This essay draws upon approaches from music analysis, the cultural study of music, and the philosophy of language to examine the meaning and function of borders in music. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of multiple aporias as metaphors for understanding the relationship of life to death, the essay begins by exploring three functions of aporia at the borders in music: 1) a line to be crossed; 2) a zone of difference; 3) an area of impossibility and unknowability. Three case studies provide a comparative framework that seeks to extend my analytical approaches beyond specific cultural, geographic, and historical repertories. In the first case study I examine the function of caesura at the borders between oral and written tradition in epic; in the second, I examine the coterminous moment of emptiness and fullness known as khāli in South Asian music; in the third, I analyse the compositional language employed by Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) in his concentration-camp melodrama, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, to represent the musical transcendence of death in the Holocaust. By analysing aporia in such different traditions I demonstrate the ways in which they open possibilities for understanding the sameness that connects music from radically different musical traditions.

An attempt to distinguish between ‘alte Musik’, as German musicians used to conceive it, and ‘early music’, as is now the common phrase in English, provides a new – and perhaps better – lens through which to view the old historical schisms of twentieth-century music. The recourse that musical innovators have always had to ancient precedents, as inspiration and as validation, has many variations, and these variations are reliable reflectors of aesthetic attitudes.

By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler's position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert's own ‘community-forming power’ – a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno's outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler's first, negative claim – thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert's social role.

Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julián Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in Spain, an interest which continued after the composer's death in 1961. By exploring Bautista's presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Música de América y España, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the régime, and the cultural values and historical narratives that underpinned them.

In this article the highly contested relationship between art and politics in the twentieth century is discussed by way of the life and work of the Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906–94). Lopes-Graça, who described himself as ‘a communist from birth’, lived for almost fifty years in Salazar's ‘New State’, a Fascist-type dictatorship, which emerged from a military putsch in 1926 and lasted until 1974. His experience as a communist under a right-wing régime was therefore very different from that of either communist composers living in Western democratic countries or those active in the Eastern bloc. Lopes-Graça stood apart from most other party intellectuals in his resistance to the doctrine of socialist realism. Yet from 1945 onwards he composed revolutionary songs in which his communist engagement is directly evident. Understanding this apparent tension within his output requires both a careful and nuanced understanding of his own personal position and a clear distinction between political engagement in music on the one hand and socialist realist or neo-realist tendencies on the other. It is that latter distinction – between (in the composer's own terms) ‘lived action’ and ‘imagined action’ – that accounts for the seemingly contradictory coexistence in Lopes-Graça's thinking of aesthetic autonomy and political commitment, and in his music of (to adopt categories posited by Heinrich Besseler) both ‘presentational’ music (for conventional concert settings) and ‘colloquial’ music (to be sung and played ad libitum in political meetings, at demonstrations, in the home, or even in political prisons).

Accanto (1975–6), for clarinettist and orchestra, constitutes a turn towards historical reflection in the work of the distinguished German composer Helmut Lachenmann, providing a meeting point for the practitioner and the theorist. This article examines how Accanto's dialogue with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto relates to topics such as recording conventions, performance practices, and compositional trends, particularly in the 1970s. It also demonstrates how Lachenmann's conception of musical material is rooted in an understanding of the Western art music tradition, especially with regard to the issue of the ‘language-character’ of music. In doing so, it investigates Lachenmann's aesthetics of beauty in connection with performance practices, sociological models of musical subjectivity, and Adorno's understanding of tradition. In general, the article argues that compositional practice in Accanto is shaped in response to the situation of classical music, especially in the 1970s.

Research into musical creativity has hitherto involved highly disparate approaches and has taken place largely at the level of the individual. As a result, creativity has tended to be interpreted in terms of either expressive behaviour(s) in performance or ineffable innovation. In the meantime, however, a tranche of interdisciplinary research has moved towards a more collaborative understanding of creativity. With reference to that research, this article analyses the performance of a jazz standard played at a jam session in London. In exploring this unplanned moment of collaborative creativity, the study looks at the relationship between the mundane shaping of an ending and its occurrence within a cultural tradition that demands inventiveness on the part of performers. From an examination of the different sets of cultural knowledge on which musicians draw and an analysis of the momentary interactive conduct of the performers we obtain a view of creativity as an emergent amalgam – a shifting blend of knowledge and conduct that works to bring a song to a close.

In the years around 1968 London was home to a sizeable community of writers, musicians, artists, and political activists whose countercultural attitudes are expressed in the publications of the ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ press – magazines such as International Times, OZ, INK, Friends (later Frendz), Time Out, Gandalf's Garden, The Black Dwarf, and The Hustler. That most of them had at least some pages devoted to music reflected the crucial role of rock in particular in summing up the community's aspirations, focused less on political or social than on cultural transformation. This article seeks to chart in these underground publications the changing attitudes towards music and its revolutionary potential. Initially the alternative press portrayed popular music as sharing with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. However, there soon arose contradictions between the radical social potential of music and its growing commercialization, contradictions stemming not only from the co-optation of rock by market forces and record companies but also from the underground's own lack of a coherent ideological agenda. Paradoxically, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘high’ culture – just as the alternative press advocated – that its perceived effectiveness as part of the revolutionary, countercultural project began to diminish.