What can queer theory, and drag performance, contribute to music semiotics? This paper proffers ‘dragging’ as a socio-cultural semiotics that demonstrates how musical meanings are dynamically queered through drag lip-sync performance. Departing from approaches to meaning and semiotics in musicology and popular music studies, I intervene with direct insights from queer theory. I draw out oscillations between queer theoretical perspectives on temporality and (post)structural concepts such as assemblages and mediation as they have been incorporated into music studies. ‘Drag’, not just an art form, is here developed as a specific kind of spatial-temporal mediation: dragging is understood as the displacement and heterochronization of meaning, where musical objects are dragged ‘out of time’ and ‘out of space’ into the alien world of queer experience. Dragging as a conceptual instrument allows us to begin answering questions of how meanings – and their political stakes – coalesce inside and outside, within and without, music.

This article explores classical music education through analysing findings from a project on embedding ‘youth voice’ within instrumental teaching and learning. Drawing on theorizations of classical music as a genre, I describe how the young people in this project saw classical music’s genre conventions as working against a youth voice approach. The article also outlines the ways in which youth voice was shaped through social relations in this space as well as the ‘institutional ecology’ of music education. I argue that embedding youth voice approaches in instrumental education will only be effective if the genre itself is open to transformation.

Adam Maor and Yonatan Levy’s chamber opera The Sleeping Thousand refashions the Palestinian–Israeli conflict as a futuristic science-fiction political fantasy. Adopting a critical and satirical perspective, the opera develops ad absurdum an imaginative state of affairs out of which a utopian and dystopian situation unfolds. My argument is that in The Sleeping Thousand, children are central and, furthermore, that the image construed for them is new to the medium of opera. The image is disconcerting. The child is positioned in a troubled, brutal world and catalyses the portrayal of a violent, cursed, unethical, and estranged world inhabited by adults. Children are not assigned a voice but rather are reported on; in the report, they are said to be possessed by a dybbuk. In The Sleeping Thousand, a dybbuk phenomenon forms operatic children and, through them, infiltrates the opera as a whole.

Florentín Giménez (1925–2021) stands as one of the most prolific Paraguayan composers. Published in six Cancioneros (‘Songbooks’), his more than 800 canciones populares (‘folkloric or folk-style songs’) testify to his productivity and distinctive approach to this particular genre. Based on the examination of his six published Cancioneros, along with an analysis of Giménez’s musical recordings and personal interviews with the composer, this article first provides biographical context and introduces these songs through a series of representative cultural themes that emphasize some of Giménez’s ideas about musical and extra-musical expressions of cultural identity and Paraguayan nationalism. Following a discussion of Giménez’s vocal compositions, the article focuses on the composer’s self-proclaimed musical advocacy, and highlights three of his most iconic and widely known songs: ‘Así canta mi patria’ (‘Thus My Country Sings’), ‘Ka’aguype’ (‘In the Forest’) in the Guaraní language, and ‘Muy cerca de ti’ (‘Very Near You’). By considering these three Paraguayan folk-style songs, I aim to demonstrate that throughout his career, Giménez’s music has become illustrative of a cultural identity informed by Paraguayan music and socially imagined ideas, including the sentiment of nationalism, which he expresses through a profound admiration for his country.

Luciano Berio’s modernism, which has fallen off the critical radar since the composer’s death, is not typically tied to extroverted political statements, and so does not easily allow for the fashionable (liberal) equation of aesthetic radicalism with political radicalism. On the contrary, Berio’s musical output is perhaps instructive precisely as a negative case study of the link between political and aesthetic radicalisms. Such will be the gambit of this article, which will consider the engagement with contemporary ideas of ‘openness’ and practices of phenomenology in works from the early 1960s, like Passaggio (1962) and Epifanie (1963), to illuminate Berio’s relationship to the so-called neoavanguardia, a cultural movement which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a withdrawal from the cultural–political activism associated within Italy’s leftist intelligentsia.

This article amplifies current understanding of the Afro-diasporic composer-violinist Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-George, by exploring his 1770s musical career in relation to Mozart. Director of the progressive Concert des amateurs during Mozart’s visit to Paris in 1778, Bologne was one of the leading exponents of a virtuosic style of symphonie concertante writing that became a touchstone for Mozart following his return to provincial Salzburg. A comparison of the musical spheres inhabited by Bologne and Mozart nuances our understanding of developments in ‘concertante’ composition and the performative dimensions of the medium, enabling a broader, more inclusive history to emerge.

The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.

Polish cathedral and monastic archives preserve multiple precious handwritten sources of musical and liturgical contents originating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three such manuscripts have been the topic of research in this paper. The article’s problem is the provenance of the Pauline Gradual (PL-CZ III-913 olim R659) from 1596, owned by the Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit in the Jasna Góra Monastery (Luminous Mount) in Częstochowa, Poland. The authors have examined the provenance by comparing the book’s repertoire of alleluiatic verses of the commune sanctorum with the contents of two older Polish codices from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, kept in the Archives and Library of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter: Wawel Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 45) and Jan Olbracht Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 44). The research leads to an ascertainment that the Pauline codex has, to some extent, been modelled on the Cracow manuscripts. The main text has been accompanied by photographs of each source’s selected original folios, and by transcriptions of the alleluiatic chants analysed.

Late in 1947 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) wrote to Alan Frank, music editor at Oxford University Press. He asked Frank if he or his wife, the composer Phyllis Tate, could ‘suggest any pieces of the wrong note school’ as he wanted to use some of their compositional techniques.1 Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), the British serial composer, appeared on his list of possible candidates alongside Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Roberto Gerhard. In the early 1950s, Lutyens, always wilfully controversial, distanced herself from the music of the previous generation of British composers, chief among them Vaughan Williams, acidly dismissing it as ‘cow-pat music’. Decades earlier, in a letter to ‘My Darling Betty’, his beloved former student, Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94), ‘Uncle Ralph’ had made a passing derogatory reference to a ‘Freak Fest’, his nickname for the annual festivals organized by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM).2 But, it was Vaughan Williams’s close friend Edward Dent (1876–1957), a musicologist, who had helped to found the ‘Freak Fest’ in 1922. Both Dent and Edward Clark (1888–1962), a champion of modern European music and a BBC programmer during the institution’s early days, went on to be president of the society. Throughout this period, works by Maconchy, Lutyens (Clark’s wife) and Vaughan Williams were performed at ISCM festivals. The purpose of the preceding examples is not to highlight the aesthetic differences between the dramatis personae of the four volumes under discussion here – Vaughan Williams, Lutyens and Clark, Maconchy, and Dent – but rather to suggest some of the myriad ways their lives intertwined. These tangled webs of personal and professional relationships combined in different formations to produce overlapping musical networks. Together and individually these books provide rich insights into the British musical world during an important period in its development.