The opera Gawain (1991; revised 1994 and 1999) brought together Harrison Birtwistle and the poet David Harsent in a reworking of the late fourteenth-century narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That Birtwistle asked Harsent to make a large number of alterations to his original libretto has already been documented. The present article, which draws on the sketching processes of both librettist and composer, reveals the nature and the ramifications of those changes. The discussion is particularly concerned with the contradictions and multiple narrative layers that resulted from the Harsent–Birtwistle collaboration, and with the composer’s suggestion that there is both a secret drama in the orchestra, and instruments that function like unheard voices. A consideration of Birtwistle’s sketches also reveals a preoccupation with line, in particular with finding different ways of shadowing vocal and instrumental parts, and ambiguously shrouding originary lines in layers of varied reflection. These musical devices represent Birtwistle’s response to Harsent’s interest in divided subjectivity, and to the idea that Gawain should develop a sense of his own identity.

Nottingham, 1 May 2004: the Kamkars, a group of Kurdish musicians from Iran, close a concert with a flamboyant instrumental encore based upon a song performed earlier in the evening.

Video installation art is a collaboration of sound, image, and space, with a closer relationship to music and art than to cinema. Accordingly, those working in this genre are often both artist and musician, a double role that represents a radical departure from the artist/musician divide of many other audio-visual genres. Because it is single authored, video installation can invert many elements of the filmmaking process: while it is common procedure to add a soundtrack to film during post-production, for instance, many video artists use sound as their starting point, often basing whole works on a musical structure. While such an inversion invites reconsideration of musical audibility and film narrative, video work, when installed, also challenges the notions of screen space and realism. An audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of film, but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. And as image expands beyond the four sides of the cinema screen – a space occupied previously by music alone – important questions are raised: what happens to music when film breaks from the containment of the screen? when it destroys its own boundaries? Focusing on the work of Bill Viola, this paper explores the ways in which video installation art confronts methods of film exhibition and audience engagement, and investigates how such confrontation redefines the roles of music and image in film.

This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr’s account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art, the article outlines an approach to mediation that incorporates understandings of music’s social, technological and temporal dimensions. It suggests that music’s mediations have taken a number of historical forms, which cohere into assemblages, and that we should be alert to shifts in the dominant forms of musical assemblage. In the latter part of the article, these tools are used to conceptualize changing forms of musical creativity that emerged over the twentieth century. A comparison is made between the work concept and jazz and improvised electronic musics. Three contemporary digital music experiments are discussed in detail, demonstrating the concepts of the provisional work and of social, distributed and relayed creativity. Throughout, key motifs are mediation, creativity, and the negotiation of difference.

Björk’s collaboration with the director Lars von Trier on the film Dancer in the Dark was marked by well-publicized personal and aesthetic differences. Their work nevertheless shares an intense preoccupation with the nature and quality of sound. Björk’s soundtrack systematically explores the boundaries between music and noise, and the title of von Trier’s film itself presupposes a heightened attention to aural detail. This paper proposes a theoretical context for understanding Björk’s music in the light of her work with von Trier. Whereas Björk’s soundtrack responds to the visual and narrative stimuli of von Trier’s film, the use of sound in her album Vespertine thematicizes more familiar Björk subjects: the relationship between music, landscape and the natural world, and Björk’s own (constructed) sense of Nordic musical identity. By placing Vespertine alongside Björk’s music for Dancer in the Dark, the sense of ‘hyperreality’ that defines both also emerges as a primary characteristic of her work.

The rhythmic and metrical qualities of electronic dance music (EDM) are clearly among its most prominent and appreciated features. Yet scholarship on rhythm, as well as popular discourse surrounding EDM, often frames the pervasively duple metres that characterize popular dance-based styles as simplistic and limited in capacity. Given the allure of EDM’s temporal qualities, how do musicians devise creative solutions to the constraints of its duple metrical organization? This article addresses this question through a consideration of embedded grouping dissonance, one of several distinctive rhythmic phenomena found in EDM. In theorizing embedded grouping dissonance, the article both builds upon and expands recent music-theoretical formulations of ‘metrical dissonance’, which describe similar occurrences without addressing this specific phenomenon. It then situates embedded grouping dissonance in relation to EDM’s technologically mediated means of production, arguing that this rhythmic technique exemplifies recurring principles of design that shape and reflect the aesthetics of electronic dance music on a broad scale.

A multivalent conception of opera, one that understands each operatic domain as functioning independently of every other domain, is one way of accounting for marks of contention: passages in which the music seems not to fit the events, characters, or atmospheres of its accompanying text. With that analytical framework, opera, frequently conceived of as two media subsumed under a cohesive initiative, emerges as a site of elaborate, sometimes contentious, interactions.

Scene 11 of Death in Venice exhibits considerable signs of multivalence. The unusual musical construct of this scene suggests points of reference that are absent in the libretto, and, accordingly, the two media do not distil the protagonist’s character in this passage but rather broaden the representational space into a heteroglossic network of associations.

The incongruities in this scene thereby disrupt the sense of ideological affinity between media, and signal significant differences among artistic perspectives and values. In particular, musico-dramatic dissonances highlight varying concerns regarding the opera’s topic of homosexuality. If the protagonist’s homosexual trajectory in Death in Venice’s libretto ends in shame and death, this is a trajectory that the music might be heard as opposing, even if we cannot translate its meanings precisely.

This paper explores the ways in which the Barbershop Harmony Society’s flexible and contested constructions of musical content relate to the community’s originary myths, to its ongoing negotiations of social and organizational values, and to specific musical practices. Drawing on documentary evidence, interviews, and participant observation, I argue that barbershop’s rather fitful and intermittent espousal of a form of Werktreue ideal can best be understood in the context of the idiom’s characteristic approaches to music making. The theoretical fissures that riddle the Barbershop Harmony Society’s definitive discourses, meanwhile, reflect the tensions between different sets of musical and social values simultaneously in play among Society members. Recent debates within the Barbershop Harmony Society about membership levels, breadth of appeal, and repertoire consequently emerge as a tension between the ideals of Preservation and Encouragement that it was founded to promote.

Lou Harrison seems always to have been re-examining his older works, revising or updating them, reworking them into movements of longer compositions, or creating alternative versions. This article examines Harrison’s revisions, alterations, and self-borrowings in terms of both technique and aesthetic objectives. Harrison’s first reworking of a set of short pieces into an extended composition, the Suite for Symphonic Strings of 1960, resulted in a poly-stylistic work he found so attractive that he not only used the self-borrowing technique in later works (such as the Third Symphony) but also incorporated similar contrasts in most of his long works, whether or not they were based on recycled materials. Thus the process of revision and self-borrowing in itself helped Harrison develop a distinctive personal style – one marked by its own eclecticism.

Lawrence Kramer’s latest book offers a reading of ‘Opera’ and modernity in terms of a crisis of ‘symbolic investiture’. This latter concept, developed out of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and its application by Eric Santer, is defined by Kramer as ‘the process by which social institutions grasp the inner being of the individual in its essence, and in so doing both define and confer that essence […] Although often in need of later supplements to sustain its power, this process is dramatic and discontinuous, enacted in defining moments that resonate through the rest of the person’s life and “fate”’. This symbolic investiture ‘can come in moments of rapture as well as terror, enfranchisement as well as confinement, even if each of these terms always harbors traces (if not more) of its opposite’ (5). Kramer tackles his project through interpreting examples of revolt against the concept of the norm (which, as Foucault famously argued, is based on disciplinary regulations specific to modernity) in figures of variance, deviance, and difference. He is especially interested in how ‘normative’ subjectivity can be revitalized by borrowing from the ‘abnorm’; how the supreme, as a hypertrophied form of the norm, has a secret kinship with the debased. This is a topic powerfully expressed in the exceptional states of supremacy and debasement characteristic of ‘Opera’. It is tied to Opera’s emergence at the historical moment of the ascendancy of bourgeois subjectivity and its norms, regulations, and desires.

Hungarian composer György Ligeti has not lacked for attention since coming into contact with Europe’s new music scene in the early 1960s. In 1966 he was featured in Moderne Musik I: 1945–65, and by 1969 Erkki Salmenhaara had published a dissertation on three major works. Although periodic illness and a painstaking approach to composition slowed his progress, Ligeti continued to refine and expand his style in the 1970s, producing everything from intimate solo works for harpsichord to the suitably grand opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, revised 1996). His turn towards traditional orchestral forms and a quasi-diatonic language in the 1980s brought him new prominence, and the voluble composer has seemed ever ready to provide ripe commentary on his work and the state of new music. The numerous awards and publications that followed Ligeti’s seventieth birthday in 1993 support his status as probably the most widely fêted and influential composer of the latter half of the twentieth century. And if that degree of timely recognition was not enough, the composer has entered his ninth decade with no noticeable decline in compositional energy or ideas. Ligeti continues to fashion brilliant revisions of the tried but true genres of concerto, solo étude, song cycle, choral work, and character piece. His compositions bear the weight of extramusical influence as well as that from beyond the Western canon, yet each innovation affirms his inimitable voice and his singular musical journey from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century.

The London Sinfonietta’s reputation as a contemporary music ensemble comes from the continuing commitment by its players and artistic directors to its quality of performance. The ensemble also developed a sense of its musical identity by generating a repertoire of commissioned works. This article looks at some of the ways that the Sinfonietta defined its musical ideology and has functioned as a performance-centred art world in which composers are invited to collaborate but are not there by right. It examines the Sinfonietta’s strategies for audience building, the ensemble’s contribution to the development of London’s concert life since its foundation in 1968, and looks at the ways that it has sought to renew itself in response to the different funding and aesthetic environments it has encountered in its history. The Sinfonietta’s venture into Broadway repertoire is discussed in terms of social identity. The article argues, after Jürgen Habermas and T. W. C. Blanning, that one of the most significant contributions of the Sinfonietta has been its continued commitment to the concert event as a forum for critical engagement and cultural debate.

For those of us who have lived with and through the second British folk music revival, it seems most apt that this important chapter of our lives should merit a serious academic history. We watched and were part of a radical youth movement that grew phenomenally in the late 1950s, burgeoned in the 60s, stumbled and stagnated through the 70s, but recovered its composure to mature in the late 80s; and now, half a century on, the fruits of this movement have become an established and significant part of the nation’s soundscape, as much a part of British culture as brass bands or choral singing. Much work has been and is being done to document every twist and turn of this revival, meticulously noting the key players, the setting up of clubs and festivals, broadcasting and recording developments, and so on; and, understandably, there is a welter of data on which to draw, including key witnesses to consult. One could argue that such histories are primarily of interest to the insider. But Brocken’s study, by contrast, attempts to take the view of the outsider, analysing the political agenda of the ‘revival’s’ architects and assessing its impact in terms of cultural studies as an aspect of popular music – in itself a most laudable enterprise.

I read Stephen Cottrell's broad-ranging ethnography Professional Music-Making in London with both great interest and disquiet. Cottrell has made a significant scholarly contribution in successfully outlining the myriad social, political, economic, and artistic forces that comprise that city's classical music performance culture. His model, which offers potential bridges between ethnomusicology and musicology, will prove useful in any number of locales and theoretical studies. My disquiet arose from the fact that the author details a musical world of frustration, dead ends, and downright failure. Twenty years ago, and an ocean away, I escaped a similar professional existence in New York City.