Scholars have struggled to reconcile the expressive immediacy of Witold Lutosławski's works with his claims that he wrote absolute music. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the place of abstraction in Lutosławski's creative practice by exploring connections between his 1981 speeches on artistic ethics and his approach to melodic construction in Chain 2 (1984–5). Lutosławski's words and music both rely on convention, and recycle rhetoric from his past. But these are not their only correspondences. They also engage with a trio of concepts – withdrawal, integrity, and autonomy – that are at the heart of a moral code Lutosławski articulated in response to the volatile political conditions of 1980s Poland. The article thus sheds new light on the entanglement of modernism, ethics, and politics in the late twentieth century, while illuminating what the idea of abstraction may have meant in a particular time and place.

The music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago was often considered to be politically oriented, and many of their performances addressed controversial political issues. However, these political moments were counter-balanced by public pronouncements in which the members of the group denied that their music was motivated by politics. I interrogate this seeming contradiction by analysing the Art Ensemble's ‘Get in Line’, a musical-theatrical piece from their 1969 album A Jackson in Your House. ‘Get in Line’ critiques Vietnam-era militarism and racism, and simultaneously proposes that African Americans respond to these issues in politically unconventional, oppositional, even playful ways. In so doing, ‘Get in Line’ challenges essentialist views of black experimental music and shows how the Art Ensemble – like their colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) – prioritized pluralism and individual agency over orthodoxy, whether in politics or in aesthetics.

György Ligeti has stated that his micropolyphonic compositions were ‘governed by rules as strict as Palestrina's’ (Ligeti 1983, 14); some of these rules are preserved directly in his sketches and others can be derived from the compositions themselves. This article discusses the artistic context in which Ligeti developed systems of rules for individual compositions, and investigates in depth the composer's rules for the organization of pitch and rhythm in two of his seminal works from the 1960s, transmitting the explicit rules for pitch in sketches for the ‘De die judicii’ movement of the Requiem and uncovering implicit rules for rhythm in Lux aeterna. By examining both the rules and their application in composition, with the exceptions that arise therein, we come to a better understanding of the aesthetic goals Ligeti's rules were devised to meet, and the balance of stricture and freedom that was essential to the composer's persona.

Ernst Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf (1927) was, according to the composer, concerned with ‘the problem of freedom’. But in what ways did it grapple with this problem? This article offers a new interpretation of Krenek's opera in light of the composer's views on freedom, developments in contemporary criticism, and the wider context of German Idealism. By focusing on constructions of subjectivity in Jonny, I argue that, much as Krenek lamented the fact that the opera's fundamental message had not been taken seriously enough in the work's reception, he himself had presented this theme of individual freedom ambiguously in musical terms. As a work that mediated between ethics and aesthetics, consistently adhering to an irreconcilable dialectic between the individual and the community, Jonny spielt auf contributed in important ways to the discourse that would stir so many Weimar intellectuals over the next few years to warn against the power of mass culture.

Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

Morton Feldman composed his first works on graph paper in 1950–53, but he subsequently abandoned graph music, before taking it up again in 1958 at a time of rapidly increasing interest in musical indeterminacy and graphic notations in the United States and Europe. Feldman's return to graph music was a turning point in his career that would affect his subsequent output for almost a decade, but his principal surviving account of this change in his musical direction, which appeared in liner notes for an LP record, is misleading. This article presents a revised account that highlights a previously undocumented and atypical graph work that was used by John Cage to derive the graph now known as Ixion. In addition, it reveals links between Feldman's compositional ideas and those of Henry Cowell, explains how Robert Rauschenberg inadvertently affected the sound of Feldman's graph music for several years, and clarifies Feldman's response to problems he encountered in performances of his graph music.

This article demonstrates how performance may further understanding of – and offer new perspectives on – indeterminate music, and in particular the ways in which performers realize the indeterminate aspects of the scores. Cage's Solo for Piano (1957–8), one of the most celebrated indeterminate scores, is used as the model for such an approach. The close involvement that performers have with the score and the music over what is often a prolonged period of time leads to a particular kind of understanding, different from that of non-performers, which, when articulated, can offer valuable insights. After a brief outline of the score, the article begins by discussing the performances of other pianists, notably David Tudor. It then examines in detail the author's own approach to making a realization, discussing the implications of such an approach from both practical and aesthetic perspectives.

In John Corigliano's and William Hoffman's opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), generic, musical, and temporal boundaries are dissolved, and historical processes revealed, resulting in a work that performs an operatic rendering of what philosopher Frank Ankersmit has referred to as sublime historical experience. As Marie Antoinette's ghost resolves her trauma by narrativising it in performance, and as music extends and dramatises the experience of the sublime, the audience experiences profoundly the liminal realm that historically-based operas inhabit in their movement between past and present. Indeed, the temporal suspension that is so central to theories of the sublime finds parallels in opera's historical obsession with death, and in music's ability to momentarily blur the boundaries between life and death, and past and present. The Ghosts of Versailles allows for the audience's relationship to history to be revisited, reconfigured, and in many cases, reconciled, through a haunting of the present in operatic performance.

In contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created ‘interesting’ music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related ‘art worlds’. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting.