Mitski Miyawaki, a Japanese American indie-rock artist professionally known as Mitski, wrote her 2016 song, “Your Best American Girl,” from the perspective of a woman who is unable to have a relationship with her love interest due to their different racial and cultural backgrounds. The accompanying music video engages with the song’s social message while adding nuance and complexity to it. Many of the lyrics portray Mitski’s feelings of isolation as an Asian American woman, especially through their employment of Japanese cultural symbols, while the music video uses parody, camera angles, and Americana iconography to further illustrate Mitski’s experiences of isolation. This essay analyzes the subtle ways in which “Your Best American Girl” subverts Asian stereotypes and destabilizes white patriarchal structures that are perpetrated by popular media, particularly through white centrality in the indie-rock genre. Comparison of “Your Best American Girl” to Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die” music video reveals how “Your Best American Girl” uses parody techniques to criticize this white centrality. Further, its references to PJ Harvey allows Mitski to occupy a similar position of musical authenticity and command respect. Through lyrical, musical, and visual storytelling, “Your Best American Girl” chronicles Mitski’s journey towards self-acceptance, while critiquing the pervasive whiteness in romantic narratives.

The large research study on which this paper draws examined the preparation of early-career teachers (ECTs) in New South Wales to teach composition and musical creativity. Presenting data collected through a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) research design, and semi-structured interviews and themes, this article explores the theme of Musical Identity as it arose in the larger study. Through discussions with ECTs and composers who have experience teaching composition in NSW secondary schools, this study examined and compared these groups’ personal definitions of composition and perceptions of composer/creator identity and explored the implications of these definitions and identities on how these groups approach composition instruction in NSW secondary schools. These discussions revealed that participants held a wide variety of definitions of composing and the composer identity, stemming from composition’s strong Western Art Music (WAM) connotations, and these ambiguities presented themselves as barriers for the participants to teach composition effectively. Literature in this area indicates that, with relatively little pedagogical understanding of it, composition is neglected in initial teacher education (ITE) programs in Australia, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As music education activities should be facilitated using processes and paradigms that reflect the paradigms of students, music teachers’ personal definitions of composition need to be broadened through their ITE experiences. In order to democratise the act of creating music, syllabus terminology and requirements should be revised to reflect these broader definitions of music creation in NSW secondary schools.

It is well known that musical activity in colonial New England was quite low; this was in no small part caused by the Puritan emphasis on the unaccompanied singing of psalms in their churches. What is often neglected when discussing Puritan musical activity is how Calvinism’s grip on Puritan theology loosened throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving room for changes to worship traditions. The same Puritans who destroyed pipe organs across England in the seventeenth century started building these instruments in their New England meeting houses towards the end of the eighteenth century. This paper uses primary sources to compare the Puritan theology of the Westminster Confession to statements of belief from Boston’s most progressive Congregationalist churches in the late eighteenth century. Such comparisons, when paired with a timeline of rhetoric surrounding instruments in worship music, connect doctrines of separation to the destruction of organs and doctrines of unity to the reinstatement of organs.

Internal key relationships in Brahms’s music are an important yet often overlooked area in which he adapted classical forms to a new harmonic language. Using analytical resources developed by Richard Cohn and other so-called “neo-Riemannian” theorists, Brahms’s harmonic ingenuity can be better analyzed in the context of nineteenth-century chromaticism, rather than in a context that is entirely beholden to the principles of diatonic tonality. Nineteenth-century harmonic features that are relevant to Brahms’s music include modulation by major third, augmented triads as structural objects, and hexatonic cycles. This paper will incorporate these harmonic features into a discussion of three compositional trends. First, local modulations by major thirds are used as central contents of sonata-form theme groups. Second, Brahms employs a Schubertian treatment of second subjects in major-third related keys, resolving both the key and the key relations in the recapitulation, but his practice deviates slightly from Schubert’s. Third, he replaces typical dominant or subdominant key relationships with major thirds in the most global contexts. While Brahms was only one of many composers using major-third related harmonies in the nineteenth century, the interplay between diatonic and chromatic structures in his classical forms contribute several interesting innovations to Romantic compositional practice.

As a young operatic performer-scholar, I have observed issues in the industry that I believe stem from opera’s complex, authoritative power structure and many of its leaders’ refusals to change this structure. In working towards rectifying these issues, I ask: How can the operatic rehearsal process, specifically, embrace measures of liberatory praxis and power disruption? Drawing on secondary literature regarding historical practices, philosophies of power, and liberatory praxis in music education, and a roundtable discussion I facilitated among opera practitioners on leadership and power structures, I developed a workshop in which I aimed to enable singers’ agency using alternative rehearsal methods. This workshop used a collaborative, democratic structure which honoured each participant’s expertise and prioritized discussions of the goals of the workshop and of each individual participant. Although some singers seemed uneasy with a collaborative structure of rehearsal as opposed to one with a central authoritative figure, my personal observations and a survey completed by workshop participants showed that singers gained agency through the employment of democratic, liberatory rehearsal praxis. Based on these results, I recommend that opera companies adopt a structure of democracy and collaborative discussion of personal and social praxis to expand singers’ agency. These results also suggest that continued study in singers’ praxis, agency, and power in operatic processes is needed.

The phenomenon of musical play has gained significant traction in recent research pertaining to music education. However, despite the popularity of this topic in both educational and research settings, investigation into the pedagogical potential of play has largely been limited to elementary-aged students. As such, middle and high school students (13-18 years) often experience rigid pedagogies that fail to appreciate the complexity of the adolescent stage of development. In response, this article draws on a single case study of play-based music education in middle school, and examines the ways in which social learning environments promote student engagement with learning and self-correction strategies. Based on analysis of the collected data, the research found that learning in play-based environments is cyclical, where the adoption of self-correction strategies is largely driven by the adolescent’s desire to participate in social interactions and experience the resulting sense of belonging. Therefore, the results indicate that student learning is enhanced by utilising pedagogies that respect the socio-cultural environments that adolescents experience.

Drawing on philosophical frameworks of agency, autonomy, and vulnerability as developed by feminist opera scholars, this paper examines the use of the lament in the expression of female unhappiness through a comparison of the representations of the sorceress Alcina in Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina, and George Frideric Handel’s Alcina. This paper begins by exploring how Caccini’s Alcina’s lament, “Ferma, ferma crudele,” exposes her journey through anger, confusion, and finally grief over her lost love. Alcina’s vulnerable expression of grief inspires another woman to join her in lamenting, an act which instills Alcina with greater emotional agency. The paper then considers Handel’s Alcina, suggesting that his Alcina’s aria, “Ombre Pallide,” functions as a lament rather than an invocation aria. The presence of lament characteristics following her abandonment of the musical conventions of the invocation aria see Alcina gain the freedom and autonomy to act without her self-destructive magical powers, showing that this loss of power is actually her liberation. Ultimately, these considerations question existing assumptions that composers reject lament conventions in order to lend agency to their women characters, and create space for nuanced understandings of women’s vulnerability and agency.

How do audiences come to understand a character who appears to lack a discrete performed identity? This paper explores how, in performance, music and theories of magic and reader response interact to create the identity of the musical spirit, Ariel, from William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) The Tempest (1611). To facilitate this exploration, I outline Ariel’s characterisation across six productions from the Renaissance, Restoration, and modern-day on two levels: textual (concerning how culturally-bound theories of magic and gender affect interpretations of the play’s script), and performed (concerning practical decisions such gender casting, voice type, and visual design). Across both the textual and performed levels, I emphasise the roles of socio-cultural contexts and resultant audience perceptions in informing Ariel’s identity in each production, ultimately proposing that while Ariel’s textual identity as a genderless spirit remains relatively stable from the Renaissance to the modern-day, each production of The Tempest creates a new performed identity for the character through dynamic interactions between culture, history, directors, performers, and audiences.