For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

Chapter 34 surveys Goethe’s extensive influence on the musical world. It considers his own musical background, his relations with contemporary composers, notably Carl Friedrich Zelter, and focuses especially on Goethe’s reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, his influence was most evident in the Lied (art-song), most famously those of Franz Schubert, and in opera, where Faust proved especially powerful. Twentieth-century composers were less likely to set Goethe’s literary texts, but both Richard Strauss and Anton Webern engaged intensively with his thought in their own creative activity.

This chapter makes a case for integrating some musical narratives – both verbal and audiovisual – into the field of Argentine literature. After considering the case of Luis Alberto Spinetta’s 1973 “Cantata de puentes amarillos,” a song generally valued as a poetic achievement, it highlights the historical role of five iconic music works: the Himno Nacional, the national anthem written in 1813 by Vicente López and Blas Parera, which inaugurated a state ritual based on the alleged epic value of personal sacrifice; “Mi Noche Triste,” a tango recorded by Carlos Gardel in 1917, which describes a beloved woman’s absence from the perspective of a suffering male narrator, thus nourishing a topos of gender relations in popular culture; Estancia, a classical ballet composed by Alberto Ginastera in 1941, which displays the nationalist myth of Argentina’s rural authenticity; “Manuelita la Tortuga,” a children’s song by María Elena Walsh, the story of a female turtle who travels to Paris in order to be made beautiful; and Charly García’s “No bombardeen Buenos Aires,” a rock song that in June 1982 proposed a critical view of the Malvinas/Falklands War, contributing to the negative memory of the dictatorship of 1976–83.

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

Reflecting the turn in colonial literary scholarship towards performance in relation to sound studies, this chapter examines poetry as a form of poesis that emerged as an aural aesthetic category in colonial Mexico. Taking into consideration sociocultural factors, including language, class, and caste, and the evangelizing impetus of much religious music, this exploration of sounded lyric verse explains how these forms were not limited to church settings and places, nor to colonizing sources. The chapter considers poetry as a prestige form in music, the presentation of lyric in public musical settings, and the importance of aural aesthetics to convey poesis as a performative aesthetic category of cultural belonging. Musical poetic texts examined include the romance, villancico, church music, and other popular forms of autochthonous lyrical verse. Finally, the chapter considers the continuation of poetic aural performance through the nineteenth century.

Chapter four examines the Muses, the sole female divinities who are regularly depicted as musicians in the surviving visual material. The ambiguity inherent to their representation, where it is never clear whether they are goddesses or human women, allows for their bodies to become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities. Laferrière considers the images within their original contexts, including the domestic sphere, the cemetery, the sanctuary, and the symposium, to examine how the images invited their viewers to imagine the sounds of divine music and what effect this visualized music had upon the viewing audience. In each instance, she argues that the depictions of the Muses respond to the spaces in which they are encountered, so that their visual interpretation becomes inherently multivalent and malleable. When representations of the Muses are considered within a range of possible contexts of use, the vases make a powerful statement about the Muses: not only may they appear in any context or work through any female figure, but as divinities who are flexible in their visual representation, the Muses become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities.

Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

Chapter two explores how we might develop a vocabulary for describing the appearance and effect of visual music by examining red-figure vases that depict Apollo simultaneously playing his lyre and pouring a libation. This synchronicity between the god’s two actions, one musical and the other ritual, demonstrates that his movements are rhythmic in a similar way to, or are even conditioned by, the sounds of his music, so that the images draw an implicit connection between divine music, rhythm, and ritual. Laferrière argues that the slow music that Apollo creates with one hand establishes a visual rhythm and musical pattern that are derived from the god’s body as well as the forms of the musical and ritual objects that he holds. For the ancient viewer, each image acts as an invitation to engage with its visualized musical rhythm, to hear imaginatively the sounds of the god’s music. In this interplay between visual image and imagined sound, and in one’s own participation in animating the god’s ritual, the viewer could experience the presence of Apollo in a moment of coordinated musical rhythm and harmony.

Chapter five focuses upon scenes of revels in which Dionysos is surrounded by the musical and danced performances of satyrs and maenads, the mythical beings who accompany him. Dionysos exhibits a distinct kind of musicality: unlike the other gods, Dionysos rarely plays an instrument himself. Rather, he acts as the source of inspiration for satyrs and maenads, prompting them to play their instruments, dance to the wild music they produce, and lose themselves, collectively, to the ecstatic sounds that envelop them. The movements of the satyrs and maenads also communicate to the external viewers how they might experience Dionysos’ presence. Within the symposium, ancient viewers created the opportunity for Dionysos to manifest when they consumed wine from the vases, looked at the representations of mythical revels, listened to music performed on similar instruments, and moved their bodies in response to the music they both saw and heard. Such immersive and imaginative seeing and hearing thus allowed the symposiasts to join in the divine revel, where, under the influence of Dionysos, they played instruments and danced with satyrs and maenads.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

It is common for income tax systems around the world to contain a broad range of exemptions. From a policy perspective, there are many reasons why governments provide exemptions. The most obvious is to grant concessional treatment to certain ‘deserving’ entities. Tax exemptions may be total or partial and are usually provided because the relevant entities serve some social, community or philanthropic purpose that the government wishes to support. By providing particular entities with tax exemptions, the government delivers support to them indirectly (ie via tax expenditures) rather than directly (ie via grants or subsidies). Clearly, providing tax exemptions comes at a cost, since governments do not collect revenue from the benefiting entities. However, this needs to be balanced against the fact that many of these entities provide important services to the community, which governments might otherwise feel they would have to provide themselves. By supporting such entities under their tax systems, governments can relieve themselves (either wholly or partly) from having to directly provide certain services that may, in any case, be best delivered through the private sector.