Coming to terms with foreign otherness in 1900 inevitably involved interpretation, negotiation and acceptance of the ungraspable ‘space between’ the oral and the written. Julien Tiersot's transcriptions of non-western music into western notation tell us more about racial preconceptions and the search for musical universals than about musical difference. Léon Azoulay, French physician and member of the Société d'Anthropologie, similarly presumed something universal in human languages, and wished to fix them through ‘non-systematic’ transcriptions into phonemes and ‘semi-literal’ translations. However, whereas Tiersot took dictation from musicians performing at the Paris Universal Exhibitions, in 1900 Azoulay made over 400 wax cylinder recordings there. This little-known and, until recently, unavailable collection includes diverse languages and dialects, accompanied by notes on the linguistic and sociological characteristics of those recorded. These documents shed light upon the ‘revolution in knowledge’ they sought to bring about, and how the genre of transcription reveals fundamental aspects of the colonial experience.

‘The new art of music is derived from the old signs – and these now stand for the musical art itself.’1 With this statement, Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) summarized his main criticism of traditional music notation – that it was lifeless and outdated. Based on an analysis of Busoni's organic method of keyboard notation (1909), an examination of composition sketches and performance scores, and an investigation of his writings about notation in aesthetic texts – in particular the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907) – this article shows how Busoni's multifaceted views about notation forged a middle ground between the work as text and the work as performance in an age enthralled to the idea of Werktreue. In addition, it traces the continuing influence of Busoni's ideas about notation on Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporaneous theorists and composers.

This article examines the meeting point of Olivier Messiaen, Australia and birdsong, particularly as it relates to the transcription of pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) vocalizations. It draws upon correspondence from Messiaen to the Australian ornithologist Sydney Curtis, printed here for the first time, as well as two recordings not previously available to musicologists, from which Messiaen transcribed. Both the recorded birdsong models and Messiaen's transcription of them in his cahiers are subjected to sonographic and waveform analysis. In analytical scrutiny of eight of these transcriptions, I demonstrate that Messiaen's pied butcherbird transcriptions conform to their models in a partial and highly personal way. I propose a provisional template for Messiaen's approach to birdsong transcription, in order to answer Alexander Goehr's question: ‘Why do birds sound like birds, but Messiaen's birds sound like Messiaen?’