Musicology has recently re-evaluated the nature, form and purpose of musical biography, reflecting a broader ‘biographical turn’ in the humanities. This article takes up recent challenges to move beyond the traditional model of the ‘life and works’ of ‘great’ composers and joins the search for new paradigms of musical biography. The lives of the Australian microtonal composer Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965) and the British music archaeologist Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953), and their collaboration, which spanned three decades, are offered as a case study that demonstrates the importance of international and transnational networks for comparative musicology and modern music, and reveals the role of women as critical agents of scholarship and cultural transmission. It also lays bare the considerable influence exerted by the fin de siècle occult revival upon the search for new modalities of musical expression. It is an example of how a biographical approach allows an expansive examination of a mentalité and can bring together a range of discourses to reveal unrecognized connections and relationships.

Brahms's dedication of his op. 51 string quartets (1873) to the surgeon Theodor Billroth provides a window into Brahms's musico-political views in the 1870s that has hitherto been unexplored by music scholars. Analysis of correspondence, performance traditions and the scores of these two quartets demonstrates that Brahms chose to align himself and his works with the learned connoisseurs of the domestic chamber-music-making tradition, represented by Billroth and his frequent musical soirées. Brahms's music also shows the influence of Joseph Joachim, his oldest and dearest friend and Europe's premier chamber musician. Brahms's compositional choices in these two works combine public and private musical styles, to offer a touching memorial to earlier composers and friends, and to provide a teachable moment for the musical public.

The first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) has been noted for its Beethovenian use of sonata form and shares a number of features with the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. This article examines the relationship between these two composers and these two works, starting with an examination of Bartók's use of sonata form. It attempts to establish whether Bartók borrowed gratefully from his predecessor in an attempt to ‘synthesize’ old and new, folk and art, or whether he misread Beethoven in the anxious process of carving a place for himself in the musical canon.

This article considers why septuple metres are so rare in Western music, despite being common in many other cultures. The scene is set by tracing the history of the septuple-time ‘meme’ (an idea that replicates by imitation) from ancient Greece through to Western art and popular music. The following sections consider the psychological, musical and environmental factors in more detail. The scarcity of septuple time in Western music is largely attributable to the development of the time signature, as a vertical conception of music evolved during the Renaissance. Subsequent evolution of the ‘Western music memeplex’ maintained septuple time on its periphery. Analysis of this interaction permits the construction of a meme-centred narrative of aspects of the development of Western music.