This article presents a musical bestiary, a collection of creatures found in the work of the composer Liza Lim. It is a thought experiment, meant to unsettle current ways of thinking about music and its relationship with the world. Centring our discussion on sonic figurations rather than on a composer’s works, we experiment with alternative musical ontologies and consider their lessons for understanding the role of contemporary art in a time of ecological breakdown. Thinking of Lim’s musical creations in terms of strange beasts inhabiting the Anthropocene draws out a range of themes – including uncanny ventriloquism, performer-instrument symbiosis, theatricalization and the everyday, musical mourning and witnessing – that might help make sense of the sensory and conceptual derangements of our time. The prose style and nonlinear format are likewise experimental, intended as provocations that we might read and write otherwise about music in the Anthropocene.

Malcolm Arnold’s symphonies have persistently divided critical opinion because of their problematic relationship with traditional genre expectations. This is especially the case in works that eschew sonata-style tonal conflicts and formal markers in favour of theme- and timbre-driven processes. In these respects, Sibelius, rather than members of the Austro-German symphonic tradition, was an important model for Arnold’s individual approach to symphonic composition. This article applies four formal principles (content-based forms, teleological genesis, rotational form and klang meditation), which James Hepokoski has explicitly identified with Sibelius’s later symphonic style, to the first movement of Arnold’s Fifth – one of his most admired and yet most unconventional symphonic structures. The resulting analysis shows a complex and yet accessible movement that generates its own unique tension and dramatic interest. Far from being the feeble work of a symphonic lightweight, it is an impressively realized landmark of the genre in the late twentieth century.

Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance is notable for the ways in which it evokes a childlike fascination with the world. This article considers not only how this experiential mode is constructed, but also how the topic of childhood overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, particularly in the context of how humans interact with the natural world. I argue that exploring such ‘strategies of enchantment’ and their musical framing allows not only for a more nuanced understanding of Enescu’s aesthetics and his music, but also of the role that enchantment as an aesthetic category occupies within musical modernity more broadly.

The ‘Bridal Chorus’ of Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world. This article explores how it became so inextricably associated with wedding ceremonies – real ones, or on stage and in film. Furthered by its use at several British royal weddings the music was especially popular at wedding ceremonies in Britain and the USA. Notwithstanding that the chorus was usually performed in an instrumental arrangement, its attractiveness as wedding music was strengthened by various new English texts, its popular title of ‘Here comes the Bride’ deriving from a 1915 silent film. On a different level, this study contextualizes and evaluates the long-lasting criticism of the use of Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ at wedding ceremonies. Proportional to the decline in its actual use, this criticism has now mostly gone; yet, the ‘Bridal Chorus’ remains as the archetypical music to represent the arrival of the bride.

In recent years, musicologists have dropped the murder charges against Carlo Gesualdo because criminal law in Renaissance Italy permitted cuckolds to execute their unfaithful wives. As Annibale Cogliano has expounded, Gesualdo had the right to perform an ‘honour killing’. Still, the known facts of this case are few, and the extent to which Gesualdo premeditated his attack has remained a mystery. Through a new investigation of the surviving sources, this study proposes that Gesualdo coordinated his honour killing with the church liturgy: fearful of breaking the fifth commandment, Gesualdo attacked on a day when the Bible lesson sanctioned vendetta killing.

Anglo-American musicology is having a childhood moment. The foundation of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Childhood Study Group marked this moment most clearly, together with the launch in 2021 of an accompanying website maintained by Susan Boynton and Ryan Bunch.1 Not that children and childhood are anything new as a topic of enquiry in music studies: since the mid- to late twentieth century, children’s musical cultures have formed a steadily expanding subject for ethnomusicologists, to some extent predating the institutionalization of the study of childhood in anthropology generally.2 Since Boynton and Roe-Min Kok published an early state-of-the-field collection in 2006 (as the outgrowth of an International Musicological Society conference), studies of music and childhood have burgeoned principally at the intersection of ethnomusicology and other fields – notably popular music, as in Kyra D. Gaunt’s The Games Black Girls Play, as well as music education and technology studies, both of which intertwine in Tyler Bickford’s Schooling New Media.3 At present, the relation between popular music, mass media and youth culture forms the most prominent subject of musicological debate about childhood.4 Contrary, then, to the implications of this article’s title, we might say as music scholars that children have always been around, but that large parts of the discipline have not paid them much attention.

This book review was written in the form of a letter correspondence, allowing us to explore a more dialogic approach to review writing. During the seven-month period of working on the review, we also met and discussed some of the ideas shared below. In writing these letters, we embraced the main theme of the books by being mindful of the soundscapes that surrounded us, and that have inevitably formed part of our final review.