In the seventeenth century the process of appointing court musicians was often complicated by struggles between conflicting agendas. Recently discovered letters of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II (1613–80) document the nature of the process in Dresden during the tenure of court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz, and the attempts of Schütz and the prince to steer Elector Johann Georg I's hiring decisions in a direction that would further their cause: the cultivation of an awareness of the modern Italian style of singing in the Dresden court musicians. The letters reveal the previously unknown collaborative effort of Schütz and the prince to fill the position of vice-Kapellmeister with the ‘right’ musician (i.e. an Italian or Italian-trained one), and to keep the ‘wrong’ man out of the job. In the course of this enterprise, the prince participated in the negotiations for several appointments, including that of Christoph Bernhard, whom he then sent to a northern court to study with an Italian singer. Although the collaborators' mission ended in failure, the story of their efforts casts light on the musical politicking at a seventeenth-century court and on the implications such campaigns had for the lives of individual musicians.

Bartók's essay ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of our Time’, published in 1921, was written as he was working on the score of The Miraculous Mandarin. Three main issues in the essay, the question of origin, the position of the creative subject with relation to ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, and the character of the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, are given fresh contexts by the musical work's emphasis on the character and function of differing types of eroticism. The possibility of cultural renewal based on the recovery of erotic self-expression in the face of the oppressive, objective conditions of the modern metropolis emerges as a central concern. This links Bartók's work to that of the Sunday Circle group of intellectuals, including Karl Mannheim, György Lukács and Béla Balázs, who sought an affirmative alternative to Georg Simmel's pessimistic view of the ‘tragedy of modern culture’.

‘Lateness’ is a musicological concept relevant to Tippett's oeuvre – if applied dialectically. His Triple Concerto (1978–9) is arguably the first work to reveal the ‘late’ trait of renewed lyricism and tonal transparency which together serve as an immanent critique of the fragmentation and dissonance of his second period (which began with King Priam). The co-presence of both sets of characteristics, whose synthesis is only partial, issues in a heterogeneity suggestive of a future social order in which the particular is not subsumed into the totality. This world-view sedimented in the musical structure constitutes a pluralism which invites comparison with, but may not be identical to, notions within postmodernism. Its paradigm may also have been distilled from the (problematic) social mediation of self which Tippett would have experienced as a gay person.

Restoration and reproduction have served as two of the primary means by which the present has approached the past. These practices are the focus of Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5, two recent works that draw upon earlier compositions. In Rendering, Berio ‘restores ’ the drafts for what would have been Schubert's Tenth Symphony. Contrary to conventional restorations, Berio not only builds up the sketch materials but also fragments them, having Schubert's themes disappear into musical voids. Europera 5 looks back at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera, which is presented in a collage of live performance and reproductions. During the course of the work, opera gradually disappears into a world of reproductions, losing its vocality and presence. In both compositions, restoration and reproduction ultimately make the past more distant and inaccessible. A similar use of these two practices occurs in recent visual artworks by Igor Kopystiansky and Mike and Doug Starn. Both the musical and visual artworks create scenes of decay, in which the past appears as crumbling and the present as an emptiness.