[PART 1] Contemporary musical production and consumption have become increasingly pluralist, seemingly bearing out postmodernist accounts of the eroding distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Accordingly, accounts of twentieth-century music ought to be able to narrate these different musical spheres – emblematized by the phenomena of Elvis and Darmstadt – together. While such gestures are not altogether absent from some recent histories of twentieth-century music, the results suggest that a more developed theorization of cultural pluralism is needed, one that also has a political dimension. Liberalism is one polity that espouses cultural pluralism and value pluralism, ideas that are not entirely separable from postmodernist relativism. Both epistemes are limited, however, by a disinclination towards dialectical thought and by the absence of ideology critique. [PART 2] Theoretical concepts from Slavoj Žižek (influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas of radical democracy) hold the potential for a post-Marxian model of ideology critique that might galvanize approaches to musical pluralism. Such an application could be relevant to various kinds of music, without giving a priori preference to one musical style over another – as was the case with Adorno. That said, these ideas have significant resonances with Adorno’s negative dialectics, and are valuable in developing a form of strong relativism that could dialecticize a dialogical approach to musical pluralism. This suggests the possilbity of construing pluralism not as the achievement of stasis (or ‘the end of history’), but as a means of effecting social and historical movement beyond the present cultural paradigm.

The terms ‘arrest’ and ‘movement’, deployed by Tippett in his Third Symphony (1970–2) as part of what Kemp defines as a ‘dialectic of strong contrasts’, were in fact significant at an earlier stage of the composer’s output. Some ten years previously Arrest and Movement appears as a possible title for his Second Piano Sonata in the pencil manuscript of the work. Tippett’s notebooks further reveal how these two categories determined the formation of two distinct types of temporality in the piece: one halting or stuttering, the other flowing. Art critic Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort’s book Arrest and Movement: an Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East, which was published in 1951 and which Tippett is known to have read, uses these terms to explore the relationship between spatial and temporal representation. This prompts investigation of the arrest–movement dialectic in Tippett’s Sonata along analogous lines, analysing structure, balance, and use of quasi-spatial proportions. The two threads converge by means of the criterion of ‘monumentality’, a term Groenewegen-Frankfort uses to describe works of particularly effective balance. While critical evaluation of the Sonata might suggest that this work itself falls short of ‘monumental’ stature, it is arguable that Tippett was able to carry forward lessons learned to works of his later œuvre (such as his Fourth Symphony), which do indeed approach this status.

Messiaen rarely commented on form. His posthumously published seven-volume Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie offers an important new perspective on many aspects of his music; yet despite the vast amount of information that the composer’s surveys of his works disclose – details that, in many cases, only he himself could have supplied – his analyses do have certain limitations, notably with regard to form. In a largely complimentary essay on Messiaen in La Musique depuis Debussy (1961), André Hodeir closes with a scathing assessment of Messiaen’s activity in the domain of form. In order to assess the validity of Hodeir’s comments, I have surveyed Messiaen’s analyses, proposed a hypothetical taxonomy of formal models in a range of the composer’s works, and attempted to place his thinking in the wider context of attitudes to form in the twentieth century.

The development of recording is arguably the most significant change to have affected music in the twentieth century. Never before have people had access to so much music and in so many different ways and with so many different patterns of use. This paper examines some of the effects of recording on listening, starting with a brief outline of an ecological theory of listening and focusing on three specific characteristics of recordings: the interpenetration of music and the wider environment; recordings as medium and as object; and the relationship between social and solitary listening practices. Recording has attracted both utopian and dystopian commentaries on its effects on musical culture, and the paper concludes by considering both the opportunities and the drawbacks of recordings as a means of access to music.

This article explores the notion of artistic collaboration between performer and composer, a topic that has attracted some attention but whose methodology might be thought to preclude objective discussion by the participants themselves. Although our report can make no claims to objectivity either, it attempts a critical reflection on a specific collaboration between the two authors as composer and performer, respectively. Cast in a dialogical format, it traces the genesis of a composition by Fabrice Fitch for speaking cellist, Per Serafino Calbarsi II: Le Songe de Panurge, written in 2002–3 and premiered in London in October 2006. The collaboration first evolved as a constant exchange of ideas in which concept, technique, and realization were held in fine balance. The piece engages a variety of frames of reference. If its stance in relation to the instrument clearly draws on certain contemporary traditions, for example Lachenmann’s musiqueconcrète instrumentale, other aspects draw on earlier idioms, notably a specialized instance of scordatura, and the use of a spoken text (from the third book of Rabelais’s Pantagruel) that recalls Marin Marais’s Tableau de l’opération de la taille. The interferences and resonances between these influences pose aesthetic questions that are explored within the piece and its performance, while remaining open for the analyst and audience. Finally, the ‘extended techniques’ employed posed specific notational problems. The resulting score navigates a path between tablature and ‘traditional’ notation, in which the emphasis between what is heard and what is played shifts constantly. This hybrid status, we imagine, constitutes a challenge not only for the performer, but for the analyst as well.

This article, which is intended as a starting point for debate rather than a definitive statement, proposes an outline structure for a musicology of record production. While such a musicology cannot exist as an entity separate from other aspects of musical analysis, it is hoped that a coherent set of tools for analysing the production of recorded music will prove useful. The main discussion is divided into six sections, under the following headings: the development of technology; staging; ergonomics and embodiment; training and practice; the negotiation between performance practice and recording practice; and consumer influence. During the course of the article I examine the scope of existing work in this field and, in some instances, make suggestions for future investigation.

This article explores the sound capabilities of video game consoles of the 8-bit era (c.1975–85) in order to discuss the impact that technological constraints had on shaping aesthetic decisions in the composition of music for the early generation of games. Comparing examples from the Commodore 64 (C64), the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Atari VCS, and the arcade consoles, I examine various approaches and responses (in particular the use of looping) to similar technological problems, and illustrate how these responses are as much a decision made by the composer as a matter of technical necessity.

Albert Giraud’s cycle of fifty rondels bergamasques, Pierrot Lunaire (1884), famously became, in Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation, the basis of Schoenberg’s Op. 21 (1912). But for many decades the work of the Belgian poet was either straightforwardly denigrated for its anachronism and ‘mediocrity’ (Boulez), or at least declared inferior to its ‘vivid, Angst-filled transformation’ (Youens) in Hartleben’s hands. This article questions some widely held beliefs concerning the original Pierrot and its subsequent reworking. The claim that Schoenberg’s selection and reorganization of the poems imposed logic and order on an otherwise jumbled collection is found to be belied by the striking narrative coherence of Giraud’s original sequence, which is unified by a clearly defined set of symbols. Meanwhile, Hartleben’s putative ‘infidelity’ to Giraud is challenged by evidence both internal (his careful preservation of the rondel structure) and contextual (an esteem for his Belgian contemporary manifested in further poetic homages). While there is no doubt that Hartleben’s translations distance the poems from their background in Parnassian aesthetics – omitting crucial references to Brueghel, Shakespeare, Watteau, and the painter and lithographer Adolphe Willette – it is Giraud himself who deserves the credit for the most strikingly memorable images later absorbed into the expressionistic milieu of Schoenberg’s melodrama.

Although Uri Caine first made his mark as a relatively straight-ahead jazz pianist – ‘roots’ to which he returns regularly – he has, arguably, become most famous with his often controversial versions of works from the ‘classical music’ canon. These recompositions, which often involve a host of other styles from Latin to dub, are usually regarded as examples of postmodern eclecticism. While this view is certainly valid, it needs to be complemented by more detailed analysis of both Caine’s artistic methods and their aesthetic and ideological implications. Among his work on classical composers, Caine’s engagement with Gustav Mahler is the most sustained. The result of this engagement is not an exercise in ‘crossover’ or ‘jazzed-up’ Mahler, but a radical reinterpretation of Mahler’s music that situates it as a Jewish voice within the cultural cross-currents of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. Through this reference to Mahler, Caine constructs a Jewish tradition within jazz that complements but does not compete with jazz’s overwhelmingly African-American heritage. What emerges is a pluralistic subjectivity in which different cultural identities and traditions are negotiated in an equal and open dialogue.