What has it meant for the Kronos Quartet to collaborate with Middle Eastern musicians? What have these collaborations enacted? This article traces some of the recordings, liner and programme notes, interviews, and performances that result from these works. In the first part, I offer a critical reading of the 2009 album Floodplain, drawing on Dylan Robinson's insights around settler colonial listening practices and the politics of intercultural musical collaboration. In the second part, I move to the recent past and read Kronos's 2025 performance of the Palestinian folk song 'Ya Taali'een' in relation to the same song's parallel life as an anti-genocide call to action. Throughout, I counterpose my situated encounter with these sounds alongside the construction of these recordings and performances as intercultural encounters.
This essay advances performance as both a method and practice for making queer worlds audible and for producing spaces of safety and belonging through sonic worlding. My musical-storytelling performance series, At Odds With Even Love, is central to this essay. In this performance, I bring together queer narratives and letters from late twentieth-century South Asia with seventeenth-century padams, the erotic poem-song genre of Karnatik music (South-Indian art music). I argue that the padam's cyclical and non-linear form enacts a queer temporality that resists teleology, and that de-gendered translation and performance pairing constitute an ethico-aesthetic intervention into caste and gendered respectability politics surrounding 'classical' music. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's sense of queer as 'across', I place it in dialogue with andolan-an Indic and Hindustani term signifying both social agitation and musical oscillation, not just across, but between contiguous notes. This movement between 'betweens' reframes microtonal sway and formal recursion as sonic and social gestures of queer relationality. Situated at the intersection of performance, music, South Asian studies and queer studies, this essay mobilises form, translation, and composition to unsettle heteronormative listening and to convene worlds attuned to the political aesthetics of intimacy and difference.
Reviews and articles have generally approached Kurt & aacute;g's opera by way of the Beckett play on which it draws, a natural consequence of the composer's openly stated admiration for Beckett, and for this play in particular, going back to his attendance at the first production when he was in Paris in 1957. This article surveys his history with Beckett's writing before outlining ways in which the libretto-and still more the opera-depart from the source text, especially in drastically cutting the dialogue between the main characters, Hamm and Clov, but also in adding a Beckett poem as a prologue. Beyond that, ways in which the work is emphatically an opera are considered. Kurt & aacute;g was well versed in opera from his student time and immediately after, when he served as repetiteur in a provincial theatre. The testimony of people who knew him as a performer or teacher is that opera has remained alive in his musical thinking. Proof of this, though emerging creatively so late, is to be found in his piece-in traditional aspects (e.g. the choice of voice types), in developments of antecedents (notably Monteverdi) and in innovations, such as the use of accompanimental style as a definer of character and situation.
This article brings recent debates within trans and queer scholarship regarding the body to bear on questions of 'trans music', considering in turn how trans music tempers these debates. The determinate, possessed body is the current conceptual and material problem engendering a bifurcation in trans studies, as some scholars (within and without musicology) are rethinking trans studies' relationship to queer theory. Readings of these disciplinary renegotiations are mobilised towards setting the agenda for trans music and sound studies, asserting that the relations, however contradictory they may seem, between 'queer' and 'trans' theories and methods must be sustained. The article proposes 'transaurality' as a method of trans music studies. This method is tested out when listening to techniques of voice and breath in the track 'Faceshopping' by the late transgender artist SOPHIE. Seeking to offer a model of socio-aesthetic analysis that listens for the ways in which sound makes transitions of gender and sex audible and actual, this method develops a critical and material approach to aurality.
'It should sound like Schubert', said Morton Feldman of his own music during a rehearsal with the Kronos Quartet. In this article, his surprising remark serves as the basis for intertwined analyses of Feldman's relationship to musical performance and to the musical past. A comparison of his late piece Piano and String Quartet and Schubert's late Notturno for piano trio reveals one possible explanation of what it meant, for Feldman, to 'sound like Schubert', and it shows the importance of performers such as the Kronos Quartet-to whom Feldman's piece is dedicated-in calling forth that sonic likeness.
In this paper, the authors develop a critical dialogue to trans/queerly trouble paradigmatic directions in music studies. Particularly, the authors engage the liberal tendency to celebrate trans/queer interventions as a discipline's progress towards becoming more diverse and inclusive. The article emerges from a recent panel at Feminist Theory and Music 17 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Through wide-ranging engagement with music and sound, we attempt to (re)orient our relationship to music studies and its various interventions, including the (im)possible emergence of trans/queer as a distinct area of study. The authors collectively draw on mutable forms of embodiment to explore trans/queer music studies otherwise-that is, to pursue a relational mode of scholarship that provokes generative and capacious directions in our study. Recognising ourselves within the 'terrible we' of trans scholarship (Awkward-Rich, 2022. The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment. Durham: Duke University Press)-as junior, racialized, (dis)abled, trans/queer scholars-how do our relations on and off the page revel in loudness, noise, and dissonance? Simultaneously, we locate these trans/queer relationships within contemporary material histories, including the regulation of bodies through anti-trans/queer legislation, relational modes of performance and composition, and Brazil's history of slavery. We might imagine this article as a discordant chorus more than a harmonious gesture of calcification, which is to say that the voices in the article indulge in a dialogic cacophony in order to trace (dis)connections between the fractal nodes of trans/queer critical thought in music studies. While it may be comforting to proffer a legible response to recent developments in trans/queer music studies, we instead suggest that a critical hesitancy might better afford an overdue reflexivity for trans/queer music scholars. As such, the essay invites readers into the 'terrible we' in hopes of grounding our work in contemporary material quagmires to open toward possibilities of trans/queerly musicking otherwise.
This article analyses three pop music cover versions that feature Jimmy Somerville on vocals. Each of the well-known disco numbers from the 1970s was a hit when performed by the original or previous artists but, I argue, took on a different and distinct meaning when released during the 1980s, given the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The first song I consider is Bronski Beat's 1985 cover version of Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love', which is coupled with the Johnny Leyton hit 'Johnny Remember Me', on which Somerville duetted with Marc Almond. I then discuss The Communards' 1986 hit 'Don't Leave Me This Way', originally sung by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1975 before being covered by Thelma Houston in 1976. Finally, I analyse Somerville's 1989 cover of Sylvester's hit 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)'. Given that the three songs are all dance tracks, I consider the significance of disco for the queer community. I also examine male falsetto, which Somerville can be heard to use in all the songs, as a means to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of gender and sexuality.
This text examines the converging trajectories in the creative practice of Gy & ouml;rgy Kurt & aacute;g and Luigi Nono. Despite the enormous differences that mark their music, their backgrounds, and their public personas, important similarities do emerge when we study the development of their compositional technique in more detail. These similarities became more pronounced after their first meeting in 1978 and are particularly strong in that liminal space in which composition and performance overlap. The primary objects of study will be music composed in the 1970s and 1980s, notably Kurt & aacute;g's 'In Memoriam Joannis Pilinszky' from the Kafka-Fragmente Op. 24 (1985-1987) and Omaggio a Gy & ouml;rgy Kurt & aacute;g (1983-1986) by Nono.
This previously unpublished interview with Gy & ouml;rgy Kurtag and his late wife Marta, conducted on November 27, 2018, a few weeks after the premiere of Kurtag's opera Fin de partie at La Scala in Milan, is about the creation and interpretation of the work. The Kurtags talk about their early experiences with opera, from well-known stories (such as their private opera sessions in their youth with Gyorgy Ligeti) to lesser-known aspects of Kurtag's first attempts at the genre. They also talk about how and why Beckett became important to them and how the compositional process of Fin de partie went from initial ideas to orchestration. They express their mostly negative opinions about the first performance and discuss the concept of performance in general. The concept of translation as a conceptual framework for opera composition emerges at one point, as does the relationship between language and music. To reflect the critics' opinion about the similarity of Kurtag's method of setting texts to music and that of the composers of the early seventeenth century, Kurtag analyzes a short scene from Monteverdi's Orfeo. The conversation is a vivid testimony to Kurtag's compositional thinking and the deep and collaborative nature of their relationship.
