a variety of bodily metaphors; motion is not ever-present, but intermingles with metaphors of heat, light, weight, tension and so on. Works by Ligeti, Carter, Kurtág and Saariaho are discussed as case studies.

‘Memetics’, a concept most elegantly expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, asserts that human culture consists of a multitude of units transmitted between individuals by imitation and subject to evolutionary pressures. Such particles, ‘memes’, are broadly analogous to the genes of biological transmission. Four late pieces of Mozart's, including Pamina's aria ‘Ach ich fühl's’ from Die Zauberflöte, are examined in terms of the meme concept and a conglomeration, or ‘memeplex’, consisting of seven memes is identified within them. The nature of the musical memeplex, in this specific case and also more generally, is considered, particularly from the perspective of its location at different levels of the structural hierarchy. The evolutionary history of some of Mozart's memes is examined with reference to selected passages from works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, relationships between the musical memes under investigation and memes in the verbal-conceptual realm are explored.