This article examines the musical techniques used to create humour in the contemporary Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Drawing on existing theories of parody, I argue that most songs initially rely on ‘straight’ and accurate imitations of other Broadway composers and pop-rock artists to set up an incongruity with the characters’ words or actions. There is a tendency then for these intertextual references to be layered or exaggerated, giving the joke in question an overblown quality. I adopt the novel label of a ‘musical caricature’ to describe such instances. This analysis thus presents a new methodological tool for studying musical humour; it also offers insights into The Book of Mormon's critical success as well as the writers’ ability to evade censure for the crude and potentially offensive thematic content.

Drawing primarily from unpublished archival data, this article reconstructs the Musicians’ Union long embargo on library recording in Britain (1965–1978), retracing the immediate as well as long-lasting implications of the ban for the shaping of library music practices and discourses. The article demonstrates how crucial relations with the Union were in shaping the nascent library music industry as well as the working lives of the many individuals and groups involved in it, including London-based session musicians and music publishers. More theoretically, the article argues for a horizontal, ecological approach to library music culture, acknowledging its many intermediaries and prompting us to consider (musical) history in its unfinishedness, heterogeneity and ambiguity. The methodological challenges of researching ephemeral or ‘secondary’ music are also highlighted.

The British amateur fretted instrument orchestra was a product of the late Victorian and Edwardian banjo and mandolin ‘crazes’. Lacking deep community roots, early organisations were numerous but mainly short-lived. However, reconstituted as more broadly based clubs, they enjoyed a substantial revival from the later 1920s and played a major role in the preservation of fretted instrumental culture at a time when it was losing purchase in wider popular musical life. Clubs and orchestras provided a significant outlet for the musical talents of lower-middle and working-class amateur musicians and, although always ultimately male-dominated, gave greater opportunity to women than was the norm within amateur instrumental music-making. The charitable concerts that featured so strongly in their work provided an impressive record of public service. However, their instrumentation and middle-of-the-road repertoire rendered them increasingly unfashionable in the changed popular musical climate of the 1950s and entirely marginal by the end of the 1960s.

Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career has garnered much attention from audiences and the international music press. In this article, we investigate the case of Bushell as a point of entry for understanding children's participation in mainstream popular music culture and the broader public sphere. We explore Bushell's social media presence, creative output and public reception in relation to three interrelated themes: (1) the functioning of social media and the music press as arenas for the (re)negotiation of ideas about child prodigy; (2) child musicians’ political activism; and (3) the role of adult ‘mentor-fans’ in sponsoring girls’ participation in rock culture. In grappling with the complexities of these themes, we place a particular emphasis on querying how dominant conceptions of girlhood inform the press coverage of Bushell's music and social media output, as well as on examining her highly visible relationships with established male rock artists serving as mentors, fans and industry brokers. Ultimately, the article sheds new light on how notions of girlhood as a cultural identity are negotiated by young artists and their (often adult) audiences in relation to musical genre boundaries.

This article discusses musicking in the Church of Scientology, and how it can be used to understand the organisation and its relationship to society. The article begins by discussing the essential place of listening in Scientological practice, noting that it is one of several ‘technologies’ that institutionalise the charisma of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. It next demonstrates how Hubbard's hagiography influences how the church produces music today. This leads to a consideration of the ‘whole track sound’ of Scientology and uses the album Hymn of Asia (2000) to discuss how Scientological concepts are embedded sonically and lyrically into the church's recorded music outputs. The final section discusses the importance of communication in Scientology's musical thought, using interviews drawn from my fieldwork in Los Angeles to highlight the benefits and limits of music as a medium of (religious) communication.

In Britain, the Select Committee of the government department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has investigated the economics of streaming and recommended that the share of revenues for record companies should decrease so that songwriters can earn more. This article addresses lobbying activity that has resulted from this recommendation. To support their causes, songwriter representatives and record company organisations have made incorrect or misleading use of data from the report Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Age. This article looks at the impact of these uses and provides corrections and alternatives to the statistics that have been employed. It also looks at the importance of the issues that have been raised. In conclusion, it addresses aspects of record company accounting that will need to be considered if an increase for songwriters is to be made at their expense.

German Schlager's simple and static musical form is considered by many authors as an immutable key factor in the genre's overall success. However, the introduction of break routines and pop drops to the genre seem to refute this point of view. Cultural references and musical clichés are also integral parts of Schlager's staging. This paper presents an integrative content analysis of 548 songs from 2009 to 2019 with the aim of observing trends in musical form and the use of both cultural references and musical clichés in contemporary Schlager. Overall, the corpus shows more variability than expected, featuring a growing number of structural parts. Contrary to strong claims, the genre is undergoing a change in musical structure. However, whether this also applies to the reproduction of certain stereotypes in song lyrics remains to be seen: about a quarter of the songs contain cultural references, outnumbering musical clichés by a factor of three.

Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm.

In this article, I explore the processes of cultural dialogue through which European and Caribbean dances such as the waltz, the pasillo, the polka, and the danzón became tributaries of Panamanian típico. These genres, particularly the thriving danzón culture in Panama, contributed in various degrees to the shaping of típico as local performers adopted, adapted and reinterpreted rhythms and melodic material from the context of existing musical traditions. Expanding on recent research, I show how this cultural dialogue developed into a platform for innovation from which típico emerges as a distinct genre in the mid 20th century, a reinterpretation of the dance repertoire known as danzón–cumbia by composers which I collectively call the Azuero School. I examine how this repertoire and its performance practice became channels for discontinuous cultural dialogue, experimentation and reinterpretation of multiple influences in a context of political and social change in Panama.

The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

‘Bayraktar’, a pop/rap song written by a Ukrainian soldier following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, went viral, spawning various covers, from electronic dance music to hardcore punk. I analyse this digital archive of 19 ‘Bayraktar’ songs, including five that share only the title with Taras Borovok's paradigmatic song, and contextualise it within the broader historical and decolonial frameworks of Ukrainian resistance music, including the protest music of the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan demonstrations, and the anti-war music produced during the Donbas war and in the first six months of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. I apply the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis to highlight the ways that sound, image (videos and stills) and text (lyrics and verbal descriptions on YouTube) forge nationalist and global protest rhetorics, and also function pragmatically to raise awareness, fundraise for the armed forces and humanitarian efforts, and boost morale in Ukraine and abroad.

In order to reveal normative prototypes undergirding various formal sections, this article introduces the ‘Anchoring vi Schema’: a medium length major-mode passage (typically eight or 16 bars) that initiates on an unambiguous hypermetric downbeat (for example, the beginning of a verse or chorus). The Anchoring vi Schema must begin with tonic harmony and deploy submediant harmony at its midpoint – the second most hypermetrically strong beat. The identification of the Anchoring vi Schema enables closer readings of phrase expansion and deletion in popular music. A comparison of the common harmonies used in eight- and 16-measure passages reveals some striking similarities, particularly in terms of where tonic and subdominant chords are likely to occur. Although the endings of formal sections can take a variety of paths – including arriving at various tonal goals within a range of possible times – hypermetrically accented beginnings and midpoints show greater consistency in their organisation.

This article examines the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni to investigate sonic and discursive negotiations of transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture. Developing Haraway's concept of feminist figurations, it introduces the concept of vocal figurations, which articulates a performative, relational and multiply mediated understanding of voice, wherein gendered voice takes shape through processes of voicing and listening. I initially examine Anohni's reception to analyse how biologist, trans-exclusionary and othering discourses surrounding voice and gender inform emergent discourses of transfeminine voices in the first decades of the 21st century. Subsequently, I build on trans and queer theorisations of voice and listening to engage Anohni's variably vibrating voice as a vocal figuration that may challenge biologist and marginalising constructions of transfeminine vocality. I suggest that it may attune us to recognise all gendered voices as thoroughly situated yet changeable configurations of sounding voices, bodies, and subjects.

This article examines emerging practices of popular music revivals that rely on affective commitments other than nostalgia. It uses two Serbian-based singers’ post-war Croatian tours as case studies, analysing musical fluidities in the material and symbolic navigation of post-Yugoslav performance networks and focusing on borderwaters such as the Danube that bridge the region's peoples, centring their interconnected industrial and cultural attachments, yet also physically and politically separating former Yugoslav republics. Reviewing hydrological conceptions of territorial belonging in the late-Yugoslav period and in the 1990s as expressed in their ballads and reception history, it argues that the singers (Đorđe Balašević and Zvonko Bogdan), in attempting to re-establish their interrepublic touring practices with the backing of Serbian tambura bands, engage in an economy of love that, as with revival tours elsewhere in Europe, has proved more efficacious than nostalgia for responding to recent political and socioeconomic changes in the European Union.

Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo with musicians who perform a musical style known as shaʿbi, this article unravels the complex role that the state-affiliated Musicians’ Syndicate plays in musicians’ working lives in order to investigate the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt. Focusing on moments of encounter between musicians and Syndicate officials, I consider why my interlocutors’ time was split between evading the Syndicate and its restrictions, and embracing the Syndicate by calling for it to implement harsher interventions. Doing so not only sheds light on the reality of cultural production in an authoritarian state, but also prompts a broader reconsideration of scholarly approaches to popular music censorship, requiring us to move beyond dichotomies of ‘state vs. society,’ ‘censors vs. censored,’ and ‘resistors vs. oppressors’ that have tended to dominate scholarship on music censorship.