Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando (2019) reimagines Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist across five centuries, intertwining feminist critique and postmodern aesthetics. This article explores how Neuwirth sonically enacts the concept of ‘in-betweenness’, aligning with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. Neuwirth constructs an ‘androgynous sound’ through hybrid styles, pop-cultural references, and the countertenor voice. Focusing on four pivotal duets, the analysis shows how vocal registers, textures, and stylistic ruptures destabilize gender norms and formal expectations in opera. I argue that Orlando transcends its narrative framework, positioning opera as an active space of knowledge production and political resistance. Tracing sonic gestures from Woolf’s literary modernism to Neuwirth’s contemporary score, I reveal how operatic voices carve out a sonic Borderland where gender and identity are not merely performed but continuously invented.

James Aird stands at the forefront of music printing in Glasgow, introducing a style of business that had been attempted sporadically in the city prior to his own first endeavours in 1782. His initial establishment opened c. 1776 and grew into a successful music publishing business, with about one hundred attributable works surviving today. Aird survived the financial challenge of sequestration, not uncommon in the local business community, and in the last months of his life faced a bitter legal case. His legacy is evident in the output of his immediate successors, who bought some of his printing plates after his death to establish and sustain their own publishing houses. This article reviews the few details already known about Aird’s career and augments these using newly uncovered archival documents. The appendix provides the fullest list to date of his publications, including lost works.

The music of Paolo Papini (d. 1603) has gone almost unnoticed in spite of the existence of over forty liturgical pieces by him, located primarily in five large manuscript choirbooks with a provenance from the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome. These choirbooks are otherwise known for their manuscript copies of music by Palestrina. This article examines the sources, provides new biographical information about Papini, and evaluates the function of his music within the Ospedale. It argues that, together with documentary evidence such as inventories and financial records from Santo Spirito, Papini’s music throws new light on our understanding of the reform of liturgical music in the decades following the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563.

This article re-evaluates the late seventeenth-century operatic culture of the Savoy court in Turin through the lens of newly examined archival material, the Avvisi di Torino preserved in the Medici archive in Florence. These handwritten newsletters, covering the years 1688–99, offer unprecedented insights into the musical and theatrical life of the Savoy capital, a court that stood at the crossroads of the Italian and French traditions. Previous scholarship has often overlooked this period or has relied primarily on printed librettos that provide only a partial view of operatic production. By integrating the avvisi with other sources, this study reconstructs the repertory, organization, and sociopolitical function of operatic spectacles under Victor Amadeus II of Savoy.