Project MUSE®: Music and Letters - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Music and Letters.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 85 (2004) through current issueLatest Articles: Music and LettersTWOProject MUSE®Music and Letters1477-46310027-4224Latest articles in Music and Letters. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Classical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation ed. by Neil Thomas Smith, Peter Peters, and Karoly Molina (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985245
<p></p>
This edited collection derives from a conference on ‘Futuring Classical Music’ hosted by the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music at Maastricht University in 2021. It gathers an eclectic mix of contributions from scholars and practitioners at different career stages in the form of transcribed conference roundtable discussions and talks, practice-based reflections, traditional scholarly essays, and polemical writing. As such, the volume gives a sense of vibrancy and dialogic exchange that conferences ideally have, flush with people who have interesting and sometimes provocative things to say. In this case, the contributors are concerned with how the practices of Western ‘classical music’
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallClassical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation ed. by Neil Thomas Smith, Peter Peters, and Karoly Molina (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USClassical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation ed. by Neil Thomas Smith, Peter Peters, and Karoly Molina (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®157062026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Music in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies by John Rink (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985246
<p></p>
Music in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies compiles twelve of John Rink’s previously published essays, spanning 1990 to 2021, all of which concern musical performance studies. Approaching a complex topic from a diversity of methodological viewpoints, the volume is an exemplar of rigour and paves ways for future research on performance. Music in Profile draws together Rink’s experiences as a pianist and as a musicologist and puts forth a view of musical structure that emerges in time and is not fixed in notation. The repertory covered consists of Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and Rachmaninov. Representing over three decades of scholarly and artistic work, the volume documents the growth of performance studies as a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallMusic in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies by John Rink (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USMusic in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies by John Rink (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®153362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert by Joe Davies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985247
<p></p>
That Franz Schubert’s music often pulses with a brooding undercurrent is well known: evocations of horror and terror not only permeate his vocal works but also have informed many interpretations of his instrumental music, particularly those composed from 1822 onward (his so-called ‘late’ period, a phase marked by his personal crises, especially his declining health). While such themes have long attracted scholarly interest, it is only more recently—most notably since Marjorie Hirsch’s 2016 article, ‘Schubert’s Reconciliation of Gothic and Classical Influences’ (in Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (eds.), Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style (Cambridge, 2016), 149–70)—that they have been more
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert by Joe Davies (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert by Joe Davies (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®119982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works: Their Reception from the Nineteenth Century to the Present by Russell Stinson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985248
<p></p>
Over a long career Russell Stinson has made an extensive contribution to our knowledge of Bach, particularly regarding the source transmission of organ and instrumental music. His studies of large collections of organ chorales have become indispensable guides, and much of his later work has centred on reception, most notably his study of the reception of organ music from Mendelssohn to Brahms (OUP, 2006). The new volume, The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works, fills in some of the gaps in the earlier studies, often reading like a scrapbook of findings and discussions with other scholars. This informal study is disarming in a field that can often become bogged down with much technical or critical jargon, and many
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works: Their Reception from the Nineteenth Century to the Present by Russell Stinson (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works: Their Reception from the Nineteenth Century to the Present by Russell Stinson (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®81192026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Vaughan Williams in Context ed. by Julian Onderdonk and Ceri Owen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985249
<p></p>
In just the last three decades, Ralph Vaughan Williams has received the full complement of biographical, critical, and musical treatments usually afforded ‘great composers’. While a unified Gesamtausgabe seems unlikely for the foreseeable future (with his works tied up under copyrights stewarded by different publishers), Oxford University Press and Stainer & Bell have been issuing new critical editions of select works—both obscure and standard repertory. New Vaughan Williams recordings continue apace, with several premiere recordings in recent years. A large sample of his voluminous correspondence has appeared in print (Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford, 2009)), with considerably
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallVaughan Williams in Context ed. by Julian Onderdonk and Ceri Owen (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USVaughan Williams in Context ed. by Julian Onderdonk and Ceri Owen (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®133602026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography by Robert Sholl (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985250
<p></p>
Olivier Messiaen remains an imposing figure in the history of twentieth-century music, having followed his own sensibility encompassing colour, birdsong, and the temporal exploration of eternal time compared to the impermanence of existence and the sense of solidity that he found in his Catholic convictions, neither joining nor despising wider trends but learning what he could from an extensive and eclectic set of sources and forming those influences into his own remarkable musical style. All this in service of what Robert Sholl describes as an ‘audacious mandate for music’: ‘to manifest the real presence of Christ to humanity and to realize a vision of human destiny after death’ (p. 8).This very readable new
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallOlivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography by Robert Sholl (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USOlivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography by Robert Sholl (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®120692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence by Margaret Cormier (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985251
<p></p>
What is the ethical responsibility to an operatic audience? Margaret Cormier’s Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence contends that any opera performance engages with contemporary bodies and ideals in ways that demand critical attention. Post-#MeToo, as the classical music industry reckons with the increased visibility of sexual violence, this timely monograph considers the ramifications of performing such violence. Cormier’s ethical framework for creating and analysing a production foregrounds the welfare of the social body—on both an individual spectatorial level and more widely through the perpetuation of harmful rape myths—over fidelity to the opera text. In this endeavour, Rape at the Opera contributes to
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallRape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence by Margaret Cormier (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USRape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence by Margaret Cormier (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®156112026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Following the Score: The Ravel Trilogy ed. by Michael Pinchbeck and Oliver Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985252
<p></p>
This book, published as part of the Intellect ‘Playtext’ series for innovative theatre practices, documents the creation, performance, and afterlives of three devised theatrical works based on three compositions by the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937): Bolero, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and Tzigane for violin and piano. The performances were created and presented in various guises between 2014 and 2019, and are presented in this book as belonging to what its editors, Michael Pinchbeck and Oliver Smith (part of the creative team that put the works together), identify as an ‘emergent’ genre, described as including ‘score theatre, concert theatre, composed theatre, and orchestral theatre’, all of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallFollowing the Score: The Ravel Trilogy ed. by Michael Pinchbeck and Oliver Smith (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USFollowing the Score: The Ravel Trilogy ed. by Michael Pinchbeck and Oliver Smith (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®120662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Sound of Empire: Soundscapes, Aesthetics and Performance between Ancien régime and Restoration ed. by Federico Gon and Emmanuel Reibel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985253
<p></p>
Shakespeare’s question ‘What’s in a name?’ features in a children’s book by the scientist J. B. S. Haldane (My Friend Mr Leakey (London, 1937)). To ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ Professor Leakey retorts ‘Oh no it wouldn’t, not if it were called the Lesser Stinkwort, or the Fish-and-chips flower’ (chapter entitled ‘Mr Leakey’s Party’). The Sound of Empire is a wide-ranging name, echoing studies such as Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe (ed. Kirsten Gibson and Ian Biddle (London, 2016)), with its material from the medieval to modern periods. Federico Gon and Emmanuel Reibel specify ‘between Ancien régime and Restoration’ but actually the ambit of this project falls later
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Sound of Empire: Soundscapes, Aesthetics and Performance between Ancien régime and Restoration ed. by Federico Gon and Emmanuel Reibel (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Sound of Empire: Soundscapes, Aesthetics and Performance between Ancien régime and Restoration ed. by Federico Gon and Emmanuel Reibel (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®195092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century by Austin Glatthorn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985254
<p></p>
The title page, a stylized map of the Holy Roman Empire with its main cities connected by the routes travelled by theatrical companies, visualizes the twofold aim of Austin Glatthorn’s study: he wants to map the German musical stage in the twilight years of the Holy Roman Empire (1775– 1806), and he wants to put the Reich on the map of music history. In political history, the nineteenth-century view of the Holy Roman Empire as unwieldy, outmoded, and destined to be superseded by the ‘modern’ nation state has been revised for some time. Now Glatthorn tackles music history, where German opera of the late eighteenth century has either been interpreted with hindsight according to later nationalist paradigms, or through
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallMusic Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century by Austin Glatthorn (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USMusic Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century by Austin Glatthorn (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®154432026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07‘Innocent social delight’: Glee club Life in Bath, 1782–1853
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985255
<p></p>
As a means of investigating the intersection of a city’s social and musical life, the phenomenon of the glee club1 is uniquely valuable to researchers. The private meetings of these clubs offered both leisure to a city’s fashionable elite and employment to its musicians, and while distinctions were made between these two groups—usually called ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ members respectively—common membership served to blur the boundary of patron and performer when compared to other settings such as the concert or music lesson. Bath, whose musical life was second only to London’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, played host to at least fifteen separate glee clubs during the period 1782–1853
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmall‘Innocent social delight’: Glee club Life in Bath, 1782–18532026-03-07text/htmlen-US‘Innocent social delight’: Glee club Life in Bath, 1782–18532026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1625082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Black Heritage and English Song: Amanda Ira Aldridge, ‘Domestic’ Music, And Transatlantic Networks (1866–1956)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985256
<p></p>
Content warning: Part of this article concerns the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century and deals with historical sources that contain offensive language.On 16 April 1954, the composer and voice teacher Amanda Aldridge made a television debut at the age of 88 as a guest on the popular BBC series Music for You (see Fig. 1). Following a performance of ‘Luletta’s Dance’ from her piano suite Three African Dances (1911), she was joined by the West End singer Muriel Smith for a rendition of her Two Little Southern Songs (1912).1 With this late flourish of televised recognition, Aldridge was presented as a surviving link both to a bygone world of Victorian genteel music-making and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallBlack Heritage and English Song: Amanda Ira Aldridge, ‘Domestic’ Music, And Transatlantic Networks (1866–1956)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USBlack Heritage and English Song: Amanda Ira Aldridge, ‘Domestic’ Music, And Transatlantic Networks (1866–1956)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®2190622026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985257
<p></p>
The status and significance of the composer Sir Edward Elgar and the conductor Sir Adrian Boult in the history of music and music-making in twentieth-century Britain, though subject to changes in fashion, is beyond dispute. Elgar, the perceived composer laureate of the Edwardian age, and Boult, the embodiment of the musical establishment as represented by the growing influence of the nascent BBC, project an image that from a twenty-first-century perspective now seems remote.Elgar and Boult came from very different social backgrounds. Elgar’s origins in provincial mid-Victorian Worcestershire are well documented in the extensive corpus of biographical literature. Boult, in contrast, came from a prosperous
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallEdward Elgar and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USEdward Elgar and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®138522026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Bernhard Lang by Christine Dysers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985258
<p></p>
This perceptive volume offers the first sustained, book-length treatment of Bernhard Lang that manages to be at once accessible and intellectually ambitious. Christine Dysers’s study is exemplary in its clarity of prose and in the coherence of its argument: written with a fluidity that makes demanding theoretical material feel immediate, the book clearly establishes the notion of repetition as the central, organizing principle of Lang’s compositional world. More than a catalogue of works, the book constitutes an interpretative key that opens new ways of hearing—indeed of thinking—about one of contemporary Europe’s most interesting and, until now, comparatively neglected figures.A central point of the book is the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallBernhard Lang by Christine Dysers (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USBernhard Lang by Christine Dysers (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®128092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Tonality: An Owner’s Manual by Dmitri Tymoczko (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985259
<p></p>
Dmitri Tymoczko has long been recognized as one of the most distinctive theorists of this generation. His groundbreaking research on the OPTIC voice-leading spaces applied topology and geometry to the study of harmony (Clifton Callender, Ian Quinn, and Dmitri Tymoczko, ‘Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces’, Science, 320 (2008), 346–48), laying the groundwork for his first book, A Geometry of Music (New York, 2011). His newest book, Tonality: An Owner’s Manual, both builds on and departs from his first. On the one hand, geometry is applied to hundreds of new musical analyses; on the other hand, geometry is no longer the focus, and the scope is more encyclopedic. The book is not offered as a ‘generalized tonal theory’
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallTonality: An Owner’s Manual by Dmitri Tymoczko (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USTonality: An Owner’s Manual by Dmitri Tymoczko (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®143252026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Harmonic Theory (d’)après Debussy: René Lenormand’s Étude sur l’harmonie moderne
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985260
<p></p>
For a long time now, the harmonic language of contemporary composers has not conformed to the one whose laws are set down in the treatises. How is one to analyse certain chords, to explain certain forbidden progressions—in a word, what is one to conclude from the current state of harmony? So many burning questions that are being asked every day . . .So we read in Le Monde musical in 1912.1 Introducing a new year’s programme of supplements, the director of this Parisian magazine may have anticipated some bemusement from subscribers presented with a ‘Study of Modern Harmony’ by the composer René Lenormand alongside harmony exercises for a teaching diploma, with resoundingly un-‘modern’ realizations by pedagogues such
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallHarmonic Theory (d’)après Debussy: René Lenormand’s Étude sur l’harmonie moderne2026-03-07text/htmlen-USHarmonic Theory (d’)après Debussy: René Lenormand’s Étude sur l’harmonie moderne2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®2006692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna by David Wyn Jones (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985261
<p></p>
The year 2025 marks the bicentennial of Johann Strauss, Jr’s birth, an occasion for festivals, performances, tours, and celebrations in his home-town. Since the beginning of his career, Strauss has been synonymous with Vienna, and talismans like the Blue Danube Waltz and Die Fledermaus have entertained millions of denizens and visitors alike in the years since they premiered.In David Wyn Jones’s sweeping multi-generational biography of the Strauss family, he weaves events in their personal and professional lives with the larger context of Viennese and Habsburg history from the Biedermeier period through the First World War. Although the literature on individual Strauss family members, especially Strauss, Jr, has
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna by David Wyn Jones (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna by David Wyn Jones (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®139592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory ed. by Gavin S. K. Lee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985262
<p></p>
Queer Ear is in many ways the sequel to Queering the Pitch (Routledge, 1994), the groundbreaking anthology edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas that, alongside Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), reshaped musicology by bringing gender and sexuality into sharp focus. Queering the Pitch throws the spotlight on minority sexualities and argues for the centrality of the body. In so doing it contrasts the positivist work in mainstream musicology and music theory. Despite vigorous opposition to this agenda, Queering the Pitch became a beacon of light for queer perspectives—in particular, gay and lesbian—with many of the authors working with inventive and radical
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallQueer Ear: Remaking Music Theory ed. by Gavin S. K. Lee (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USQueer Ear: Remaking Music Theory ed. by Gavin S. K. Lee (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®147132026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Harmoniousness: Essays in Chinese Musicology by Jao Tsung-i (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985263
<p></p>
Edited and translated by Colin Huehns, Harmoniousness: Essays in Chinese Musicology (hereafter, Harmoniousness) offers a comprehensive exploration of the profound insights and scholarly contributions of Jao Tsung-i (1917–2018), a renowned polymath in Chinese classical scholarship. This volume, part of the Collected Works of Jao Tsung-i: Xuantang Anthology series, features a diverse range of essays examining various aspects of Chinese music—from the qin and pipa to Sanskritic intoning, bell modes, and operatic incantation.The primary goal of Harmoniousness is to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between classical Chinese musicology and English-speaking audiences, making Jao’s seminal works accessible and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallHarmoniousness: Essays in Chinese Musicology by Jao Tsung-i (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USHarmoniousness: Essays in Chinese Musicology by Jao Tsung-i (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®152252026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07‘Booted, to Betoken’: Bonny Boots, Thomas Watson, and the Discovery of a New Oriana
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985264
<p></p>
On 20 September 1591, a Petrarchan poet, tragedian, and music lyricist stood before Queen Elizabeth and thousands of others booted in high platform shoes. In this article I argue that that person was Thomas Watson (c.1555–92) and that he thereby gained the nickname Bonny Boots that appeared thereafter in commemorative pastorals and madrigals associated with the elusive character Oriana. The setting was a lavish and extraordinarily musical entertainment for Elizabeth at Elvetham hosted by Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (1539–1621), who sought, through various masque-like shows, to reassert the Suffolk line of succession.1 In addition to proposing a new solution to a long-standing puzzle in identifying Bonny Boots
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmall‘Booted, to Betoken’: Bonny Boots, Thomas Watson, and the Discovery of a New Oriana2026-03-07text/htmlen-US‘Booted, to Betoken’: Bonny Boots, Thomas Watson, and the Discovery of a New Oriana2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1311692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Sounds of Apocalypse: Music in Poland under German Occupation by Katarzyna Naliwajek (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985265
<p></p>
Musicologists who study Poland during the Second World War are faced with an intractable challenge. They must confront violence on a scale that is difficult to imagine. They must grapple with the murder of millions of civilians, cities reduced to ruin, and mass displacement, without laundering the countless individual tragedies behind these events into tales of collective loss or national martyrdom. At the same time, they must make sense of a cultural moment when live, classical music was not only ubiquitous, but also mattered profoundly to musicians and listeners who, by nearly any standard, had far more pressing concerns than attending chamber music recitals or composing sonatas. Faced with this seeming
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallSounds of Apocalypse: Music in Poland under German Occupation by Katarzyna Naliwajek (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USSounds of Apocalypse: Music in Poland under German Occupation by Katarzyna Naliwajek (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®117182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Paris in London: Kammermusikalische Begegnungen um 1900 by David Reiβfelder (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985266
<p></p>
One of the most heartening aspects of the growing field of studies in British music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the way it has attracted scholars from beyond the English-speaking world. The Swiss musicologist David Reiβfelder has worked and published inter alia on Charles Villiers Stanford, Edwin Evans, and Benjamin Dale. The present monograph, based on the author’s 2021 doctoral dissertation for the University of Zürich, is not merely a welcome addition to British musical studies per se, but acts as a timely reminder that, in promoting a thriving concert life, Britain in the long nineteenth century was anything but ‘the land without music’.As the title implies, the book is primarily
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallParis in London: Kammermusikalische Begegnungen um 1900 by David Reiβfelder (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USParis in London: Kammermusikalische Begegnungen um 1900 by David Reiβfelder (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®116402026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Samantha Bassler, Katherine Butler, and Katie Bank (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985267
<p></p>
Many of us think we know Byrd well, not only for his music, but also for the compelling details of his biography. A Roman Catholic in aggressively Calvinist Elizabethan England; widely connected to a colourful network of co-religionists with more than a whiff of subversiveness about them; somehow narrowly escaping societal ostracism by means of patrons in the very highest places: the popular image of Byrd taps into our most picturesque notions of the persecuted artist and our cherished values of religious and ideological freedom. It’s very easy to be glib about Byrd, and it’s precisely for this reason that Samantha Bassler, Katherine Butler, and Katie Bank’s edited collection Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallByrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Samantha Bassler, Katherine Butler, and Katie Bank (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USByrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Samantha Bassler, Katherine Butler, and Katie Bank (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®145022026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Erard Grecian Harp in Regency England by Panagiotis Poulopoulos (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985268
<p></p>
Panagiotis Poulopoulos’s The Erard Grecian Harp in Regency England offers a fascinating exploration of how a single instrument became central to the musical and cultural life of early nineteenth-century England. The book traces the remarkable transformation of the harp from a relatively modest instrument into one that, as Poulopoulos shows, rivalled the piano in popularity during the Regency period. At the heart of this transformation stands Sébastien Erard (1752–1831), the innovative French instrument maker whose technical ingenuity and commercial acumen fundamentally reshaped both the physical construction of the harp and its cultural significance.The Erard Grecian harp emerged at a crucial moment in the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Erard Grecian Harp in Regency England by Panagiotis Poulopoulos (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Erard Grecian Harp in Regency England by Panagiotis Poulopoulos (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®134952026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Italian-American Musical Experience: A Journey from Busoni to Berio by Valentina Bensi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985269
<p></p>
The main title of Valentina Bensi’s book, The Italian-American Musical Experience, could apply to some among the 17 million Americans of Italian ancestry identified as ‘Italian-Americans’. One might expect that the book is about the musical experience of outstanding ‘Italian-American’ composers like Walter Piston, Paul Creston, Vittorio Giannini, Vincent Persichetti, Norman Dello Joio, Henry Mancini, and John Corigliano. But the subtitle informs us that it is instead A Journey from Busoni to Berio, i.e. from Ferruccio Busoni, Rosario Scalero, Alfredo Casella, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Luigi Dallapiccola, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Nino Rota to Luciano Berio. What caused the misunderstanding, though? Perhaps it is due
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallThe Italian-American Musical Experience: A Journey from Busoni to Berio by Valentina Bensi (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Italian-American Musical Experience: A Journey from Busoni to Berio by Valentina Bensi (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®239372026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Motets for Six and Eight Voices, Canons by Ludwig Senfl (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985270
<p></p>
Ludwig Senfl’s historical renown amongst the composers of the generation following the ‘core’ masters of the central Renaissance—Josquin des Prez, Jean Mouton, Jacob Obrecht, Henricus Isaac—has not been without its ups and downs. Always acknowledged as one of the masters of the German Tenorlied, his fame as a composer of sacred music has ebbed and flowed with the interest in liturgical polyphony more generally. As the successor of Henricus Isaac at the Imperial Court Chapel in Vienna he can, for example, lay claim to having completed the latter’s massive collection of Mass Propers, the Choralis Constantinus, but even that magnum opus has been more admired than loved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (as
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallMotets for Six and Eight Voices, Canons by Ludwig Senfl (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USMotets for Six and Eight Voices, Canons by Ludwig Senfl (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®134562026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Italian Film Music, 1950s–1970s: Between Tradition, Innovation, and Internationalisation by Franco Sciannameo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985271
<p></p>
In recent years, Italian film music has been the subject of numerous studies focusing on the output of individual composers or directors. Until now, however, there has been no work in which these individual experiences could be compared to offer a sense of the complexity of the relationships embedded in each cinematic season and in which film music is inevitably involved. This volume, edited by Franco Sciannameo, fills this gap. The text traverses two decades of enormous importance—namely, the years from 1950 to 1970—during which the sonic landscapes of the seventh art had begun a slow, perhaps very slow, process of renewal. This process led to an evolution in musical composition, whereby scores modelled on late
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallItalian Film Music, 1950s–1970s: Between Tradition, Innovation, and Internationalisation by Franco Sciannameo (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USItalian Film Music, 1950s–1970s: Between Tradition, Innovation, and Internationalisation by Franco Sciannameo (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®158202026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Frammenti liturgico-musicali dell’Archivio di Stato di Perugia by Pietro Moroni (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985272
<p></p>
Catalogues are often underestimated. The task of finding, collecting, and studying fragments of medieval liturgical chant manuscripts is too frequently described as mindless and repetitive; the focus on isolated sources risks missing the ‘wider picture’. Yet catalogues of fragments of medieval musical manuscripts hold a singular importance for both historical scholarship and the preservation of cultural memory. These compilations serve not merely as inventories, but as intellectual frameworks that restore coherence to materials long separated from their original contexts. Because medieval manuscripts were frequently dismembered, repurposed, or dispersed across collections, individual leaves often survive in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallFrammenti liturgico-musicali dell’Archivio di Stato di Perugia by Pietro Moroni (review)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USFrammenti liturgico-musicali dell’Archivio di Stato di Perugia by Pietro Moroni (review)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®97842026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07‘Music & Letters’ Awards
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985273
<p></p>
The Music & Letters Trust makes awards twice a year, in January and July, in order to support musical research. Full details of the method and timing of applications may be found on the Music & Letters website at <http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/>.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmall‘Music & Letters’ Awards2026-03-07text/htmlen-US‘Music & Letters’ Awards2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®14102026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Authors of Articles in this Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985274
<p></p>
jonathan frank is an Assistant Librarian at the Royal College of Music, London. His main research interest is the music of nineteenth-century Bath, particularly the life and influence of James William Windsor (1779–1853) and his family. His forthcoming monograph, provisionally entitled ‘The Windsors of Bath’, will be published by Routledge in late 2026.katherine fry is an independent scholar and writer, whose research lies at the intersection of musicology, literature, cultural and intellectual history, and urban studies. She has held teaching and research positions at King’s College London and the University of California, Berkeley, and was the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Individual Fellowship for
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallAuthors of Articles in this Issue2026-03-07text/htmlen-USAuthors of Articles in this Issue2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®29812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Recent Titles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275
<p></p>
Inclusion in this list neither implies nor precludes subsequent review. The editors regret that material sent for review cannot be acknowledged or
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985275">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/266/image/coversmallRecent Titles2026-03-07text/htmlen-USRecent Titles2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®461272026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07