Abstract This article establishes the overwhelming association of the key of E♭ minor with expressions of profound melancholy. Subthemes include deep depression, ghosts, and spiritual darkness, represented by ombra style markers, sea storms represented by the tempest style, and representations of Scotland and Ossianic melancholy. C. F. D. Schubart’s well-known statements on E♭ minor are examined concerning its use, though those statements themselves may have been conditioned by prior usage of the key, contemporary tuning systems, and the prevalent psychological association of flat-side keys with melancholy. Topical analysis is served by the history of E♭ minor, which differs greatly from its relative major.

Abstract Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists’ fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the ‘highest’ in the natural world.

Abstract This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners’ affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners’ experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.

Abstract Through ethnographical, historical, archival, and analytical lenses, this article explores Zheng Xiaoying’s (1929–) Mandarin re-translations of Das Lied von der Erde as a prism that refracts critical light on intersections of translation, epistemology, interculturality, and post-/decoloniality. The article first provides a reception history of Das Lied in China to contextualize Zheng’s re-translations, and then examines her archives to discuss the cultural dynamics of translation and musical knowledge-making in China. The article ends with a provocation from Hong Kong to reflect on the stakes of celebrating translation as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonial goals, and to position translation in intercultural musical exchange as an arbiter of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.

Abstract Discussions of sample-based music are traditionally single-authored, despite the frequency of multi-genre content found within this repertoire. This article builds a case for a new approach for future analyses, justified by highlighting repertoire that embeds samples from different genres, times, and cultures and that calls upon a variety of disciplinary expertise to attend to these disparate contents. Multi-voice commentary is an approach that includes insider voices to speak to the content of sample-based music, building a reception network that runs counter to single authorial modes, broadening the narrative around sample-based music and its lineage. Certain sample-based works are most in need of this new approach, based on situations of ‘sampling up’, ‘down’, or ‘sideways’, tendencies developed from Nader’s concept of ‘studying up’ and Walser’s writings on ‘appropriations from below’. Theoretical ideas from Fish and Barthes are also brought into this discussion to further the case for a multiplicity of readings.

Abstract Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.

Before a cyberattack in October 2023 knocked out most of the British Library’s online resources, audible voices from the First World War were only a click away: sixty-six British soldiers, recorded in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany between 1915 and 1918, all reciting the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.1 In their erstwhile digital home, these recordings sat alongside other surveys of English accents and dialects, offering a taste of the variety and richness of vernacular speech across the British Isles before the influence of radio and television began to iron out regional idiosyncrasies. In the prevailing mood of historical curiosity and uncanny self-recognition surrounding these recordings — English used to sound like that? — little attention was paid either to the conditions of captivity that shaped these men’s lives or to the scholarly project that produced these sounds. Recordings of English speech, in fact, made up only a small fraction of the massive wartime output of the Prussian Phonographic Commission, an interdisciplinary team of German scholars who conducted anthropological, linguistic, and musicological research on soldiers and internees from Allied countries and their colonial territories. In total, some 2600 sound recordings, comprising speech, song, and instrumental music, were made in German POW camps or nearby recording studios (Lange, p. 70). Forgotten or ignored for the better part of a century, the recordings held today in institutions in Berlin and Vienna have been the subject of increased critical attention over the past fifteen years.2 Thanks to this work, we are getting closer to understanding one of the most ambitious yet fatally flawed research projects in the history of world music.

Fact: the shellac disc — aka the 78 — was the dominant format for the circulation of sound recordings until it was eclipsed by vinyl — the LP —in the 1950s. Saying so seems obvious, indisputable. Yet within this commonplace lurks a bit of complexity. For one thing, every phonograph (aka gramophone) disc was made of many materials in addition to shellac, which made up only a portion of the whole. Somehow this one ingredient garnered synecdochical sway over all of the others, becoming our total idea of the 78 within what we might call the phonographic imaginary. For another thing, calling a ten- or twelve-inch disc played at 78 rpm a ‘format’ confounds additional uses of this same term. Suppose, for instance, we want to call ten-inch discs one format and twelve-inches another? Or suppose by ‘format’ we want to draw a distinction between discs in general — including LPs — and the (non-shellac) cylinder records played on phonographs designed specifically for them? Can ‘format’ be the correct usage in all of these cases? Both of these wrinkles, it should be clear, have less to do with fact than they have to do with language. The curiously expansive and differently imprecise meanings of shellac and format are minor media-historical conundrums of the sort that beg larger questions about media as cultural phenomena and the ways that we approach media as objects of study.