In recent years, the neologism audiency has found traction as a direct counterpart to the term performance, not least among theatre and performance scholars.1 It announces audience research that is inclined to understand phenomena of witnessing as action and as involved in processes that stand in a mutually constitutive relationship with performance. This contrasts with the more familiar focus on groups of people ('audiences') and their constituent role identities ('audience members'). Building on existing work, this round table seeks to further develop the audiency perspective by applying it to contexts outside of concert scenarios and other events characterized by a stable separation of counterposed performer and audience groups. We propose that considering audiency as action and opening it up to a wider range of musical contexts, ranging from rituals to games and from work to healing, can bring a deeper sense of its centrality in musical life.
This article explores how a queer production of Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor generates a variety of meanings about gender and sexuality, troubling the opera's conventional cis- and heteronormative narrative and themes. Specifically, it examines the fluid relationships between the production's materials, activities, and ideas that constantly evoke new meanings. To aid this endeavour, the author adopts Gilles Deleuze's conception of the possible and the virtual and his understanding of sexualities. Consequently, elusive genders and sexualities emerge alongside normative and recognizable non-conforming ones. The article thus underscores how queer initiatives are pushing operatic genders and sexualities beyond their conventional forms.
In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky officially founded the Berkshire Music Center (later known as Tanglewood) and appointed Aaron Copland as head of the faculty. Copland actively participated in the US cultural diplomatic initiative of the Good Neighbor Policy by setting up the conditions for modern Latin American composers to attend the Center. By examining the contribution of modern Latin American art music, especially at Tanglewood, this article reflects on the relationship between music and politics, and shows that musical modernism encompasses a much broader artistic spectrum than previously thought.
The Italian features of Nicolas Bernier's musical style have already been brought to light, but one remains to be addressed: his contrapuntal writing and the relationship between the basso continuo and the other parts. Nothing is known of Bernier's stay in Rome, but musical clues suggest that he was in contact with Bernardo Pasquini and that he may have practised the latter's partimenti. Bernier's output betrays musical gestures inherited from these Italian pedagogical tools, testifying that the partimento tradition had a profound impact on the composer and that he played a key role in introducing its use in France.
Peter Maxwell Davies's Third Symphony, commissioned by the BBC in 1983, serves as a compelling example with which to explore the emergence of a new beast in the musical jungle: the composer's agent. This moment represents a turning point in the commercialization of the classical music world. The fee negotiation for the symphony, handled by Maxwell Davies's agent rather than his publisher, exemplifies the shifting power dynamics introduced by the agent's arrival. Drawing on archival records, personal memoirs, and interviews, this article reconstructs the complex network of relationships involved, offering a nuanced understanding of the commissioning process during this pivotal moment.
As organ-grinder communities in large cities like London expanded in the late nineteenth century, the question of women's (and children's) presence in these contexts came to the attention of middle-class observers. Several issues emerge from reports in contemporary British newspapers: Firstly, to what extent was the organ grinders' music considered to be music? Secondly, to what extent was organ-grinding considered to be a legitimate (and not a deviant or spurious) form of work for women? Lastly, what kinds of freedoms might an organ-grinding life appear to offer, and how did this relate to contemporary middle-class movements for women's liberation?
This article puts forward the idea of ubiquitous audiency to help explain the fleeting and fluid ways in which ostensibly peripheral actors, such as passers-by, help perform musical situations in city streets and similar situations of everyday public-space life. It analyses several instances involving the playback of recordings in regional metropoles in China, especially Kunming, showing how attention is distributed across various actors and sensory modalities. It also considers several significances of the direction in which attention is granted, ultimately advocating adoption of a broader situational lens to transcend a focus on performer/audience bilateralities in these and other musical encounters.
In addition to their pedagogic dimensions, music lessons are contexts for performing and audiencing. This article focuses on performance-audiency interactions in Karnatak vocal lessons in South India, exploring how teachers and students audience each other. Drawing on work from phenomenological and pragmatist traditions, I analyse ways that gesture, gaze and utterance contribute to teachers’ and students’ grip over their interactions, both with the other person and with the music performed. Through this analysis I develop the concept of audiency as an active and embodied ‘adjustment to the other’, and aim to further understanding of music as interaction.
In many West African dance-drumming genres, the emphasis is on involving the gathered community in the performance, inviting them to take turns dancing. In such performance contexts, there is no audience in the strict sense: no group of participants who are not themselves directly involved as performers. Based on ethnographic case studies of music-dance events in rural southern Mali, this article argues for the concept of embedded audiency, showing how musicians provide dancers with the crucial contributions of audiency to performance: focused attention, social recognition, and meaning.
Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.
Another scholarly journal has apparently decided that no book should be reviewed by somebody named in the book’s acknowledgements. Margaret Bent has over seventy names in her main list, and she warmly thanks or praises dozens of others in the course of her book, which is a definitive report on the state of play in research on the motet repertory of the years 1300–1420. It is safe to say that nobody who is at all qualified to review the book is omitted. That is partly because Bent has been inviting authorities from across the world to speak at her monthly All Souls seminars for over thirty years, and since the time of the Covid lockdown the seminars have been seen internationally on Zoom, with respondents also from across the world. An astonishing and massive public has contributed to making her book what it is. (Declaration: I am indeed named, but I learnt so much from the book that I feel required to make my statement.)
This article establishes the overwhelming association of the key of Eb minor with expressions of profound melancholy. Subthemes include deep depression, ghosts, and spiritual darkness, represented by ombra style markers, sea storms represented by the tempest style, and representations of Scotland and Ossianic melancholy. C. F. D. Schubart's well-known statements on Eb minor are examined concerning its use, though those statements themselves may have been conditioned by prior usage of the key, contemporary tuning systems, and the prevalent psychological association of flat-side keys with melancholy. Topical analysis is served by the history of Eb minor, which differs greatly from its relative major.
Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists' fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach's and Marx's writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the 'highest' in the natural world.
Louise Farrenc's Nonet, which features an allusion to Beethoven's Third Symphony, premiered to positive reviews in 1850. Around the same time, Farrenc successfully petitioned for her salary as a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire to match that of her male colleagues. Indeed, much of Farrenc's career involved subtly challenging the gender norms and social boundaries of nineteenth-century France. In this article, I examine Farrenc's career in terms of nineteenth-century French feminist praxis. I analyse Farrenc's sociohistorical context to demonstrate how she played by and subverted gender norms, and examine her Conservatoire students' careers to illustrate her support of female students, providing them with instruction and performance opportunities. Finally, I read Farrenc's Nonet as a musical challenge to normative gender roles, a nod to the declining popularity of her colleague and rival Henri Herz, and a response to the 1848 Revolution.
The magician Robert Heller performed virtuoso piano repertoire as part of his magic act while touring in the 1860s. He linked other musical performances in his shows to minstrelsy and spiritualist seances, and briefly featured an unsuccessful musical effect, 'Tartini's Dream', that illustrated the limits of transnational marketing. Expectations of recital audiences shifted in the 1870s, leading to questions about Heller's capacity to play 'serious' repertoire. Throughout his career, he benefited from an emergent celebrity culture that treated conjurers and virtuosos as kin, with musicians like Liszt, Thalberg, and Paganini frequently described in magical terms. Heller's musical virtuosity functioned as an illusory effect, transforming the piano's sound while masking his physical presence.
Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island's commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta's cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.
This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners' affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners' experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.
During the early twentieth century, Catalonia experienced a period of great cultural and musical development through the Noucentisme movement, which aimed to elevate its national culture to a symbol of high art. The xeremies (shawms) of the cobla ensemble, which played the sardana genre, were integrated into symphonic and chamber repertoire. This required the technical improvement of the tible (treble) and tenora (tenor) xeremies, but also encouraged the invention of new instruments in the shawm family. The bar & iacute;tona (baritone shawm) was premiered in 1930 by the Banda Municipal de Barcelona and represents a milestone in Catalan music in the tumultuous period before the Spanish Civil War.
Through ethnographical, historical, archival, and analytical lenses, this article explores Zheng Xiaoying’s (1929–) Mandarin re-translations of Das Lied von der Erde as a prism that refracts critical light on intersections of translation, epistemology, interculturality, and post-/decoloniality. The article first provides a reception history of Das Lied in China to contextualize Zheng’s re-translations, and then examines her archives to discuss the cultural dynamics of translation and musical knowledge-making in China. The article ends with a provocation from Hong Kong to reflect on the stakes of celebrating translation as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonial goals, and to position translation in intercultural musical exchange as an arbiter of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.
