In terms of musical style, the sizeable catalogue of music that falls under the label of Krautrock is as diverse as it is experimental. The difficulty in pinning down a specific ‘sound‘ for this diverse body of music can be traced to its roots in the period of cultural revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter discusses how the desire to create a new German identity, distanced from the crimes of the Nazi present and freer from the influence of American culture, was reflected in this music: Krautrock musicians began to abandon the characteristics of both Anglo-American popular musics such as beat and rock ‘n’ roll, and the prevailing German style of the time, Schlager, endeavouring to create something entirely original. The chapter demonstrates how Krautrock was initially better defined by what it was not, rather than what it specifically was. However, these radically different approaches to newness shared certain characteristics. As the chapter argues, Krautrock musicians embraced innovative approaches to instrumentation, timbre, the voice, texture, and form, generating a new musical vocabulary that they could call their own.

This chapter explores two strategies for preserving the memory of live music in early Ptolemaic Egypt by reading Posidippus’ epigram (37 AB) on Arion’s lyre next to Hedylus’ epigram (4 GP) on an automated rhyton in the shape of the Egyptian god Bes. While Arion’s lyre captures the essence of a classic but long-dead virtuoso in amber, the rhyton performs its song on endless repeat. I suggest that the automated rhyton, as interpreted by Hedylus, represents an attempt to create an eternal first performance of a type of song that could represent the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic empire: a hymn to the Nile.

The second chapter focuses specifically on A Passage to India, examining the ways in which Forster’s representations of Western musical instruments in the novel destabilize and subvert – that is, queer – colonial norms. It continues the previous chapter’s interrogation of the conventional dissociation of modernist aesthetics from politics by bypassing Forster’s preference for a formalist, ‘abstract’ reading of the novel and going against his consistent dilution of the novel’s political resonance with contemporary nationalist movements in India. Documenting Forster’s awareness of the dissemination of Western musical instruments as an embodiment of the empire’s material invasion of the colony, the chapter explores his rarely discussed attention to the material existence of music as part of his criticism of colonialism. Drawing upon postcolonial theories, material culture studies, and queer musicology, the chapter suggests that Forster’s descriptions of Ronny Heaslop’s viola, the Maharajah’s harmonium, and a piano in a European Guest House delineate the individual subjection to and negotiation of external forces in a colonial environment.