ABSTRACT This article analyses three pop music cover versions that feature Jimmy Somerville on vocals. Each of the well-known disco numbers from the 1970s was a hit when performed by the original or previous artists but, I argue, took on a different and distinct meaning when released during the 1980s, given the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The first song I consider is Bronski Beat’s 1985 cover version of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, which is coupled with the Johnny Leyton hit ‘Johnny Remember Me’, on which Somerville duetted with Marc Almond. I then discuss The Communards’ 1986 hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, originally sung by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1975 before being covered by Thelma Houston in 1976. Finally, I analyse Somerville’s 1989 cover of Sylvester’s hit ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. Given that the three songs are all dance tracks, I consider the significance of disco for the queer community. I also examine male falsetto, which Somerville can be heard to use in all the songs, as a means to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of gender and sexuality.

ABSTRACT In this paper, the authors develop a critical dialogue to trans/queerly trouble paradigmatic directions in music studies. Particularly, the authors engage the liberal tendency to celebrate trans/queer interventions as a discipline’s progress towards becoming more diverse and inclusive. The article emerges from a recent panel at Feminist Theory and Music 17 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Through wide-ranging engagement with music and sound, we attempt to (re)orient our relationship to music studies and its various interventions, including the (im)possible emergence of trans/queer as a distinct area of study. The authors collectively draw on mutable forms of embodiment to explore trans/queer music studies otherwise—that is, to pursue a relational mode of scholarship that provokes generative and capacious directions in our study. Recognising ourselves within the ‘terrible we’ of trans scholarship (Awkward-Rich, 2022. The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment. Durham: Duke University Press)—as junior, racialized, (dis)abled, trans/queer scholars—how do our relations on and off the page revel in loudness, noise, and dissonance? Simultaneously, we locate these trans/queer relationships within contemporary material histories, including the regulation of bodies through anti-trans/queer legislation, relational modes of performance and composition, and Brazil’s history of slavery. We might imagine this article as a discordant chorus more than a harmonious gesture of calcification, which is to say that the voices in the article indulge in a dialogic cacophony in order to trace (dis)connections between the fractal nodes of trans/queer critical thought in music studies. While it may be comforting to proffer a legible response to recent developments in trans/queer music studies, we instead suggest that a critical hesitancy might better afford an overdue reflexivity for trans/queer music scholars. As such, the essay invites readers into the ‘terrible we’ in hopes of grounding our work in contemporary material quagmires to open toward possibilities of trans/queerly musicking otherwise.

ABSTRACT This previously unpublished interview with György Kurtág and his late wife Márta, conducted on November 27, 2018, a few weeks after the premiere of Kurtág's opera Fin de partie at La Scala in Milan, is about the creation and interpretation of the work. The Kurtágs talk about their early experiences with opera, from well-known stories (such as their private opera sessions in their youth with György Ligeti) to lesser-known aspects of Kurtág's first attempts at the genre. They also talk about how and why Beckett became important to them and how the compositional process of Fin de partie went from initial ideas to orchestration. They express their mostly negative opinions about the first performance and discuss the concept of performance in general. The concept of translation as a conceptual framework for opera composition emerges at one point, as does the relationship between language and music. To reflect the critics’ opinion about the similarity of Kurtág's method of setting texts to music and that of the composers of the early seventeenth century, Kurtág analyzes a short scene from Monteverdi's Orfeo. The conversation is a vivid testimony to Kurtág's compositional thinking and the deep and collaborative nature of their relationship.

ABSTRACT The pandemic of 2020 brought about a surge in the use of telecommunications, as concertising closed, and in brief time, those affected looked to the World Wide Web to transmit their work out to the public. Home studios were harnessed, concerts were streamed, educational events and conferences were held online. The world saw more deeply that powerful, yet affordable telecommunications systems have given rise to compelling means for online music making. Consumer access to greater computational power at a lower cost through fibre optics now carries high bandwidth internet into the homes millions at affordable costs. Additionally, telepresence is what brings a sense of liveness to the online interactions that permeates cellular networks, internet, virtual reality, and other connective modes. Today’s explorations of telepresence examine areas such as relational dynamics, human-computer-interactivity, online group practices, and many more. Critical areas include latency, a/v quality, and user experience. Deck 10 Intermedia (2020) is presented as a tool for the realisation of these explorations because it provides an expansive framework designed for a broad range of activities requiring various forms of interactivity. The 2020 Earth Day Art Model Festival (2020) is a good example of how an online festival using this system can become a hub of chat, live performance, media arts, and discussion within a singular eco-system of the web. This is important to artists because as connectivity expands, communities will move further into the virtual world to increase the reach and impact of their musical gatherings.

ABSTRACT This article explores some of the ways in which durational collective musical practices can be built on and adapted through the utilisation of telematic performance technology to adapt to radically altered global circumstances. Phonetic Orchestra is an experimental music collective based between Narrm/Melbourne, Ballardong/York, Australia, and Berlin, Germany, whose work repositions composer-performer hierarchies, and elevates concepts of situatedness and liveness through novel methods of presentation, and extreme duration. These ideas were interrogated in Phonetic Orchestra’s 24-h telematic performance work, ‘Silent Towns’ (2020), a project developed and performed under COVID-19 lockdown conditions, featuring music that was composed and performed by members distributed across three locations in Germany and Australia. The creative and theoretical development and realisation of a recent extended-durational telematic performance of the work form the core of this paper.

ABSTRACT The influence of minimalism, along with other phenomena associated with experimental music, has been present in the Hungarian contemporary scene since the mid-1970s. The fifty-year history of Hungarian music includes experimental compositional techniques that, in addition to minimalism, also show Cagean principles of silence and musical process. More recently, these works feature postmodernist traits, such as folklore, jazz, and pop music, as well as musical quotations, allusions, and literary associations. This study highlights the most significant works of the rather isolated Hungarian minimalism, focusing on music that bears the characteristics of the Hungarian cultural environment and elements of individual compositional ideas. The diverse repertoire discussed in the study not only shows minimalist influences but also offers an overview of compositional styles that had a significant impact on the Hungarian music scene at the time of their appearance and are noteworthy for international attention.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the relationship between repetitive music and meaning in the postdramatic context of two operas by Serbian women composers—Abraham in Flames (2019) by Aleksandra Vrebalov and Deca, opera u 17 pesama [Children, Opera in 17 Songs] (2022) by Irena Popović. I discuss the role of repetition in constructing operatic meanings in three steps. First, I examine how these two composers reinterpret the correlation between music and drama from the perspective of postdramatic theatre. Thereafter, employing the distinction between musematic and discursive repetitions, and traditional and recombinant teleologies of repetitive music, I analyse the meaning of repetition in the two pieces. I show how the higher-order repetitive segments of Vrebalov’s work correlate with the leading female character’s transformation on her journey to discovering her authentic self. Finally, I explore how, in Popović’s opera, repetitive techniques interact to create a moving musical image of a woman’s life.

ABSTRACT In this text, I explore aspects of Éliane Radigue’s electronic works. Based on long standing exchanges and collaboration with Radigue herself, and 20 years of experience and involvement in the field of musique concrète, I aim to share a personal and problematized look at Radigue’s unique approach. I will first examine the traditional musique concrète techniques that Radigue learned from Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, her own idiosyncratic explorations of these techniques and finally the extension of these techniques as carried out on her ARP 2500 synthesizer. I will then trace how this evolution emerged from Radigue’s formative listening experiences—experiences, which led her to pursue a phenomenological approach, directed towards the listening to sounds rather than a structuralist one directed towards the apparition of sounds. This countercurrent approach can help illuminate the unique position Radigue took, and is still taking, in the electronic-experimental music landscape.