In 2004, Cape Town Opera mounted a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the former apartheid prison on Robben Island. Sponsored by Den Norske Opera, and endorsed by the South African government, the production was presented as a celebration of the country's tenth year of democracy. This article investigates the vision of democracy performed by Fidelio on Robben Island and asks how it interacts with the founding principles of the new South African political order. Situating the production within the context of contemporaneous debates about cultural identity and representation in a democratic South Africa, I argue that Fidelio on Robben Island performed a legitimizing function designed to endorse the validity of the state and of opera as a democratic cultural form.

The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los Angeles shortly after the earthquake. One performance of this work takes place far from the site of ruin, voiced by distant observers. The other performance happens in Haiti, sung by its survivors. Both performances transform rubble into ruin.

Laptop composition – the creation and performance of music primarily using laptop computers – emerged as an important musical activity in the last decade of the twentieth century. While much has been written about the cultural and conceptual significance of this new music, less has been published regarding the sonic structure of specific works. This article explores the musical structure and design of compositions by three laptop composers at the turn of the millennium: ‘Untitled #2’ by Oval (Markus Popp), ‘Cow Cow’ by Merzbow (Masami Akita), and ‘Powerbookfiend’ by Kid606 (Miguel De Pedro). Each piece is analysed using spectrographic images, representations of musical sound that allow for the precise measurement of frequency and intensity. Repetition and noise are revealed as musical characteristics common to all three pieces, defining both smaller-scale patterns and large-scale designs. Using the conceptual vocabulary of Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, repetition and noise are framed in relation to a ‘machine aesthetic’ and ‘difference and repetition’.

This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression. Boulez sometimes acknowledged the influence of ‘extra-European’ sounds in his music, but also insisted that music should not be a ‘simple ethnographic reconstruction’. Artaud, who explicitly ‘reconstructed’ the ethnographic other in a 1947 radio broadcast, will become my foil to show how Boulez's philosophy of writing hinged on an East–West dualism. I follow Boulez to South America with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault to suggest that he took cues from Afro-Bahian Candomblé when he wrote Le Marteau sans maître. The conclusion reflects on the lessons that Boulez and Artaud might teach us about sound; namely, that recent musicological claims on behalf of the ontology of sound have modernist origins.

The appearance of the corps sonore at a key dramatic moment in Rameau's Pygmalion (1748) opens up an espace sensible (a term borrowed from Michel Leiris) where sounds derived from the harmonic series can articulate transformed temporal and spatial environments. The corps sonore – rediscovered and repurposed by the spectral movement of the 1970s – reappears in a number of twenty-first-century operas in order to animate a late-modern sense of the espace sensible. Instead of crossing a threshold towards the transcendent, the seemingly immobile corps sonore can now represent a modernist sense of loss, death, exile, ruin, and failure. Michaël Levinas's 2010 operatic reinterpretation of Kafka's Metamorphosis stands as an exemplar of the ways in which the spectrum of sound (here the voice of the ‘becoming-animal’ Gregor Samsa metamorphosed by electronic means) can create a ‘deterritorialized’ space of alienation. Liminal, spectral spaces in works by Dufourt, Grisey, Haas, Harvey, Murail, and Saariaho are also discussed.

In this article, I propose that Steve Reich takes on the voice as a problem, and that his solutions to this problem are manifold, informing – perhaps driving – works from across his oeuvre. A close reading of his music and commentary indicates that he is motivated by reinvigorating what I call the ‘vocal imaginary’ of Western classical music, or the connection between melody, voice, and human presence. My argument unfolds in four parts. First, I read closely Reich's writings and interviews that illuminate this problem. Second, I turn an analytic lens on two works composed before and after Music for 18 Musicians, respectively – It's Gonna Rain and Tehillim – to see how it plays out in music. Third, I focus on a close reading of Music for 18 Musicians. Finally, I close with some thoughts about how Reich's relationship with the voice might complicate his professed relationship with modernism, calling into question his adversarial stance vis-à-vis modernist practice.

The fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–91) had a profound impact on economic, socio-political, and cultural conditions in Cuba during the 1990s. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’. Increasing dire economic conditions on the island led to many changes that impoverished cultural life, including the relocation of composers in Europe, the United States, and other countries in the Americas. The situations encountered by composers who migrated to Europe varied, depending on generational differences and on the dynamics of the socio-political and cultural powers to which each of them were exposed in their new reception contexts. Whether adopting an uncontested identification with the new cultural milieu or resorting to discursive strategies of appropriation and de/re-territorialized negotiation, this text centres on the compositional journeys of four Cuban composers who settled in different European cities: Leo Brouwer (Córdoba, Spain); Eduardo Morales-Caso (Madrid); Keyla Orozco (Amsterdam); and Louis Aguirre (Aalborg, Denmark). Each case represents an invaluable experience of aesthetic reconstruction in a new creative territory that, by its own transterritoriality, has in turn enriched the sonic map of the Caribbean island.

Death not only robbed Anthony Pople of more than two decades from his three score years and ten; it robbed a community dedicated to the study and promotion of western classical music, especially twentieth-century music, of one of its leading lights. Pople was a prolific thinker and doer, and quite a bit of his legacy is in the form of influence, as a teacher, of course, but also as an imaginative person of action who gave of his time and expertise in all sorts of ways – on committees, as an editor, examiner, adviser, studio producer – and, let us not forget, as a most gifted composer and performer of music. There is also the black-line legacy. His writings show, consistently, his rare talent for both clarity and depth of thought. I think he was one of those authors who wanted every piece to be special, shunning the routine as well as the speculative: and if that sentiment might remind us of the composer Alban Berg, it is no accident.

Central to the official identity of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the state's positioning of itself as the antifascist and anti-colonial other to West Germany. This claim was supported by the GDR's extensive programme of international solidarity, which was targeted at causes such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. A paradox existed, however, between the vision of a universal proletariat that underpinned the discourse of solidarity and the decidedly more exclusive construct of socialist identity that was fostered in the GDR itself. In this article, I explore some of the processes of othering that were embedded in solidarity narratives by focusing on two quite contrasting musical outputs that were produced in the name of solidarity: the LP Kämpfendes Vietnam, which was released on the Amiga record label in 1967, and the Deutsche Staatsoper's 1973 production of Ernst Hermann Meyer's anti-apartheid opera, Reiter der Nacht.

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’.

Morton Feldman composed his first works on graph paper in 1950–53, but he subsequently abandoned graph music, before taking it up again in 1958 at a time of rapidly increasing interest in musical indeterminacy and graphic notations in the United States and Europe. Feldman's return to graph music was a turning point in his career that would affect his subsequent output for almost a decade, but his principal surviving account of this change in his musical direction, which appeared in liner notes for an LP record, is misleading. This article presents a revised account that highlights a previously undocumented and atypical graph work that was used by John Cage to derive the graph now known as Ixion. In addition, it reveals links between Feldman's compositional ideas and those of Henry Cowell, explains how Robert Rauschenberg inadvertently affected the sound of Feldman's graph music for several years, and clarifies Feldman's response to problems he encountered in performances of his graph music.

Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

The traditional narrative of the development of musique concrète and elektronische Musik tells a story of esoteric, academic branches of musical modernism emerging out of Paris and Cologne in the 1950s. But this narrative clouds our understanding of the unique ways this music developed in Britain, largely filtered through the BBC, as a relatively populist, accessible iteration of Continental techniques. This article explores how British reactions to contemporary music and, in particular, musique concrète and elektronische Musik, reflected on the one hand continued suspicion towards Continental music and on the other a deep insecurity about Britain's musical position in the world. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music from within establishment musical cultures betray profound concerns about trends that were seen to exert a harmful influence on British musical society.

Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), futurist, communist commissar of music, and close friend of Stravinsky in Paris in the 1920s, was an important member of avant-garde Russian artistic circles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet by the 1950s he seems to have faded into obscurity. This article attempts to fill the gap left by the lack of discussion of the strange permutations of Lourié’s career after his emigration in 1922 by way of an analysis of his miniature 1961 song cycle Zaklinaniya (‘Incantations’). The cycle consists of five settings of lines from Anna Ahkmatova’s Poema bez geroya (‘Poem Without a Hero’), whose first part recalls Lourié and Akhmatova’s shared past in Russia’s Silver Age. Akhmatova (1889–1966), an intimate friend of the dandyish Lourié and at the centre of avant-garde artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, describes the early 1910s as a Meyerholdian nightmarish masquerade in which the protagonists were constantly in danger of losing their identity through nihilistic role playing. Lourié’s elusive figure can be seen as the embodiment in the Poema of the frightening, superfluous shadow with ‘neither face nor name’. Rather than any unfortunate turn of political or personal history, it was Lourié’s affection for masks – for taking up exaggerated poses and concealing his real face – that provides the most compelling reason for his gradual disappearance from view in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.

Global Musical Modernisms – the formulation heralds expansion into new arenas of music research.1 For while certain pairings of the component terms are familiar enough, the concatenation of all three is novel. In music studies, the most notable trend is the flurry of activity around global music history, with study groups in two societies historically focused on Western musics, and one focused on ethnomusicology.2 Global music history derives strength and in turn strengthens movement towards disciplinary convergence, or at least greater interaction – an important precondition for the study of global musical modernisms.3 There has also been renewed interest in musical modernism, though not so much, at least at first glance, in the direction of the global, and with less interdisciplinary synergy. By contrast, the global figures very prominently in what has been termed the ‘new modernist studies’, a field that coalesced in the late 1990s.4 As one indication, its global turn had gathered enough momentum for Oxford University Press to publish a handbook on ‘Global Modernisms’ in 2013, just three years after its handbook on ‘Modernisms’.5 Despite aspirations to coverage of modernism in all its forms, the field is populated predominantly by literary scholars, with minimal attention to music.

This article focuses upon an arrangement of part of Stravinsky's Mavra made for the British dance-band leader Jack Hylton (1892–1965), which, on its presentation at the Paris Opéra in 1931, marked a notable, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at ‘jazzing a classic’. For the French critic Pierre Leroi the failure was a direct consequence of combining different musics (‘La confusion de genres aboutit toujours à un résultat mauvais’). But while the ‘contest’ of style and genre undoubtedly played its part in the negative critical reception of the transcription, the reasons for its failure were not entirely straightforward.

Drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's models of ‘conceptual blending’ and their recent applications in theories of musical ‘multimedia’, I compare Stravinsky's source and the Hylton band's jazz translation in terms of their intrinsic musical ‘attributes’, their relationship, and their potential emergent meanings. The exercise identifies commonalities and discrepancies, revealing problems with the original, the reworkings, and the resulting performances. The main issue is, however, not so much one of mixture (‘confusion’) as of imbalance between the elements invoked: ultimately, it is argued, Hylton's reading was insufficiently ‘jazzique’.

In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, a senior at New England Conservatory, uploaded the video ‘The Lick’ to YouTube. The 1′34″ compilation excerpted a range of performances that each deployed the same seven-note ‘lick’. This article explores the digital dissemination of videos and memes that feature the Lick, suggesting its function as a mimetic device users can deploy to signal their belonging and individuality within a larger jazz community. The Lick, in its formulaic deployment within these ‘insider’ spaces, moves away from improvisation and becomes a calling card for performers and listeners alike to determine a legitimate participant, on and offline. The Lick's online proliferation becomes a gimmick through its repetition, pointing to its hyper-presence and complaints about the excessive posts of the Lick becoming recycled into over-repeated jokes. I argue the Lick serves as the basis for a study of humour and gimmickry in jazz identity formation.

This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.