Whereas previous work established the link between linguistic features, norms, identity, and personae, little is formalized regarding the extent to which speakers use linguistic variables that are already socially indexed. This article aims to clarify how one socially indexed phonetic feature is used to create linguistic norms and personae by Québécois singers. Music offers a unique context in which to probe these interactions because singing is independent from yet based on speech, and, moreover, because singers put on personae in performance. I hypothesize that singers form personae by using linguistic variants that index the identities in speech with which they wish to associate themselves and their music; these identities are dictated by their genre affiliation because genres and identity are closely intertwined.

This article reports on Singing Homer, a two-year cultural project (2021–2023) in a Greek lower-secondary school that engaged students with the Iliad and the Odyssey through modern Greek songs. The project addressed persistent challenges in teaching Homer – linguistic difficulty, cultural distance, and questions of curricular relevance – by introducing music as a medium of reception and reinterpretation, through which students connected modern musical narratives with Homeric figures and themes. Students researched songs, transcribed lyrics, juxtaposed them with epic passages, and produced digital presentations and videos. Their artefacts, together with questionnaire responses, show how music mediated Homeric figures and motifs, encouraging affective engagement, critical comparison, and collaborative creativity. Findings indicate three main outcomes. First, music provided an emotional gateway: students consistently reported joy, pride, and surprise, which sustained motivation and opened interpretive depth. Second, participants articulated clear rationales for the modern value of Ancient Greek texts, linking Homer to cultural roots, ethical reflection, and adolescent identity. Third, the integration of digital tools and public presentation fostered twenty-first-century competences, including creativity, collaboration, communication, and digital literacy. The study theorises experiential reception as a pedagogical approach where students actively reinterpret classical texts through culturally familiar media. It offers a transferable model for re-energising Homer in today’s classrooms, demonstrating that epic can function simultaneously as cultural heritage and as a living pedagogical resource.

The article aims to explore the origins of far-right music in Italy and its contribution to the formation of a new and corresponding youth movement, which constitutes a phenomenon at least partly independent of the historical and political legacy of the Fascist regime. This study is conducted by analysing three key elements that contributed to the creation of a different background, more suited to the context of the 1960s and 1970s. The first concerns the development of far-right alternative music as a counter-movement to both the conservative and progressive cultures within the 1968 student revolution; the second focuses on the cultural appropriation of Tolkien’s works and, more generally, of the epic and fantasy genre by the Italian far right; and the third considers the increased radicalisation of far-right alternative music during the Years of Lead. This phase paved the way for the development of an international network of genres and artists that now play a crucial role in the persistence and strengthening of far-right music, particularly among younger audiences.

Scholarship on Greek metre routinely asserts that responding stanzas were sung to the same melody, but the ancient evidence for this practice is difficult and rarely discussed. In response to several recent studies proposing that Archaic and early Classical antistrophes did not feature melodic repetition, this paper offers a thorough investigation of the evidence for melodic repetition in responding stanzas. I conclude that the evidence strongly supports the view that responding stanzas did generally repeat the same melody, even if this overall pattern was subject to the variations and liberties characteristic of any artistic practice.

Music accompanied the US intervention in Nicaragua. Above all other genres, US popular music dominated Nicaraguan culture beginning in 1919. And it never left. This article examines the foxtrot, a wildly popular US music and social dance, as a lens for understanding how Nicaraguans saw themselves, how they negotiated the intervention, and how they acted upon the world. It argues that Nicaraguans developed new musical expressions, making foreign culture their own, despite the dominance of US intervention. Through transculturation, Nicaraguans maintained a sense of national identity. More than an entertainment, the foxtrot grew into a discourse for reckoning with US intervention and contesting Nicaraguan cultural values. Remarkably, the transnational circulation of the Nicaraguan foxtrot resonated beyond Central America, putting Nicaraguan music on the global stage. The first section traces the origins and transmission of the foxtrot during the ragtime era between the 1890s and 1917, followed by the early jazz period. The second section narrates the foxtrot’s 1919 arrival and rooting as a popular music in western Nicaragua. The third section surveys the foxtrot’s domestic and transnational dissemination via Nicaraguan entertainments and US recording companies from 1919 to 1933. The fourth section explores the cultural embrace of the foxtrot in Nicaragua during that same period. Conversely, the fifth section pursues its literary critiques. The sixth and final section examines Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo as a prominent advocate and critic of the foxtrot. The conclusion places the Nicaraguan foxtrot in context of greater Latin American production.

Previous studies of Indigenous weddings in Southwest China have focused on attempts to uncover the surviving “authentic” ethnic traditions, analysing weddings as fixed text and ceremonial structure discoverable through ethnographic observation and collection. By contrast, with a focus on music and dance, this study explores the dynamic, multi-day, cross-contextual, and improvisational nature of live performance in such events through an ethnography of Lisu weddings. I reflect on my shifting position as observer, participant-observer, witness, observant-participant, and playful participant. These shifts stimulated contrasting insights (and oversights), suggesting how the inherent limits and opportunities of ethnographic participant-observation shape our understanding of fieldwork.

If music’s place remains ideologically contested in the national cultural formation of post-colonial Pakistan, what are the terms, if any, by which the state engages with this art form? Answering this question, along with others, this article advances the term ‘logic of managing culture’ to explore the Pakistani state’s relationship with music. Through contesting India-centric scholarship on music and cultural politics in the South Asian context and relying on an eclectic array of empirical evidence, I argue that the post-colonial state’s engagement with music is marked by a set of priorities that entails a logic of managing music rather than reproducing it. This orchestration plays out at two major levels: the international, involving strategically projecting selected elements of Pakistan’s musical-cultural identity internationally, and the national, relying on language (Urdu) and religion (Islam) for national integration, while bypassing the role of music. I suggest that this amounts to a logic of cultural management, wherein the state, through a set of cultural institutions, ‘conducts’ music and its practitioners while presupposing the ideologically contested place of this art form in the national cultural formation of Pakistan.

This research note proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the relationship between music and nationalist conflict. Conceptually, it introduces acoustic coercion — the enforcement of sonic conformity through informal violence operating with state complicity under credible impunity through selective non-intervention — as a consolidating concept for dynamics documented piecemeal across existing scholarship on music-politics relations. This concept captures dynamics that frameworks often organized around propaganda, censorship, and resistance capture partially: the gap between formal tolerance and informal terror, the conscription of performers into political service, and the impossibility of acoustic neutrality in polarized environments. Methodologically, the note demonstrates how historical acoustemology — the reconstruction of past sonic environments from textual sources — can serve nationalism studies by recovering the lived experience of sonic conflict from archival materials while remaining attentive to listening positionality. The toolkit applies equally to ethnographic study of contemporary cases; the historical emphasis reflects the available evidence. Drawing on original research into the partisan press in Athens during the Greek National Schism (1915–1922), the note shows how professional musicians became trapped subjects, compelled to perform partisan repertoires through violence and economic necessity. The note concludes by suggesting how these tools might illuminate other cases where sound serves as a medium of nationalist boundary enforcement.

From late sixteenth century, Bijapur’s sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627 ce), used nauras—a polyvalent term used extensively within the Sanskrit aesthetic realm—on his kingdom’s cultural artefacts as well as political and administrative insignia. An avid music lover, he is renowned for his Dakani work on music titled Kitāb-i Nauras (circa 1580s). Portrayed by previous scholars as religiously unorthodox, Ibrahim Adil II and nauras are located chiefly within narratives of Bijapur’s political instability and the sultan’s indulgence in leisure over statecraft. Recent scholarship has challenged such notions but no study focuses on the reasons for nauras’ crossover to the political domain or its appearance on state insignia. This article offers new insights by locating the sultan within a matrix of Indic, Turco-Mongol, and Islamicate sovereignty practices. In doing so, it argues that Ibrahim Adil II strategically employed the corporeal, religious, aesthetic, and polyvalent dimensions of nauras to forge a uniquely personalized embodied cosmic kingship practice to govern a multicultural populace. In particular, this article elucidates that the realms of art, aesthetics, and kingship were not mutually exclusive in the Indic or Islamicate worlds and that nauras was a rational manoeuvre to elevate the ruler above courtly factions and religious differences.

Violinists rely on violin crafters, or luthiers, to adjust their instruments’ acoustics. To do so, luthiers not only alter violins’ material forms but also talk with violinists about perceived and desired timbres—qualities of sound that lack standards of measure and are notoriously difficult to describe. This paper undertakes a linguistic anthropological analysis of a violin adjustment session in the Northeastern United States, showing that despite such difficulties, luthiers communicate successfully with violinists about timbre through situated practice. While luthiers sometimes use standard, enregistered cross-modal or synesthetic metaphors for timbre that can be analyzed in terms of lexical semantics, I emphasize that they also improvise on a wider repertoire of emergent and embodied semiotic strategies. By listening beyond the lexical and the enregistered, this paper synthesizes an interdisciplinary approach for research on communication about timbre, sound, and the senses.