Church ensembles of Spaniards across the Spanish Empire regularly impersonated African and other non-Castilian characters in the villancicos they performed in the Christmas Matins liturgy. Although some scholars and performers still mistakenly assume that ethnic villancicos preserve authentic Black or Native voices, and others have critiqued them as Spaniards’ racist caricatures, there have been few studies of the actual music or of specific local contexts. This article analyzes Al establo más dichoso (At the happiest stable), an ensaladilla composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla for Christmas 1652 at Puebla Cathedral. In this performance his ensemble impersonated an array of characters coming to Christ’s mangers, including Indian farm laborers and African slaves. The composer uses rhythm to differentiate the speech and movement of each group, and at the climax he even has the Angolans and the angels sing together—but in different meters. Based on the first edition of this music, the article interprets this villancico within the social and theological context of colonial Puebla and its new cathedral, consecrated in 1649. I argue that through this music, members of the Spanish elite performed their own vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society. Gutiérrez de Padilla was himself both a priest and a slaveholder, and his music elevates its characters in certain ways while paradoxically also mocking them and reinforcing their lowly status. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “three worlds of the text,” the article compares the representations imagined within the musical performance with archival evidence for the social history of the people represented and the composer’s own relationships with them (the world behind the text). Looking to the world projected “in front of” the text, I argue that these caricatured representations both reflected and shaped Spaniards’ attitudes toward their subjects in ways that actively affected the people represented. At the same time, I argue that Spanish representations mirrored practices of impersonation among Native American and African communities, especially the Christmastide Black Kings festivals, pointing to a more complex and contradictory vision of colonial society than what we can see from the slaveholder’s musical fantasy alone.

When Albert Carré became the director of the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1898, he did so with the goal of rejuvenating French lyric theater. He also took possession of a national institution in a state of flux. The Opéra-Comique had a new hall and a new mandate, and it had recently become the focus of debates in the press about what role the city’s second national lyric theater should play in French culture. Although debates initially revolved around opera, Carré’s plans for renewal included ballet, not seen at the Opéra-Comique for over a century. This article discusses the role ballet played in promoting Carré’s artistic objectives. At first glance the theater’s repertoire appears to be at odds with Carré’s progressive ideals. The Opéra-Comique staged only one innovative ballet, Le Cygne (1899)—a pop-culture-inflected mythological parody by Catulle Mendès, Charles Lecocq, and Madame Mariquita. Carré then turned to staging old-fashioned pantomime-ballets, confining innovative dances to divertissements in operas. The reasons for Carré’s repertoire decisions can, I argue, be found in the reception of Le Cygne . Carré’s initial ballet was highly contested, and critics’ arguments mirrored ongoing press debates about ballet’s value and place in French culture. I contend that Carré’s initial modernist ballet, and his shift to mixing conventional pantomime-ballets with modern opera divertissements in response to the contentious reception of Le Cygne , were part of a calculated attempt to establish the Opéra-Comique as an emblematic French national theater that was simultaneously a museum and a progressive space for modern innovation.

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in Victorian London. Introduced into séances by the Scottish American Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded, relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in the séance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.

Music-making hands have drawn considerable scholarly attention, featuring prominently in recent investigations in biomechanics, paleoanthropology, and cognitive sciences. Yet already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, piano pedagogy theories were evolving not only in response to changing musical styles but also to scientific conceptualizations of the human body. Taking piano-playing hands as a platform for human/machine interaction, this article analyzes the historical discourse on piano-playing hands in relation to the contemporary scientific context and via the framework of cognitive science. In this process, these scientific and pedagogical writings, which have been previously discussed only dispersedly and marginally, emerge as more than didactic instruction. This historical discourse on music psychology of piano-playing hands points to music cognition that is extended beyond the body, situated in activity, and distributed beyond the individual.

This article examines the connections between experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, the US somatics movement, and the new musicology. While scholars tend to position Oliveros’s work within the familiar framework of women’s liberation and queer activism, we should instead understand Oliveros as a somatic feminist for whom somatic practice was synonymous with women’s liberation. Oliveros helped instigate an influential movement to integrate somatic discourse and practice into US musical culture—including music scholarship. Scholars of the so-called new musicology concerned with issues of embodiment also applied somatic concepts in their work. Oliveros and the new musicology share a history rooted in US popular culture of the 1970s. Across this period and beyond, US composers, performers, and scholars alike worked within and alongside the somatics movement to legitimize the performing body as a source of musical knowledge.

Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together and Attica in response to the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. The texts for the works draw upon testimonies of two men who participated in the riot: Samuel Melville and Richard X. Clark, respectively. Rzewski condemns the government crackdown on the uprising through representations of both prisoners and prison. In these and other works, the prisoner is a figure of suffering. Both Melville and Clark suffer through efforts to raise a voice about the hardships of incarceration only to have that voice break apart into fragments and silence. Prison emerges as a space of increasing confinement, conveyed by rigorous compositional schemes that tightly link individual sections and close them off in a larger sealed structure. The musical evocation of confinement along with the expression of psychological distress in the texts creates scenes of suffering. Through these scenes, Rzewski brings out the infliction of pain that scholars have viewed as a fundamental aspect of incarceration. The interaction between the critiques of incarceration and the compositional schemes in Coming Together and Attica is an example of how artists at the time (Steve Reich and sculptor Melvin Edwards) drew upon abstract idioms and materials in works that comment on contemporary political developments.

The “Roman period” of Josquin des Prez resulted in a small but impressive body of work, and the Missa La sol fa re mi has been received as one of the most substantial and finest members of this corpus. Closer inspection of the transmission of this mass, however, suggests that despite its copying at the Sistine Chapel before 1500, there is reason to situate it instead among the problematic and derivative copies of Josquin’s music made at the papal chapel after his departure. I argue that rather than originating from the composer’s tenure in Rome, the Missa La sol fa re mi entered the papal chapel repertoire as part of an influx of music by composers associated with the French royal court surrounding the Italian campaign of King Charles VIII in 1494–95. Decoupling the Missa La sol fa re mi from Josquin’s tenure at the papal chapel raises new possibilities surrounding his works-chronology, biography, and milieu.

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor . In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück ( Children’s Piece ) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Parisian théâtres de la foire (fairground theaters) gave birth to French comic opera with the inception of the genre known as comédie en vaudevilles (sung vaudevilles interspersed between spoken dialogue). Vaudevilles were popular songs that “ran in the streets” and served as vessels for new texts that transmitted the latest news, scandals, and gossip around the city. Already in the seventeenth century, however, the Comédie-Italienne, the royally funded troupe charged with performing commedia dell’arte, began to create spectacles that incorporated street songs from the urban soundscape. In the late seventeenth century all three official theaters—the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the Opéra—also infused the streets with new tunes that transformed into vaudevilles. This article explores the contribution of the nonoperatic theaters—the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne—to the vaudeville repertoire to show the ways in which theatrical spectacle shaped a thriving popular song tradition. I argue that because most theatrical finales were structured around many repetitions of a catchy strophic tune to which each actor or actress sang one or more verses, a newly composed tune used as a finale had an increased probability of transforming into a vaudeville. Some of the vaudevilles used in early eighteenth-century comic operas therefore originated in newly composed divertissements for the late seventeenth-century plays presented at the nonoperatic theaters. Other vaudevilles began as airs from operas that were also absorbed into the tradition of street song. By the early eighteenth century, fairground spectacles drew from a dynamic repertory of vaudevilles amalgamated from the most voguish tunes circulating in the city. The intertwined relationship of the popular song tradition and theatrical spectacle suggests that the theaters helped to mold the corpus of vaudevilles available to street singers, composers, and playwrights.

This article makes an initial contribution to the largely unexplored field of historical performance practice in zarzuela by examining the earliest surviving recordings of Manuel Fernández Caballero’s Gigantes y cabezudos (1898). One of the greatest successes of the género chico subgenre of zarzuela during the early years of commercial phonography in Spain, it is also the zarzuela of which the most recordings made before 1905 have survived: nineteen, made on wax cylinders by local gabinetes fonográficos and on disc by Gramophone. Both the thriving género chico culture and its singing practices, as well as the technological, commercial, and cultural aspects of the early recording industry in Spain, are discussed to consider how recordings related to live performance in this particular context, what the value is of these recordings as documents of performance practice, and what questions they open up for further study of performance practice in zarzuela.

This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.

The history of Beethoven’s late quartets has usually been told by separating (and redeeming) the composer’s aesthetic priorities from the difficulties encountered by the works’ early performers, publishers, and listeners. This article weaves together Beethoven’s interests with those of his publisher Maurice Schlesinger and the violinist Pierre Baillot, whose ensemble first performed the late quartets in Paris between 1827 and 1829. I navigate the traffic among these parties to reassess what was difficult about this music and, on this basis, test new routes to explore early nineteenth-century string quartet culture. One issue these different agents faced—whether in presenting the quartets to the Viennese public (Beethoven), selling them in Paris (Schlesinger), or performing them (Baillot)—was that the late quartets seemed to call for a new kind of ensemble rehearsal. The genre’s proverbial sociability, historically supporting an almost immediate and shared grasp of the performers’ interplay, was compromised in Beethoven’s late quartets by a loss in topicality. The erosion of topical references and familiar textures in these quartets made it harder for performers to predict how to coordinate their moves. Musical topics, I argue, functioned as a means of communication not only with listeners but also among performers within an ensemble. In contrast, the sociability of Beethoven’s late quartets had to be patiently engineered through dedicated rehearsals, a step that distanced this music from past quartet cultures and shaped a new notion of making music together.

Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum is a well-known specimen of fifteenth-century notational complexity. As it is notated in the Chigi Codex, it consists entirely of mensuration canons. However, the other complete manuscript copy of the piece, in the manuscript Vienna 11883, eschews this complexity in favor of resolved notations ( resolutiones ) with uniform mensurations. Reexamining these resolutiones in light of generic mensural norms, statistical analysis of the work’s metrical structure, and subtle notational correspondences between the two manuscript copies suggests that the resolved notations in the Vienna manuscript are the result of a productive, formalist music-analytic encounter between their creator and the Missa Prolationum . Seen in this light, these resolutiones offer a new perspective on the early reception of this music.

Thomas Cross Jr. was the first music printer to capitalize on the growth of public musical performances in late seventeenth-century England by producing cheap, single-sheet editions of the newest and most popular songs, especially those from the latest theater productions, for audience members and others in fashionable society to buy. As England’s first specialist music engraver, he was able to produce his simple prints of individual songs unusually quickly and to sell them at a fraction of the price of the larger movable-type anthologies that remained the mainstay of established London music stationers in this period. In the absence of intellectual property laws, Cross was free to print any music he could acquire, and he soon came to be seen as a threat by composers and music stationers alike. He clearly did not enjoy good relationships with contemporary composers, and we can safely assume that they did not supply him with his source materials. Given that his prints were nearly always the first published editions of the theater songs to appear in print, how did he obtain his musical texts? This article examines the hypothesis that Cross’s engravings may have derived directly from the stage performances of the singers he names in the titles of his editions, and that they may reflect the singers’ interpretations of the music “exactly engrav’d,” as Cross claimed. Comparison of the variants in Cross’s editions with readings preserved in sources that have known connections to contemporary performance demonstrates that his prints—despite their not undeserved reputation for inaccuracy—probably preserve contemporary performing practices more closely than has hitherto been acknowledged. Their significance as sources thus needs to be reevaluated, which raises broader questions about the criteria that scholars use when making judgments about the relative authority of sources from this period.

In 1945 Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein began working on The Mother of Us All , their second and final opera. If the pair’s chosen subject matter—the life and work of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)—was radical in and of itself, so too was the librettist’s approach to it. As Stein scholar Jane Palatini Bowers has carefully documented, Stein quoted heavily from political speeches as she crafted her libretto, using numerous “male-generated texts” but ultimately telling an “antipatriarchal” story. Bowers and others have argued that Stein’s revisions of these texts tell not only Anthony’s but also Stein’s story. I argue that in its final form, The Mother of Us All tells yet another story, for it was Thomson who revised Stein’s libretto after her untimely death in 1946, approximately one year before the opera’s premiere at Columbia University. Drawing extensively on both versions of the libretto text, as well as the musical score, I assert that Thomson sought to buy into Stein’s feminist project, and I read his revisions to The Mother of Us All as his attempt to refashion himself as her political and artistic partner. At the same time that The Mother of Us All represented a very personal project for Stein and Thomson, it was a more broadly political project as well, a critique of the status of women in the United States following World War II. As Stein and Thomson looked back on the significance of the women’s suffrage movement, they chose not to bring their story to an unequivocally rousing conclusion celebrating the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Instead, they suggested an unfinished struggle, one that so-called “second-wave” feminists would task themselves with furthering during the latter half of the twentieth century and one that would nourish productions of The Mother of Us All well into the twenty-first century.

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris . An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

Scholars have primarily seen the musicologist Zofia Lissa (1908–80) as a communist ideologue and key instigator of the Sovietization of Polish musical culture after World War II. An examination of materials from seven archives in three countries related to her life reveals a more complex picture of her views and of how she deployed her power. Before World War II she was a fierce advocate for both modernist aesthetics and communist politics, as well as a cutting-edge thinker about issues of social identity. World War II, which forced her to flee deep into the Soviet Union to avoid the Holocaust, transformed her thinking about these topics. Working in Moscow with a Polish and Polish-Jewish diaspora, she saw how popular song could mobilize war-wearied exiles despite seemingly unbridgeable political and social fissures. These ideas became the core of Lissa’s postwar advocacy for the mass song, a genre of accessible socialist music that had deep roots in the USSR. Viewing the Polish mass song from Lissa’s perspective reveals how she believed that the genre could reflect the experiences of widespread loss among Poles and harness these reactions in service of a communist musical culture. In showing how musical performance can enunciate collective identities founded in the experience of trauma, Lissa’s views shed light on a cultural logic that continues to inform commemorations of World War II in Poland to this day.

Between 1919 and 1923 Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906) and Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony (1916) were repeatedly programmed together on public concerts in Germany. Critics reviewing these and other postwar performances often framed the two works in a distinctive and, by today’s standards, surprising way: they aligned Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony with an “expressionist” and Schreker’s Chamber Symphony with an “impressionist” musical aesthetic. With roots in prewar German critical and historical writing, impressionism and expressionism functioned as multifaceted, contextually contingent concepts in postwar music criticism. They bore not only music-stylistic but also psychological, national, and racial implications, thus serving as important mechanisms through which critics could engage music in broader cultural and political debates. Even as critics writing after the Great War almost universally—if certainly reductively—aligned Schreker’s Chamber Symphony with impressionism and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony with expressionism, they fiercely disagreed about the relative cultural value of these contrasting orientations. Schoenberg and Schreker were thereby implicated in discussions that related their music to pressing contemporary questions of political radicalism, national identity, and Jewishness. Critical reception of postwar performances of this “unlike pair” of chamber symphonies thus documents a consequential yet neglected chapter in the conceptual history of musical “impressionism” and “expressionism”: a chapter in which German-language critics first connected the two terms in a complex, politically laden relationship.

An analysis of self-allusion in Francis Poulenc’s Ier Nocturne for piano (1929/30) not only reveals a complex network of interrelated programmatic and personal associations but also suggests how attention to allusion offers a means of experiencing the piece queerly. The nocturne’s allusions to earlier works by Poulenc point toward a set of shared topics, including childhood, the pastoral, the erotic, and the composer’s romantic relationship with painter Richard Chanlaire, while a chromatic sequence in the nocturne’s coda anticipates the associations of this progression with grace, anxiety, and the divided self in two later works. Alongside these allusive referents, the nocturne’s shifting levels of discourse, dramatic form, and ironic modality inspire a hearing of the piece as a coming-out narrative, whose constant deferral of meaning renders the nocturne different from itself. This interpretation aligns Poulenc’s nocturne with contemporary works by authors Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust, whose writings similarly treat these (self-)referential deferrals as indicative of queer life and trope this difference to instantiate a queer hermeneutics. As a performance of difference and reference, Poulenc’s nocturne benefits from a mode of listening that reflects these deferrals, acknowledging allusion’s effects on listeners and queerly redefining the musical work in the process.