Berta Alves de Sousa (1906–1985) remains a forgotten figure in the history of Portuguese music, despite her pivotal role as a composer of vocal chamber repertoire in the mid-20th century. This article explores her life and contributions, focusing on her art songs, which draw on Portuguese literary traditions while incorporating influences such as Germanic and French musical styles. Her works, mostly composed during the 1930s and 1940s, reflect both personal creativity and an engagement with the nationalist cultural policies of the Estado Novo. The dispersal of her manuscripts across various collections hinders the study of her compositional chronology, but her artistic evolution—from late Romanticism to Impressionism and neo-modality—is evident. The 21-song cycle Promontório Sacro (1965–66) showcases the maturity of her style, characterised by lyrical melodies, an expressive vocal style, and complex harmonic textures. This article advocates for a renewed recognition of her critical contributions to Portuguese music.

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857–1930), daughter of famous Scots tenor David Kennedy, was a Scottish pianist, music teacher, suffragette, and collector of Gaelic songs. She toured the world as her father’s accompanist, studied singing in Milan and Paris, and read music at the University of Edinburgh. Widowed with two children to support, she taught piano and singing in Edinburgh, becoming part of the city’s avant-garde Celtic Revival circles. After visiting Eriskay in 1905, she collected, arranged, and published the Songs of the Hebrides, in collaboration with Gaelic editor Kenneth Macleod. With English composer Granville Bantock, she created The Seal Woman: A Celtic Folk Opera, premiered in Birmingham in 1924. Maligned after her death for exploiting and misinterpreting Gaelic culture, her oeuvre vanished from recital programmes, but her consummate art song versions of Gaelic traditional songs would merit their place in the standard art song repertoire, giving presence to both Gaelic Scotland among the Late-Romantic voices from all corners of Europe and a remarkable Scotswoman among British composers.

The signs and expressions on the sheet music are the pivotal point of communication between the composer’s idea of the musical work and the musician’s interpretation. Performing Stravinsky’s neoclassical works is challenging because he gives guidance through various media and on several intellectual levels through his books, scores, and recordings. In a multi-layered communication model, the differences and discrepancies between his writings, the vocabulary of articulation in his published scores, and his interpretations of his music on recordings will be analysed. In performing his neoclassical works, it is necessary to bear in mind the subjective and intersubjective approach to interpretation in the way Stravinsky demonstrates in his recordings and especially in the vocabulary of articulation signs in neoclassical works.

This timely research presents an excerpt of my analysis of opera and operatic practice in Australia in 2021. The aim of the broader research is to interrogate the sustainability, viability and evolution of the Australian operatic field. Situated during the globally recognised Coronavirus pandemic era, this qualitative research project was conducted over the period 2018–2021. The fieldwork component of the research is an investigation conducted through long-form interviews with a selection of the central figures in the operatic field in Australia today. This excerpt is from Chapter 8, Part III Stories We Tell: Making and Staging Opera in Australia. I examine how and why repertoire opera is being reframed, and who is taking the lead in this reframing, juxtaposed with the personal and societal cost of performing unexamined extant opera works and perpetuating the ‘opera gaze’. The vision and division of the operatic field is deconstructed in an exploration of contemporary Australian opera and contemporary practices, fictional ritual spaces, and explorations of gender, Aboriginal opera and decolonising the postcolonial operatic lens.