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.

When Mr. Spottiswoode asked me some time since to take his place in reading a paper before this Society, I called to mind some acoustical experiments I made last summer, with a view to making out how we detect so easily and generally the direction of a source of sound, and hoped to be able to complete the experiments to some extent, so that I might be able to present the matter in a little more complete form. Unfortunately, however, my health is not good enough to allow of my making acoustic experiments in the open air at this time of the year, and therefore I have but little to add to what I discovered last summer.

This paper outlines an approach to listening drawn from the anthropology and sociology of music, arguing that there is a pressing need for comparative empirical studies of listening. I suggest that the terms of the discussion should shift from listening to the broader category of musical experience, in this way allowing questions of the encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience to arise in a stronger way than hitherto. I propose a focus on the relations between musical object and listening subject, where this entails analysis of the social and historical conditions that bear on listening, and of the changing types of subjectivity brought to music. The point is that neither these conditions, nor the forms of music's mediation, nor the relations between musical object and subject can be fully known in advance. I sketch three perspectives from anthropology and sociology that indicate the kinds of insight offered by empirical research which takes listening-as-musical-experience, and the situated, relational analysis of musical subjects and objects, as its focus.

A musical groove is most typically created by a small group of musicians working together, each contributing parts to the whole. Characterizing the knowledge behind such interactive ventures has proved to be challenging. This article attempts to characterize the knowledge basic to grooves first by concentrating on ‘the groove’ as it is practised in soul, rhythm and blues, jazz fusion and various other popular genres, and second by focusing on cognitive knowledge structures called conceptual models. It is argued that musicians rely on such structures to produce grooves, and that listeners make use of similar structures to understand them. Grooves from the music of Eric Clapton, Miles Davis and James Brown are discussed, and conceptual models for each are developed.

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.

The question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a comeback as the order of the day in the field of musicological thought. In May 1988 a conference on the theme ‘Music and the Verbal Arts: Interactions’ was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A fortnight later, a group of musicologists and literary theorists was invited to the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford to assess, in the course of four intense round-table discussions, whether it is legitimate to recognize a narrative dimension in music. In November of the same year, the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore presented a session entitled ‘Text and Narrative’, chaired by Carolyn Abbate, and, at the instigation of Joseph Kerman, a session devoted to Edward T. Cone's The Composer's Voice. A number of articles deal with the subject in our specialized periodicals: I am thinking in particular of the studies published in 19th-Century Music by Anthony Newcomb – ‘Once More “Between Absolute and Programme Music”: Schumann's Second Symphony’ and ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’ – or, on the French-speaking side of musicology, of Marta Grabocz's article ‘La sonate en si mineur de Liszt: une stratégie narrative complexe’ and the essays of the Finnish semiologist Eero Tarasti. No doubt a good many articles will emerge from the above conferences. And we are awaiting the appearance of Carolyn Abbate's book Unsung Voices: Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Music.

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.

This article explores the relationship between music and material urban environments by drawing on ethnographic research with rock and hip-hop musicians. The first of its three sections introduces some of the musicians who participated in that research and the maps they drew to illustrate their music-making activities in the city. The second compares these hand-drawn maps and their various lines and patterns, and relates their differences to music genre and particular urban conditions. The final section of the article explores the broader implications of the maps for conceptualizing the relationship between music and material environments. It starts by considering notions of articulation and mediation and their usefulness for understanding relations between music and material urban environments. Focusing on the maps’ detailed lines and patterns, it then describes how music and music-making are mediated by material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of journeys and boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way.

This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata form–the first movements of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (as representative of its composer's idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late nineteenth century) –I propose a ‘narrative’ analysis of their musical features, applying the notions of ‘story’, ‘discourse’ and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahler's materials qualify better as narrative ‘events’ on account of their greater number, their individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the ‘discursive techniques’ of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which the developmental procedures are mostly based on tonal musical syntax (as in the Classical style), whereas a higher degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which, in addition to semantic transformations of the materials, discourse itself relies more on gestural semantic connotations (as in Mahler).

This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focusing on these particular points, the article also raises a series of more profound questions about how various strategies of looking and listening influence our understanding of music.

This article explores the metaphorical identification of the tonic key as ‘home’ in relation to the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960. Rejecting conventional readings whereby a ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ element is ultimately assimilated into the ‘home’ sphere, it argues that in this movement Schubert succeeds in doing the reverse, rendering the tonic ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich; ‘uncanny’) at a critical moment in the recapitulation. Schubert's practice in this instance is contrasted with that of Beethoven in selected middle-period works; and Schubert's own fragmentary continuity draft for the movement, as well as songs from Die Winterreise and Schwanengesang, are brought to bear on the investigation of ‘home’ and ‘das Unheimliche’.

Television's Ally McBeal revels in soundtrack games, playing as it does with the conventions of several types of musical multimedia while elevating music, especially a particular type of pop music, to the role of central plot and series metaphor–above all in relation to Ally's character. As musically saturated television, Ally McBeal not only provides a window onto music's role in television (and hence a central expression of postmodern culture), it also engages some of pop music's broader social functions dramatically. Drawing on both film and media theory, I examine Ally McBeal's soundtrack from formal and dramatic perspectives. I then go on to situate the features discussed within wider postmodernist discourses and draw out music's contribution to the show's controversial representations of contemporary gender politics.

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel–Palestine conflict – brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.

How old is music, and what are its most ancient forms? What is its origin, its source, and to whom shall we attribute its invention? Is music from man, from nature, or from God? Whom does it serve, in whose name is it sung? These are the questions that eighteenth-century writers asked themselves as they embarked on their histories of music; these are the questions they felt it necessary to answer on the first pages of their manuscripts. Today we have consigned the questions to comedy. Who but Barbra Streisand could fall in love with the professor who arrived at the congress of American musicologists with a suitcase filled with rocks that he claimed to be the earliest musical instruments? Innocent and unanswerable, the question ‘How did music begin?’ strikes us as childlike; it has fallen out of currency. In journalism, fiction, the testimony of musicians and composers, and in psychological and psychoanalytical literature, music's origin is still touched upon obliquely. Roland Barthes, inviting the postmodern reader ‘not [to] reject the delirium of origins’, proposes his own theory concerning certain ‘rhythmic incisions … on cave walls of the Mousterian epoch’ that point to ‘the intentional reproduction of a [musical] rhythm’. But the question of music's origin has vanished from histories of music. This being so, we might ask under what intellectual, institutional or professional circumstances the question was withdrawn: for a discourse on the origins of music continued to the middle of this century with the revised edition of the New Oxford History of Music.

Of what practical use are historical field recordings? This article is a partial response to that question, one which struck me on many occasions while working with ethnographic wax cylinders at the British Library National Sound Archive (NSA). There are, I believe, at least three possible answers to the question. One is that historical recordings can (and indeed should) be returned to the societies from which they originated, for which they serve as valuable cultural documents — documents both of indigenous cultural practices and of the engagement of scholars and other collectors with those practices (often within a colonial context). Another is that they can be used in studies of musical continuity and change, a possibility exploited most extensively by the ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy, who retraced the path of his predecessor and mentor Arnold Bake's Indian field trips, comparing his own findings in 1984 with Bake's in 1938. My third answer is that historical recordings, together with the publications based on them, can contribute to studies of the historical development of ethnomusicological method — of the ways in which music has been recorded, transcribed and analysed. This article pursues this last possibility, taking as an example one of the classical works of early twentieth-century comparative musicology, A. H. Fox Strangways's The Music of Hindostan. I consider the author's aims, methods and conclusions, their status in the light of subsequent research, and their significance for music studies today.

In a study of Verdi's debt to Bellini published over 20 years ago, Friedrich Lippmann set the course for subsequent investigations of phrase structure in ottocento opera by using letters to describe the archetypal shape of many melodies written by Italian composers after 1830. He identified the most common pattern in the music of Bellini and the young Verdi as a1 a2 b a2, in which each letter represents a four-bar phrase in a prototypical 16-bar melody. The method has obvious risks of turning uncomfortably antiseptic for the analyst, but there is much to be said for its virtue of concision. It served Lippmann for his subsequent work on Bellini as well as Julian Budden for his three-volume study of Verdi's operas. With a minimal addition of bulk, Joseph Kerman and Scott Balthazar subsequently formulated a more elaborate alphanumeric system. Both replace Lippmann's use of arabic numerals to demonstrate musical variation with primes (AA' BA’ instead of al a2 b a2; Kerman uses lower-case letters, Balthazar upper-case) and they communicate the number of bars in each phrase, including those longer and shorter than the four-bar norm, with subscript numbers (for example, A4A‘4B3C6). The relationship of each phrase to the standard double quatrain or sestet of Italian poetry is also accounted for by a parenthetical tracking of verse lines for each musical phrase; for example, A4(S11–2)A'4(S13–4) illustrates how the first quatrain is distributed across the first eight bars of a normative melody. More important, Kerman and Balthazar recognize the musical function of phrases within the prototypical 16-bar group. Balthazar, in particular, identifies the first two four-bar phrases as an ‘opening thematic block’, the B phrase as both ‘contrasting’ and ‘medial’, and the last phrase as a ‘closing’ unit ('some version of A or C, depending on whether motives from the opening phrases are present).

The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings' musicking behaviour. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but in terms of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. It is suggested that, rather than detracting from musical reality, notation composes musical cultures. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization and remediation. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.

This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.

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.

There is a convenient fiction maintained by all but the most fervent postmodernist concerning the interpretation of opera: that the music somehow reveals how a particular drama should be played out on the stage. Whether a reading (or a production) is supposedly authentic, traditional or modernist in intent and delivery, support is invoked for it within the musical score by assuming a clarity in the semiotic play of signifier and signified that in turn validates our various responses to opera as drama. We know an aria signifying ‘love’, ‘triumph’, ‘rage’ or ‘lament’ when we hear one, and we respond accordingly, indeed conventionally to the extent that we often focus less on what is being sung about than on how it is being sung. And whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman's battle-cry ‘In opera, the dramatist is the composer’, the notion of the composer as musician-orator, persuading and moving at will, is a powerful one, reinforcing deep-seated beliefs concerning the transcendental truths about the human condition conveyed by the canon of operatic masterpieces. It is also a trope adopted early in the history of opera. When the unknown librettist of Claudio Monteverdi's Le nozze d'Enea in Lavinia (1641; now lost) praised its composer for he was not only invoking a topos drawn from classical antiquity; he was also affirming an aesthetic stance that retains its fascination even today.