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.

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.

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.

Situated in the context of current examinations of academic disciplinarity, this article contributes to the decades-long discussions (or debates) regarding the status of ethnomusicology, arguing forcefully for the (sub-)discipline’s cessation. A focus on ethnomusicology’s very prefix, “ethn-”, exposes the field’s historical and continuing reliance upon colonialist ideology, continually reproduced in relation to both ethnicity (constructed in relation to interrelated discourses of authenticity, technology, and gender) and ethnography. Highlighting the extent to which a field-defining ideological-methodological matrix has led to the production of a theoretical narrowness predicated upon and engendering the construction of “Others,” it is commitment to inter-, trans-, or post-disciplinarity (rather than disciplinary dogmatism) that is shown to promise a vital and relevant space for explorations of sound and music within current and future university spaces. Ultimately, given the inherent restrictions and limitations suggested by prefixes or qualifiers of any sort, it is the appellation musicology that may best serve as a (provisional) marker for interdisciplinary inquiry, its very re-appropriation (from its own historical circumscriptions) serving as an act rife with symbolic significance.

This response to Amico’s paper draws lessons from the author’s own career to endorse Amico’s call to rename the discipline of “ethnomusicology,” while cautioning against the risks of nominalism as a sufficient response to the underlying tensions animating dissatisfaction with the current name of the discipline. The response emphasizes points of convergence and divergence between diverse disciplinary practices of music scholarship and locates a problem for efforts to synthesize such practices in competing views of science and applied research, and indeed in competing concepts of “music” as such.

This response defends ethnomusicology against Amico’s call for its end, even as the “ethno-” prefix has already become optional in certain contexts. Addressing Amico’s critiques of gender, repertoire, method, and colonialism, the response argues that ethnomusicologists are thinking creatively about the same set of issues raised by Amico and rejects the claim that abandoning ethnomusicology would repair the inequities of music scholarship and music departments. Rather than welcoming the end of ethnomusicology, the response looks toward a future in which music departments collectively embrace a decolonizing mission and discard the West/non-West binary.

This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to the explicit thematization of transdisciplinarity as part of the neoliberalization of the university. Finally, the essay turns to Hélène Cixous’s reflections in “Mon Algériance” to develop another way of thinking about the irreducible dispersal and dissemination of disciplinarity and its imbrication in the (post)colonial.

The development of modern styles of elite music education played a crucial role in entrenching Werktreue as the dominant practice within classical music performance. Focusing on Germany’s first conservatory, the Leipzig conservatory, which was founded in 1843, this article analyzes how Werktreue , understood as a set of tacit competencies and sensibilities that must be learned by musicians, was produced at a single historical site. Archival documents of the institution, as well as the correspondence and writings of teachers and students like Felix Mendelssohn, William Rockstro, and Ethel Smyth, show that the central objective of musical pedagogy was the faithful interpretation of musical works. Isolated as a discrete subject of training, performing musical works also functioned as the principal mode of student assessment through semesterly examinations. To transmit the necessary skills for this paradigm of performance, pupils’ bodily capacities ( Technik ) and ability to understand and interpret canonic compositions ( Vortrag ) became essential targets of conservatory pedagogy. Ubiquitous visibility among students, and the intense competition that this visibility engendered, went hand in hand with institutionalizing styles of musical expertise that continue to this day. In exploring these developments, this article asks how the productive power of modern conservatory training contributed not only to Werktreue ’s rise over a wide geography, but also to the remarkable stability with which it has pervaded performance practice across multiple generations.

In 1930 the French composer Darius Milhaud achieved a major career milestone: his ambitious opera Christophe Colomb received its premiere at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. The premiere was the most prestigious of a surprisingly large number of performances of Milhaud’s music in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even as he found success in Germany, many French critics dismissed Milhaud’s music as frivolous or incomprehensible, and in 1930 the Paris Opéra had yet to stage one of Milhaud’s works. In the wake of the Berlin premiere, however, the specter of German cultural dominance provoked calls in Paris for reevaluation of Milhaud’s work. In response, the director of the Paris Opéra, Jacques Rouché, quickly secured the right to stage Milhaud’s next opera, Maximilien , and Milhaud subsequently received a string of state commissions. After years of struggle with French critics and institutions, Milhaud’s success abroad finally precipitated official recognition at home. Milhaud owed his popularity in Germany and the subsequent transformation in his French reception to his relationship with the Viennese music publisher Universal Edition. Unpublished correspondence and contracts reveal how the firm orchestrated Milhaud’s success in Germany through a network of affiliated conductors, composers, and institutions. Universal Edition and its director, Emil Hertzka, played crucial but largely unrecognized roles in advancing Milhaud’s early career, and Milhaud’s letters demonstrate his keen appreciation for the advantages that working with Universal brought, both to his finances and to his international reputation. The transnational collaboration that enabled Milhaud’s German reception and facilitated his path to official recognition ultimately offers a thought-provoking counterexample to the historiography of chauvinism and antipathy that otherwise dominates narratives of interwar Franco-German musical relations.

This article tells the story of a cassette tape housed in the Andy Warhol Museum Archives, a set of never-released (and rarely heard) songs by Lou Reed, and the tape’s intended audience: Andy Warhol. Warhol and Reed are giant figures in the history of twentieth-century Pop Art and popular music, and their collaboration from 1966 to 1967 resulted in the acclaimed album The Velvet Underground and Nico . Based on extensive archival research and interviews, I discuss how this tape reflects Warhol’s and Reed’s failed attempt to collaborate on a stage version of Reed’s album Berlin (1973); Reed’s reaction to Warhol’s book, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975); and how elements of Warhol’s own audio aesthetics and taping practices find their way into Reed’s recordings around 1975. I also place this cassette in the context of the emerging common practice of creating and gifting homemade mixtapes of curated music, and demonstrate how such mixtapes function as a type of “closet media” (to quote theater scholar Nick Salvato) marked by private audience, disappearance, and inaccessibility. Drawing on William S. Burroughs’s conceptual spliced-tape experiments and their challenge to unified subjectivity, I explore the epistemological and ontological ramifications of sonically entangling the self with another person, and the queer intimacies of doing so on cassette tape.

This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings—Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón ( Biography of a Runaway Slave , 1966), Rodolfo Walsh’s true-crime denunciation ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who killed Rosendo?, 1968), and Andy Warhol’s experimental a: a novel (1968)—to ask why these writers transduced their recordings into print rather than release them as audiobooks, how or if listening to those tapes would alter the meaning of their printed entextualizations, and what musical interactions with the same media in the same contexts can tell us about the limits both of print and of symbolic musical notation. Tracing the intersection of musical and literary works, the article argues that a writerly ethics of distortion, rather than fidelity, arises from this mutual encounter with sound on tape, and ponders how dialogic audiobooks might contest older issues of power and representation for those writers, North and South, who worked in support of marginalized (Afro-Cuban, working class, and queer) subjects.

This article repositions the space race as a sonic phenomenon by analyzing music and sounds related to the Soviet space program. Early triumphs such as the orbit of Sputnik I in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s groundbreaking orbital flight in 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova’s success as the first woman in space in 1963 epitomized the complexities of the cultural Cold War and the utopian underpinnings of the Thaw. Space, the ultimate nonaligned sphere, was a new world for the planting of real and ideological flags. At the same time, these successes were key to reimagining the ideals of Soviet citizenship and national identity in the post-Stalin era. Heating up at a moment of great change and consequence, the space race provides an inroad to examine how music, media, and sound helped spread these emerging values. Drawing on the popular press, radio broadcasts, and variety television performances, this article demonstrates how music was used to humanize the cosmonauts and promote a new personal ethics—one that prized approachability and humility alongside heroism and bravery. The divergent ways that composers and performers celebrated Gagarin and Tereshkova reveal a complex politics of gender during the Thaw. Gagarin, the conqueror, was revered in marches extolling his colonizing feats; Tereshkova, the homemaker, was celebrated with romances and tales of domesticity. By demonstrating the prevalence of new media and the power of participatory practices in the sonic space race, this article contributes to our understanding of the cultural Cold War as a lived and performed experience.

St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) had an intellectual exchange facilitated in part by Isidore’s brother Leander (d. ca. 600), who preceded Isidore as bishop of Seville, had met Gregory in Constantinople, and to whom Gregory dedicated his Moralia in Job. Isidore’s writings and contemporaneous records of Spanish church councils make clear that the Old Hispanic Rite was already largely, though not entirely, formed in his day, much as we find it in the earliest surviving liturgical documents: the Oracional Visigótico (ca. 711) and the Antiphoner of León (ca. 900). This is a rite deriving from a great exegetical project in which liturgical chant formed only a part. Its starting points were the various translations of the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, especially Gregory and Augustine. From this an elaborate and systematic repertory of chant was formed in coordination with prayers, readings, and sermons. All of this speaks to deliberate composition by Isidore, Leander, and their colleagues rather than to the writing down of a long-standing oral tradition. Gregory surely knew about this activity in Spain. Is it likely that Gregory and his colleagues were not engaged in any such activity or that such activity in Rome took place so much later than it did in Spain? Perhaps there is a good reason why the chant created in Rome is called Gregorian just as the Old Hispanic Chant was much later called Isidorean. In the absence of Roman sources we may never know. But the Old Hispanic sources suggest that we ought to wonder.

This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the Consolation of Philosophy . Although a handful of neumations for Boethius’s thirty-nine poems have long been known, the almost complete absence of surviving pitched versions of the melodies has hindered the task of reconstruction. Following a systematic study of neumed manuscripts dating from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and identification of underlying principles of melodic design, it is now possible to attempt informed reconstructions. Even so, the leap from scholarship to modern performance remains substantial, involving a preliminary need to recreate melodies through experimentation. Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.

The return of the Florentine republic (1527–30) ushered in a tense period of political upheaval. As the city faced an imperial siege and bouts of famine and plague, the government promoted a vibrant spiritual program to combat dangers to its independence. The motet flourished within this environment, but the connections between this repertory and civic life in early sixteenth-century Florence have yet to be fully explored. Since the mid-twentieth century, music historians have examined Florentine manuscript sources of the motet (the Newberry Partbooks and Vallicelliana Partbooks) and have articulated various arguments for the political significance of these collections and the individual pieces they contain. Viewed as a whole, however, the repertory does not typically express partisan support for the Medici or the republic. One underlying thread tying many of these motets together is their function within ritual celebrations, particularly in uniting the community in prayer for collective relief. Philippe Verdelot’s wartime Congregati sunt inimici nostri exemplifies the multiple performance uses of motets in Florentine ritual contexts. Its compositional design and content reveal how Florentines turned to the motet to demonstrate communal solidarity and to seek divine aid in times of crisis.

The publication of the Missale Romanum (1570), revised at the behest of the Council of Trent (1545–63), had direct consequences for plainchant. In order to celebrate a sung mass, the contents of graduals had to be brought into conformity with the new missal. In 1572 the Venetian firms of Giunta and Varisco issued the first printed editions of the Graduale Romanum in Italy after the missal’s promulgation. The volumes contain prefaces adumbrating the requisite alterations, which from 1580 onwards were mostly assimilated into the contents of subsequent graduals. Three types of modifications affected chant melodies: the removal of text, the addition of text, and the addition of new propers. This study explores these categories in key editions of the Graduale Romanum printed in Italy between 1572 and 1653. Analyses of five offertory chants reveal that the combination of editorial freedom, source interrelation, and textual variants in editions of the Missale Romanum resulted in musical diversity. The removal of text in the offertories Iubilate deo omnis terra and Iubilate deo universa terra reflects the editors’ aesthetic preferences and their understanding of musical grammar. In Dextera domini and Iustitiae domini , the addition of text is dependent on the edition of the missal used in the process of collation, the relationships between the sources, and the editors’ responses to the changes mandated. The added chant Insurrexerunt in me , with its mixture of traditional and contemporary characteristics, highlights the freedom with which the editors sourced, or even composed, chant melodies. These findings highlight textual and musical diversity within newly regularized liturgical structures and clarify the relationship between the Council of Trent and plainchant revision. As a result, they call into question the suitability of the “Post-Tridentine” label often given to early modern chant.

Cab Calloway was of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1930s and 1940s whose legacy today is complicated by his repertoire of novelty songs with references to minstrelsy, his residency at a segregated Harlem cabaret, the Cotton Club, and his marketing to white audiences by manager Irving Mills. Calloway’s sound and persona—commercial, racialized, theatrical—did not square with an emergent art discourse around jazz during the 1930s. Hit songs like “Minnie the Moocher” (1931), with its dark, minor sound world, exaggerated depictions of seedy Harlem nightlife, and cultivated use of local slang, catapulted Calloway to success and stardom while erasing him from a burgeoning narrative that defined jazz as an autonomous, high-art tradition. Drawing on an elaborate press manual prepared by Mills, Calloway’s reception in historical black newspapers, and musical analysis of recordings of “Minnie” and other lesser-known Calloway numbers, this article examines the music, marketing and reception of Calloway during his Cotton Club residency (1931–34, with sporadic appearances thereafter) to illuminate the contemporary valences of an important interwar performer. Rather than hearing Calloway’s music in terms dictated by jazz’s post-war art discourse, the article strives to locate his songs in their original time and place, and seeks to understand Calloway’s significance by exploring the construction of his public persona. The application of a lens of historical particularity reveals that Calloway’s “novelty” songs acted as powerful articulations of contemporary black life during a pivotal period of Harlem culture.

Guillaume Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores (1436) has been subject to symbolic interpretation ever since Charles Warren suggested that the structure of the motet reflects the architectural proportions of the cathedral of Florence. More recent analyses have accepted the premise that the motet’s form has extramusical meaning, in particular, that mensural and architectural proportions can be directly analogized. These tantalizing connections have led scholars to canonize this motet, now a mainstay of music history textbooks. The extent and specificity of the extramusical associations Nuper rosarum flores enjoys—an occasion, a place, and a secure attribution—are rare in the fifteenth century. This fact alone makes the motet appear to be exceptional. But reading Nuper rosarum flores alongside the norms of genre and notation and against the grain of the work’s modern historiography suggests that it isn’t all that special—or at least that it is no more special than Du Fay’s other ceremonial motets. The interpretive history of Nuper rosarum flores exemplifies what I call “false exceptionalism,” which relates to a more general problem in music studies—the alluring but often elusive relationship between musical form and social meaning.

As a composer of secular music, Giovanni Maria Nanino seems to have published only three books of madrigals and one of canzonettas, yet he contributed numerous pieces to anthologies, and his madrigals were often reprinted. Scarcely an important anthology appeared in these years without a contribution by him. Indeed in the fifteen years before the death of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in 1594, Nanino rivaled him as the most esteemed of Roman composers; in the decade after Palestrina’s death, Nanino was the undisputed head of the large and important Roman school. By certain measures Nanino was the most often represented composer in anthologies printed between 1570 and 1620. In this area he surpasses not only Palestrina, but also Luca Marenzio, Philippe de Monte, and Alessandro Striggio. Despite Nanino’s immense prestige among his contemporaries, in modern histories his secular music is scarcely discussed, with just a passing mention in Alfred Einstein’s voluminous The Italian Madrigal . This article establishes Nanino’s leadership in defining the new Roman style of madrigal in the late sixteenth century, outlines its musical characteristics, and suggests paths for future research into this as yet little studied school.