Chapter Four reads the multiplicity of texts of the Johor Constitution as part of a textual repertoire for navigating empire, Islam, and a newly circulating Asian and global lexicon of sovereignty. It traces the ways in which the mutability of legal texts functioned to court recognition, build alliances and bridge hierarchies of empire, region, and state. A focus on an original, unitary constitution does political work for the nation state, emphasising a linear national story while erasing a longer global genealogy of borrowings, resonance, and circulations. The multiple versions of the Constitution of Johor at the moment of its introduction show how textual polyphony and ambiguity made political opportunities, and reflected political and social realities. The mobility of law depends upon its ability to shift between the universal and the particular: the archives of the Constitution of Johor provides a clear sense of how this shift was achieved through language and translation. The chapter illustrates that moments of constitutional origin are multiple, and details the function of textual polyphony and ambiguity as translational dynamics in law’s onward travels.

The long century of Debussy research since 1918 has featured competing insights into his ‘arabesque’ idea (Zenck 1974, Eigeldinger 1988, Bhogal 2013). Was this a melodic, polyphonic, or polysemic concept? Supporting Bhogal’s view of arabesque as diachronic and variable, we explain its three-decade-long evolution in Debussy’s music via early, intermediate, conventional and late stages. Our study applies music-analytical rigour to compositional evidence from across his output, representing a significant and original contribution to interpreting his development. Beyond explicating technical differences between his early and mature techniques, we show how arabesque taxonomy must extend past the L’Après-midi period into Debussy’s final decade, when he developed a ‘late’, transformed version of this practice. Finally, we argue that arabesque represents one of Debussy’s central stylistic discoveries, enabling him to link material to process, to conceive of melody, heterophony, and polyphony suited to the new formal principles that would inspire generations of future composers.

The focus of this chapter is on how language policies are resisted. The chapter begins by articulating in a theoretical and practical way what resistance to language policy looks like, particularly from a discursive point of view. It concludes with a case study of resistance to language policy in an online forum for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, highlighting the entanglements between resistance to limits on what ‘named languages’ could be used and a broader struggle to overcome a hegemonic racial ideology around the concept of ‘native speaker’.

Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France a multiplatformed staging ground took shape for a wide variety of undertakings in music composed prior to 1750. Churches, schools, universities, private salons, select societies, major concert halls, and even opera houses became sites for performances of music dating from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Sometimes, the repertoire of centuries past served as a point of focus for discussions about religion; at other times, it provided a vehicle for unabashedly secular, virtuosic performances. Choral performances in particular could as easily allow talented socialites to exert cultural influence as facilitate bonding among male workers. Through it all, the revival of early music provided the nation with a sense of artistic ancestry that could be summoned to shape notions of a collective musical identity, or even difference. This chapter shows how Debussy intersected with these powerful currents in his music, including his relationship to the music of the Ancien Régime in the form of Rameau.

This chapter explores the interplay of voices, poses, and masks that mark all of Nietzsche’s writings, but especially his later writings. His models are the ancient Cynics and “Lui,” the titular hero of Diderot’s satirical dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau. A latter-day Cynic, Lui is a pantomime artist who uses physical and vocal mimicry to expose social hypocrisy through a shameless display of parrhēsia. Both Lui and the Cynics, literary artifacts themselves, explore philosophical problems in a performative mode that is hostile to conventions of all kinds, including those that govern literature and philosophy. Nietzsche follows suit with his own polyphonic and multi-gestural style of presentation, now directed at a late nineteenth-century audience. A self-conscious poseur and master of the falsetto, Nietzsche is supremely aware of his ability to trigger and lay bare his contemporaries’ ideas, fantasies, and fears by giving voice to them, not least by “sampling” them through a kind of theatrical extroversion of roles that are even today routinely mistaken for his own. A cultural pathologist whose primary object is the material of cultural fantasy itself, Nietzsche is ultimately concerned to critique the conventions that produce the very categories of literature and philosophy.

What are medieval polyphony and song? Who composed this music, sang it, and wrote it down? Where and when did the different kinds of polyphony and song originate, and under what circumstances were they composed and performed? This chapter provides definitions of the key terms and sets out the scope of the book. It explains how we have grouped the material into chapters based on geographical locations, and the rationale for this organization. We then give a broad, outline history of the medieval period (or ‘Middle Ages’) to help readers navigate the major events, characters, and places that helped to shape this long historical period. A timeline of key musical and historical events of the Middle Ages concludes the chapter, giving a helpful point of reference for readers to understand the overlapping chronologies of different kinds of medieval polyphony and song, and their historical contexts.

This chapter explores the multiple intertextual reference points that Salman Rushdie deploys in his work. While giving a sense of the range of influences in his work, an analysis of Rushdie’s use of intertextuality gives further insights into Rushdie’s artistic process but also the wider context of his own reading and cultural emersion in popular culture. Perhaps best captured in the idea of the ‘sea of stories’, Rushdie’s version of intertextuality finds links to his notions of hybridity encapsulated in both his characters and the production of his texts. This enables him to produce a wide network of transnational cultural reference points and to connect with multiple audience constituencies through a careful process of modulation of these. The chapter also explores the wider discursive notion of intertextuality as pioneered by poststructuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, in turn extending the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which enables a contextualized analysis of the numerous vocalities located in his texts, exposing ideological power structures that Rushdie’s novels subvert and disrupt.

Chapter 5 examines Herbert’s attendance at the public choral liturgies of the church. Herbert was associated throughout his life with religious institutions that supported choral foundations: Westminster Abbey, Trinity College, Cambridge, Lincoln Cathedral, and, most famously, Salisbury Cathedral. Herbert’s practical interest in making music is well known; yet he was never a member of these choirs, and the music performed during public worship at these foundations is a repertoire that he would have experienced passively and aurally. This chapter reads Herbert’s poetic alongside contemporary developments in the composition and aesthetics of seventeenth-century liturgical choral music. In revealing striking analogues between Herbert’s verse and contemporary polyphonic church music, this chapter considers Herbert and his work in more receptive, attentive terms, affording significant new perspectives on the nature of devotional attention and early modern debates about the ‘beauty of holiness’ and the aesthetics of worship.

The ways in which migrants express, construct and negotiate their identities reveal a dynamic interplay between their discourses on how they relate to the world and the representations that shape their sense of belonging. In urban contexts, individuals’ plurilingual repertoires and transnational identities display the constant mediation migrants are involved in when they navigate their social trajectories. Migrants’ plurilingual repertoires and practices emphasize the role of language(s) in the exercise of power and illustrate how urban spaces participate in sociolinguistic stratification. However, by crossing borders between languages, cultures and spaces, migrants counterbalance the effects of the segregation that cities may impose on them and set in motion new complex plural affiliations to re-appropriate their life stories. In doing so, they break away from dominant homogeneous social discourses; they cut across the traditional deficit perspective associated with their language practice and give value to plurilingualism.

Charlie Parker is the focus of this account of Dizzy Gillespie's band in California in 1945-6. Shipton talks to survivors of the sextet – Milt Jackson, Sten Levey and Ray Brown, as well as those who heard the band there such as Clora Bryant, Teddy Edwards and Roy Porter. He traces the development of bebop back to New York, discussing this music with pianist Sir Charles Thompson, a lifelong friend of Buck Clayton who brought Buck, Parker and Dexter Gordon together for a record in 1945. Bassist Jimmy Woode recalls working with Parker in Boston, and Teddy Edwards brings the Los Angeles scene to life.

Bakhtin's work continually develops, but on the basis of a few enduring concerns. The first of these is the belief that the fate of Europe depends on a new conception of historical life as an 'ethical reality', which is structured by the prospect of a messianic future. The second is the claim that this ethical reality depends on a crucial distinction between I and other. Finally, Bakhtin believes that this relationship is embodied in the form of literary works and their language, which transforms our everyday experience of the world into language and narrative that embodies 'historical becoming', the form history takes when it is ethical. Bakhtin's linguistic turn in the late 1920s focuses on how a new novelistic style infuses social language with this historical sense: double-voiced discourse recreates language as what Bakhtin calls 'social heteroglossia', which teems with historical becoming. But double-voiced discourse is always reliant on new kinds of narrative form, which probe and shape the'languages' of the novel. Bakhtin's work from the late 1930s onwards is a sustaned effort to describe and specify the narrative forms that convey historical becoming.

In her “Étude comparée des langages harmoniques de Fauré et de Debussy,” Françoise Gervais contends that “melody does not have an independent existence in Fauré’s music. It is born of the harmony and remains inseparable from it.”1 Moreover, not a single chapter of this book, which has stood now for more than forty years as a musicological summa on Fauréan harmony, is dedicated to melody.

Key to the training of the boys was their master, who was responsible for their upkeep as well as their musical training. Men in such positions had typically themselves been through choirboy training and were highly accomplished musicians. The most notable choirmaster in the book’s period of interest, Jean Thorion, a native of Saint-Omer, offers a particularly astonishing example of the international draw of northern maîtrise training. In his youth, Thorion had been employed far away from his homeland in Florence, where he worked as a singer and tutor at the priory of the SS Annunziata. Here he was patronised directly by the Medici family, and Lorenzo Il Magnifico in particular. Apparently the most significant role within the northern maîtrise of this period was that occupied by the tenorist, in which role no one was more glittering than the former tenorist of King Ferrante of Naples, Grigoire Bourgois, a central figure in St Omer for a quarter of a century. The chapter also addresses the copying of polyphonic music, and most importantly the role in this capacity of the celebrated composer Jean Mouton, a native of the region.

The maîtrise (or choir school) was the crucible of late medieval polyphony and chant: a first stepping stone on the progress to ecclesiastical careers and, more specifically, to musical careers within the church. It was also the seedbed for most composers of note in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hence the training and social context it provided are crucial to understanding the shape and role of music in the period. The chapter addresses both the progress in and the reasons – theological and practical – for the cultivation of choirboys, and especially the changes of perspective that led to the vastly increased investment in their training and accoutrements. A signal element here is their role in private foundations paid for by individuals (especially church canons) for the welfare of their souls, and in the increasing elaboration of such foundations including chant and, particularly, polyphony.