This article presents a historical study of black British poet and recording artist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Drawing on archival research, I argue that Johnson's hybrid literary and reggae-based practice, known as ‘dub poetry’, offers fresh insight into the status of ‘the popular’ in histories and theories of the avant-garde, and of black avant-gardism specifically. I begin by discussing Johnson's participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement, a hub for diasporic arts in 1960–70s London, whereupon I show how dub poetry transposed the ideas of Johnson's colleague, pan-African Marxist C. L. R. James, in simultaneously documenting and instigating grassroots efforts at community centres where Johnson worked, notably the Race Today Collective. I contend that Johnson forged a cultural programme that paralleled James's well-known rejection of the elitist model of the political vanguard: Johnson furnished a ‘popular avant-garde’, as I call it, whose community-oriented ethos was realized via popular media like the LP and mass-democratic – populist – action campaigns.

This article engages with a wide range of existing literature relevant to understanding the artist persona in popular music, and advocates a view of personae as multiply constructed through sound recordings, music videos, live performances, interviews, social media posts, and a variety of other means. In an initial effort to theorize pop personae as transmedial phenomena, I merge a critical musicological understanding of the performative potential of aesthetics with perspectives from celebrity studies and media studies to produce new insights into how personae are articulated across a variety of disparate but intersecting spaces. Through a case study of Sam Smith, I demonstrate how the signs and symbols scattered across numerous platforms are aggregated in the pop persona, and elucidate the interpretive possibilities afforded by different points of contact between artist and audience. I conclude that the task of reading pop personae amounts to an assessment of the conglomerate of texts and contexts that shape both the production and the reception of pop expressions.

In this article I examine localized cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader change. Focusing mostly on British, white male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, United States and Europe) across the 1970s and early 1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude, and practice. These shifts arc across what Ben Piekut calls the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s to what I describe as the ‘unpop avant-garde’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which influences from popular and non-Western music play more significant roles than before and liminal, quasi-popular practices such as noise are in the emergence. I trace the appearance of the unpop avant-garde through independent music publications from the period, most prominently Microphone, Musics, Collusion, Impetus, and Re/Search, using these published scene discourses as barometers of the musical atmosphere of the time.

Shortly before finishing his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Roberto Gerhard composed Andantino, a short piece in which he used for the first time a compositional technique for the systematic circulation of all pitch classes in both the melodic and the harmonic dimensions of the music. He modelled this technique on the tri-tetrachordal procedure in Schoenberg's Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 but, unlike his teacher, Gerhard treated the tetrachords as internally unordered pitch-class collections. This decision was possibly encouraged by his exposure from the mid-1920s onwards to Josef Matthias Hauer's writings on ‘trope theory’. Although rarely discussed by scholars, Andantino occupies a special place in Gerhard's creative output for being his first attempt at ‘twelve-tone composition’ and foreshadowing the permutation techniques that would become a distinctive feature of his later serial compositions. This article analyses Andantino within the context of the early history of twelve-tone music and theory.

In order to assess Helmut Lachenmann's characterization of (his) music as an ‘existential experience’ this article focuses on a specific aspect of many of his compositions: stretches of near-silence and minimized musical activity such as reduced dynamics and gestures which contrasts the surrounding material. I argue that in the case of his early vocal compositions Consolation I and II (1967 and 1968) these ‘meta-musical fermatas’ relate to a key portion of each work's text in order to encourage self-reflection on the part of the listener. My analyses reveal the influence of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, particularly in terms of word-setting and of the works’ spiritual and political messages. I further trace the changes undertaken in these compositions and in Lachenmann's commentaries for them over the following decade. I suggest these changes relate to political events in Germany occurring between 1968 and 1977 which also led to the conception of Lachenmann's ‘music with images’, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern.