The article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but also today, in the midst of a new cold war.

As lyrical refrain forms flourished beginning in the twelfth century and increased attention was paid to the mise en page of song in manuscript sources, scribes faced the dilemma of how to cue frequent repetition of poetry and music. Owing to a lack of shared conventions among these scribes, the signalling of repetition varied greatly among sources, the resulting inconsistencies furnishing what Ardis Butterfield calls ‘glimpses of scribal thinking’. Nowhere is this more evident than in approaches to notating the Latin refrain, a structural feature in a range of genres and an inexact yet related parallel to the French refrain. I argue in this article that the graphic treatment of refrains in Latin song exposes assumptions that both scribes and performers made about form, genre and the realization of song in performance. Attending to the visual cueing of refrains clarifies textual and musical ambiguities arising from the simultaneously oral, written and performative milieu within which Latin song was cultivated and disseminated.

The elevated status of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers over the last century provides the starting point for an enquiry into which factors render it so durable. In going against the grain of recent attempts to discern the possible liturgical context for its original performance, this study claims that the collection as a whole (components of which undoubtedly had liturgical origins) can only be exemplary. Moreover, Monteverdi, in his intense engagement with the impersonation of liturgical chanting, has effectively rendered it the analogue of an actual service. Several features suggest that he is capturing something of the listening experience of a liturgy, complete with its distortions and memories. As a collection that is ‘about’ Vespers and which doubles the experience one might be having, this has something in common with the ‘musical work’ as defined by later classical practice, and its very religiosity resonates with the secularized ideology of musical autonomy.

This article discusses the function of Vincenzo Albrici and Charles II's Italian ensemble at the English Restoration court. The article cites newly discovered archival evidence to suggest that Albrici arrived at the English court in 1664 to become the leader of an exclusive ensemble performing Italian chamber music. The employment of the Italian ensemble imitated Mazarin's patronage of Italian music at the French court, arguably to rehabilitate the recently restored Stuart dynasty in the eyes of Continental courts. The article suggests that the ensemble performed chamber music privately at court, and also occasionally appeared in the queen's Catholic chapel after 1666. The recruitment of Albrici and the Italian ensemble shows that the English court participated in Continental musical fashions after the Restoration, and illustrates the complex webs of cultural exchange in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.

Giulio Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi's 1634 revisions of Il Sant'Alessio for the Barberini stage expanded the role of comedy within the opera. These revisions reveal an important juncture in the history of religious comedy and lay the foundation for the development of a comic rubric for the still-developing operatic genre. This article examines the legend of St Alexis and its potential for historic reinterpretation in light of the Barberini family's religious and political goals. Its consideration of the interrelationship of religion and comedy in early modern sacred drama provides the theoretical context for an analysis of scenes in the 1634 version featuring the comic pages Martio and Curtio. Operating as a mitigating force between the extreme ideologies presented by the characters of Sant'Alessio and the Devil, the pages’ comedy promotes a more widespread acceptance of key religious ideals and becomes the driving force behind a significant political statement for post-Tridentine Rome.

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt's composition and abandonment of Sardanapalo. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt's mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel's future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt's mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt's impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.

British music-theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall's recent proposition that Brecht's music theatre set the terms for younger British composers’ experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers’ anxieties about music's capability to convey sociopolitical messages, and their reluctance to accord popular music a progressive function. The entanglement of Vietnam War activism and rock music forms the backdrop for analyses of two works that do address Vietnam directly: Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine and George Newson's Arena (both 1971) – both of which also pass pointed comment on different popular-music traditions. Both works highlight the difficulty in emulating Brecht's model in an era when the concept of ‘the political’ was being significantly redefined, and the cultural gap between activist cadres and the wider population was unprecedentedly visible.

‘Che soave zeffiretto’, the letter duettino sung by the Countess and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, has achieved iconic status as a perfect example of the transcendental beauty of Mozart's music. An examination of the extant sources suggests that the composer and his librettist regarded it as a key moment in the opera: the crux of a developing relationship between the two women. A late change of plan over its location led to a reconfiguration of Act 3, resulting in the minor inconsistencies that Robert Moberly and Christopher Raeburn sought to explain in their celebrated double-casting hypothesis. The various versions of the text and a complete continuity draft of the score reveal the meticulous craftsmanship that went into its creation, in particular the development of its comedic potential as a vaudeville.

This article seeks to determine the extent to which timbral and textural concerns inform the musical substance of Debussy's Jeux. Of particular interest are passages in which foreground detail effaces itself in the interests of orchestral qualities, those where an overabundance of surface detail is preconfigured so as to maximize orchestral efficacy, and sections where a more traditional distinction between compositional content and orchestrational attributes seems to obtain. It is Hegelian substance ultimately that I have in mind, however, on which basis I seek to distinguish between unification and synthesis – I argue that Jeux's immediacy is overcome through negating (orchestrational) activity, arriving thus at the objectively real (realized and posited) product. On this basis, Jeux's substance, including its orchestral aspects, is best understood speculatively.

Focusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–4, this article traces transatlantic attitudes towards blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African American musicians into assuming the mask of blackface minstrelsy – an active personification of difference driven by a lucrative fantasy on the terms of white demand. I ask why this imagery found such zealous adherents among post-war youth, situating their gaze within a longer tradition of colonialist display. Subaltern musicians caught within this regime were nonetheless able to ‘speak’ via sung performances that signified on the coordinates of their own marginalization. The challenge for musicology is thus to heed the relational syncretism arising from intercultural contact while acknowledging the lived experience of African American artists unable fully to evade the preordained mask of alterity.

This article explores the content, scope and impact of an annual contemporary music festival in South Africa, the first of which was presented in 2000 by New Music South Africa (NMSA), the South African chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It explores the New Music Indabas of 2000–02 against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized South Africa, especially in the aftermath of the end of apartheid. Research into the archive of NMSA provided an entry point into understanding South African cultural, social and political life in the early years of the country's democracy. The ‘separate development’ rhetoric of the totalitarian apartheid regime, in power from 1948 to 1994, prevented cultural exchange and connection between musics and musicians in South Africa for decades; this article explores the ways in which the New Music Indabas attempted to right these historical imbalances, and to forge new directions for South African art-music production and practice.