Peter Maxwell Davies’s Third Symphony, commissioned by the BBC in 1983, serves as a compelling example with which to explore the emergence of a new beast in the musical jungle: the composer’s agent. This moment represents a turning point in the commercialization of the classical music world. The fee negotiation for the symphony, handled by Maxwell Davies’s agent rather than his publisher, exemplifies the shifting power dynamics introduced by the agent’s arrival. Drawing on archival records, personal memoirs, and interviews, this article reconstructs the complex network of relationships involved, offering a nuanced understanding of the commissioning process during this pivotal moment.

In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky officially founded the Berkshire Music Center (later known as Tanglewood) and appointed Aaron Copland as head of the faculty. Copland actively participated in the US cultural diplomatic initiative of the Good Neighbor Policy by setting up the conditions for modern Latin American composers to attend the Center. By examining the contribution of modern Latin American art music, especially at Tanglewood, this article reflects on the relationship between music and politics, and shows that musical modernism encompasses a much broader artistic spectrum than previously thought.

As organ-grinder communities in large cities like London expanded in the late nineteenth century, the question of women’s (and children’s) presence in these contexts came to the attention of middle-class observers. Several issues emerge from reports in contemporary British newspapers: Firstly, to what extent was the organ grinders’ music considered to be music? Secondly, to what extent was organ-grinding considered to be a legitimate (and not a deviant or spurious) form of work for women? Lastly, what kinds of freedoms might an organ-grinding life appear to offer, and how did this relate to contemporary middle-class movements for women’s liberation?

This article explores how a queer production of Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor generates a variety of meanings about gender and sexuality, troubling the opera’s conventional cis- and heteronormative narrative and themes. Specifically, it examines the fluid relationships between the production’s materials, activities, and ideas that constantly evoke new meanings. To aid this endeavour, the author adopts Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the possible and the virtual and his understanding of sexualities. Consequently, elusive genders and sexualities emerge alongside normative and recognizable non-conforming ones. The article thus underscores how queer initiatives are pushing operatic genders and sexualities beyond their conventional forms.

The Italian features of Nicolas Bernier’s musical style have already been brought to light, but one remains to be addressed: his contrapuntal writing and the relationship between the basso continuo and the other parts. Nothing is known of Bernier’s stay in Rome, but musical clues suggest that he was in contact with Bernardo Pasquini and that he may have practised the latter’s partimenti. Bernier’s output betrays musical gestures inherited from these Italian pedagogical tools, testifying that the partimento tradition had a profound impact on the composer and that he played a key role in introducing its use in France.

In recent years, the neologism audiency has found traction as a direct counterpart to the term performance, not least among theatre and performance scholars.1 It announces audience research that is inclined to understand phenomena of witnessing as action and as involved in processes that stand in a mutually constitutive relationship with performance. This contrasts with the more familiar focus on groups of people (‘audiences’) and their constituent role identities (‘audience members’). Building on existing work, this round table seeks to further develop the audiency perspective by applying it to contexts outside of concert scenarios and other events characterized by a stable separation of counterposed performer and audience groups. We propose that considering audiency as action and opening it up to a wider range of musical contexts, ranging from rituals to games and from work to healing, can bring a deeper sense of its centrality in musical life.

In many West African dance-drumming genres, the emphasis is on involving the gathered community in the performance, inviting them to take turns dancing. In such performance contexts, there is no audience in the strict sense, no group of participants who are not themselves directly involved as performers. Based on ethnographic case studies of music–dance events in rural southern Mali, this article argues for the concept of embedded audiency, showing how musicians provide dancers with the crucial contributions of audiency to performance: focused attention, social recognition, and meaning.

In addition to their pedagogic dimensions, music lessons are contexts for performing and audiencing. This article focuses on performance–audiency interactions in Karnatak vocal lessons in South India, exploring how teachers and students audience each other. Drawing on work from phenomenological and pragmatist traditions, I analyse ways that gesture, gaze, and utterance contribute to teachers’ and students’ grip on their interactions, both with the other person and with the music performed. Through this analysis I develop the concept of audiency as an active and embodied ‘adjustment to the other’ and aim to further the understanding of music as interaction.

This article puts forwards the idea of ubiquitous audiency to help explain the fleeting and fluid ways in which ostensibly peripheral actors, such as passers-by, help perform musical situations in city streets and similar situations of everyday public-space life. It analyses several instances involving the playback of recordings in regional metropoles in China, especially Kunming, showing how attention is distributed across various actors and sensory modalities. It considers several significances of the direction in which attention is granted, and ultimately advocates the adoption of a broader situational lens to transcend a focus on performer/audience bilateralities in these and other musical encounters.

Online music streaming and the platforms that enable it are a relatively new phenomenon in music practice, at least when measured against the timescales of music history. They involve not only very specific and structurally decisive financial arrangements (multi-sided markets, financialization), but also depend deeply on technological affordances that did not exist in their current form less than a generation ago — most notably recommender systems. The two books at the centre of this review, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver and Streaming Music, Streaming Capital by Eric Drott, together illuminate many non-obvious yet crucial structural conditions of contemporary music streaming as a networked, lived practice distributed across humans, technology, finance, and culture.