This chapter proposes Haitian song and opera as untapped sources for literary analysis and important forerunners in the development of Haitian literature. It demonstrates how the early writers of Haiti used music to challenge the country’s foreign detractors and showcase its artistic achievement, preserving regional vernaculars, offering social commentary, and eloquently heightening the irony of Haiti’s freedom in a world of ‘enlightened’ enslavers. It looks at the contributions of Juste Chanlatte (1766–1828), a prominent Haitian statesman and writer whose many songs and two operas left an indelible mark on early Haitian music and letters. Next, it expounds on the popularity and political expediency of a particular musical-literary genre: the contrafactum. Created by setting original Haitian lyrics to preexisting French melodies, the genre enjoyed a remarkable efflorescence in early Haiti with over one hundred examples published from 1804 to 1820. Through analyses of two musical works by Chanlatte, the chapter shows how early Haitians gave topical relevance to the music of their former French oppressors and literary expression to the ambitions of their nation.

Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) constitutes the nemesis of the sentimental-Romantic ‘aesthetics of feeling’. It did not however completely expel emotion from music, as some thought, but from music aesthetics, framed as a new ‘science’ equally removed from historical and political context. This position differed radically from the Left Hegelian politics and Romantic aesthetics Hanslick had espoused a few years earlier. His change of heart was prompted by the revolution of 1848 and the subsequent growth of ‘Herbartianism’, an Austrian ‘state philosophy’ synthesized from the anti-Idealist thinkers J. F. Herbart and Bernard Bolzano. Hanslick’s own Herbartian programme had a direct impact on the Viennese tradition of musicology, and a more indirect influence over late Romantic thought on music, pushing toward a more analytical, ‘objective’ concept of music’s dynamic processes. By World War I, ‘energetic’ aesthetics had replaced Romantic emotions with an unsentimental vocabulary of forms, lines and energy-flows.

The Epilogue revisits the concepts of italianità and operatic italianità within the changing context of the historiography on Italian opera and opera in Italy. Looking back at the volume as a whole, it compares how its authors frame the multifaceted idea of Italian opera within the increasingly globalised world of the nineteenth century. Viewed through the prism of italianità, Italian opera frequently takes the form of a nostalgic fantasy for something already lost, or something imagined elsewhere. Such an elsewhere might be Italy itself, idealised as pastoral idyll or land of song. Just as often, though, it is conceived more broadly, mediated via local traditions or conditions or via another place, whether Paris, Vienna or Cuba. Alternatively, it can be dispersed more widely still, across the expanding global network of opera houses performing Italian opera at the time: in the words of an Ecuadorian critic quoted in one of the chapters, ‘we can feel, for a night, as if we were in Lima, or Janeiro, or Paris, London, Madrid or Milan’.

Around 1800, the human voice was not only considered a musical instrument; it also served as a central motif in the national historiography of music. This chapter investigates a popular source in German-speaking music pedagogy on the systematic education of the (primarily female) voice: Nina d’Aubigny von Engelbrunner’s Briefe an Natalie über den Gesang (1st ed. Leipzig 1803, 2nd ed. 1824). This 'manual' is based on thirty-one fictive letters and is heavily charged with stereotypes of 'the Italian'. The chapter discusses the multiple levels on which the idea of a decidedly Italian voice is constructed and shaped against a transnational background. A close reading shows how the voice served as a wide-ranging projection screen beyond strictly musical topics, tackling anthropological, moral, aesthetic and societal questions, all of them attempting to spread clichés of Italian music into German everyday musical life.

The fifth chapter examines Forster’s ironic representations of musical scholarship in its institutional form, analysing his negative portrayals of two rarely discussed women characters, Vashti in ‘The Machine Stops’ and Dorothea in Arctic Summer, as his championing of musical amateurism and his criticism of the professionalization of musicology. The chapter analyses Forster’s satirizing of early twentieth-century academia’s antiquarian interest in folk revival. What problematizes his satire, the chapter argues, is Forster’s conception of gender: on the one hand, Forster exposes that professionalism is often constructed by gendered discourses that depend on the conventionalism mind–body dualism of patriarchal culture; but on the other, he casts professional women in roles against which his narratives rebel. Asking whether the portrayals of the two women hide his misogyny, the chapter explores how Forster’s advocacy of musical amateurism is at the same time an attempt to negotiate women’s place in his often homoerotically charged envisioning of companionship.

Sextus Empiricus brings his discussion of the so-called ‘liberal arts’ (Math. 1–6) to a close by attacking the epistemic and therapeutic pretences of a would-be science of musicology. He presents two kinds of arguments that bring about and preserve a state of suspension of judgement about the claims of those who profess knowledge in this domain. First, he borrows material from Epicureans purporting to establish that expertise in matters of music holds no prospects for a happy life. Second, he argues that fundamental notions of music theory do not correspond to anything in reality, and thus that the science itself does not exist. The emerging Sextan critique of musicology provides an interesting angle on the Pyrrhonian project as well as on Sextus’ authorial methods. In this paper, I present the agenda of the treatise as being compatible with Pyrrhonism as described in Sextus’ Outlines (Section 1), discuss the arguments employed by Sextus (Sections 2–4), and argue that the treatise does not support readings according to which his treatment of music requires Sextus to abandon the suspensive stance (Section 5).

The introduction describes the ten chapters of the volume, and how they provide models for a historically grounded musicology that recognizes relationships between gestures and words, music and dance, human bodies and social acts over time. It describes how these chapters address many of the challenges that arise in the study of European music and dance together: the ephemerality of performance, the fuzzy boundaries between theatrical and social dance, the legacies and inequalities associated with colonialism and imperialism, the complexity of the sources (choreographic notation and its absence, musical scores and their absences, film, treatises and reviews, to name just a few). It also grapples with the divides among related areas, disciplines and fields, including performance studies, theatre and dance history, comparative literature, film studies, philosophy, cognitive psychology, music theory, history, anthropology and sociology as well as musicology.