This article develops a method of understanding concepts from the Parisian Surrealist movement in music using Poulenc's treatment of cadences and fifth relations as a case study. Although music was rejected by the group's figurehead André Breton as ‘the most profoundly confusing’ of all arts, many composers were keenly involved in Surrealist circles. Notably, Poulenc's acquaintance with major figures led him to set much of their literary work. But his engagement with their aesthetic principles extends deep into the musical form. After assessing Poulenc's flirtation with the movement's ideas, I ally William Caplin's codification of the cadence to the Surrealist objet trouvé. Combining Robert Hatten's musical ‘markedness’ and literary theorist Willard Bohn's model of Surrealism in art and literature, I explore how Poulenc's music engages with the Surrealist treatment of objects, automatism, and Apollinaire's ‘fantôme véritable’.

This article explores political and aesthetic dimensions of the ‘bubu music’ made by Sierra Leonean émigré Janka Nabay while living in the United States from 2010 to 2017. It narrates Nabay's story while tracing granular flows of creative labour, collaboration, and negotiations of cultural and economic capital at some level of ethnographic detail. The central sections of the article excavate the complex and often non-linear labour that went into the production of his band's music, and gives readers a sense of the way Nabay himself intellectually framed this process. It ultimately argues that Nabay was a resilient but often-dehumanized subject who exemplified the cultural and economic cross-currents of ‘World Music 2.0’ in ways that set privileged Western values of artistic autonomy into vivid relief. As an economically precarious subject split between indigenous nationalism and Western forms of cultural capital, Nabay lived a life of profound contradictions, by turns dissenting and exuberant.

Where postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.

1972: Charlotte Moorman walked onto a concert hall stage – nude – and played a cello made of ice until it melted. 2001: Joan Jeanrenaud re-staged Moorman's piece wearing a wetsuit and brandishing a pitchfork. 2017: Seth Parker Woods performed a ‘protest’ version on an obsidian-coloured ice instrument. In this article, I argue that Ice(d) Music/Cello/Bodies has become a musico-political palimpsest, a measure of the way Moorman and her art have been recuperated through performative historiography. Through a reconstruction of the historical circumstances under which Moorman, Jeanrenaud, and Parker Woods realized their performances, I show how contemporary discourses of gender and race are materialized through the physical and metaphorical resonances of human bodies in proximity to an unusual musical instrument. I explore the ‘palimpsest’ both as a theoretical lens that insists on texts as simultaneously overwritable and recoverable and as a methodology providing an analytic framework for broader study of avant-garde re-enactment.

Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can confirm or disrupt the way populism constructs identity. Epistemologically, genres can enable us to both understand and misunderstand our world: we can recognize ourselves (‘us’) in the genres that undergird the music we identify with, and (mis)recognize others (‘them’) in those we find alien. But genres can be undermined; they can be integrated, hybridized and directed towards more inclusive or cosmopolitan ends, thus destablilizing ontologies frozen around pre-fixed identities. I elaborate this theory, illustrating it with examples of focused genre-transgression, particularly in South African jazz, where progressive social tendencies have sought to create an integrated, cosmopolitan society.