Listening to music is one of the most common human activities. Yet, answering the question 'What is a musical work?' has kept many scholars busy. In this thesis, I present a novel account for the ontology of musical works: Musical Stage Theory. Traditional theories describe musical works as abstract entities, as Platonists claim, or as classes of performances, as in the Nominalist tradition. Musical Stage Theory, instead, argues that the work is the performance. Delineating this account will help me also in defending a contextualist interpretation of authenticity in musical performance. I propose this account as an alternative to mainstream and well accepted views on the nature of musical works with a specific intent: suggesting a way to analyse the identity of musical works which gives due relevance to musical practices and, at the same time, is grounded on a solid ontological basis. The original contribution brought by Musical Stage Theory is twofold: first, it gives promising prominence to the sonic/performative dimension which, in a sense, has remained as an afterthought in alternative theories. Second, it promotes an active collaboration between the disciplines of music and philosophy, supporting philosophical investigations with musicological considerations and case studies. In order to achieve this second goal, in the thesis I adopt a multivalent methodology. In addition to a more traditional philosophical approach, I support conceptual analysis with the results obtained from interviews conducted with musicians and theorists on their understanding of musical authenticity. After presenting the benefits of Musical Stage Theory against more traditional theories in the ontology of music, I apply its theoretical framework to actual musical phenomena and case studies, showing how Musical Stage Theory can change the way in which we approach the study and perception of music. I conclude with the proposal of a contextualist interpretation of the notion of authenticity in musical performance, justifying it on the basis of the nature of musical works as defended by Musical Stage Theory.

Gozo is a small island within the Maltese Archipelago. Its main cathedral, located within the fortified citadel in Victoria, contains an extensive archive of sacred music, mostly from the nineteenth century. This resource has never before been subject to scholarly enquiry. Indeed, until my research, the archive was not even adequately catalogued. The initial impetus for this dissertation was my MPhil thesis, in which I compiled a more catalogue based on a basic inventory of the music manuscripts. Although it provided an important tool for scholars to gain access to the archive, it needed further fine-tuning. In this dissertation, I wanted to complete a significantly expanded and enhanced catalogue of manuscripts and to shed further light on the Gozitan music traditions, on the composers and performers who worked at the cathedral, and on the functions of sacred music there. Most especially, I aimed to transcribe some of the scores found in the archive to encourage performances of these forgotten works and to assist future scholars. In the opening two chapters, I investigate the historic, social, and cultural aspects of music making in Gozo during the nineteenth century, in particular for the main feasts and functions celebrated at the Gozo Cathedral. To establish a foundation for the Gozitan tradition, in Chapter 4 I explore the life of Maltese composer Francesco Azopardi, who returned after study in Naples and quickly established himself as a leading figure. A score of one of his masses performed at the Gozo cathedral is included, together with critical commentary and editorial notes. In Chapters 5, I turn to two native Gozitan composers, Vincenzo Bondì and Adrian Lanzon. To study their works and to see if features of a ‘Gozitan’ style could be determined, in distinction to music from mainland Malta, I transcribed and edited representative examples of their sacred music. Again, these are supported by critical commentaries and editorial notes. The dissertation concludes with a comprehensive catalogue of music compositions at the Gozo Cathedral Music Archive. It is hoped that making this material available will foster further interest in the music history of Gozo in the nineteenth century.

This thesis examines the life and music of vibraphonist Milt Jackson as a form of situated cognition. Situated cognition theory, or situated learning, argues for the ecological specificity of perception: namely that knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. My study brings such a perspective to mid-twentieth-century jazz practice with the view of bringing to the fore a certain cultural knowledge with regards to the practice and expression of jazz in the 1940s and 1950s, and to highlight important parts of its knowledge base as these are evident in the musical outputs of Jackson. In so doing, this thesis also attempts to offer the first substantial historical account of Jackson’s upbringing in Detroit, based on detailed archival research, and highlight some of the influential environments to which he was exposed. Typical of his generation, Jackson forged diverse musical influences into a personal sonic signature; in this development, the Detroit communities were highly instrumental. In the analytical section I examine a selection of Jackson’s recorded performances and identify the recurrence of stylistic devices, patterns and schemata, as well as perceived gesture, in his improvisations. My findings reveal a certain cultural knowledge with regards to the practice and expression of jazz in the 1940s and 1950s, and allow me to demonstrate that some of Jackson’s performing strategies were culturally specific, historically contingent, and predicated on statistical learning. My focus on examining choices made by Jackson and his peers in their use of musical language, as well as my subsequent emphasis on the recognition, transformation, and categorisation of musical material, has larger implications. Throughout, I engage with the notion of invented traditions and theories of cultural (collective) memories, and propose that a study of jazz in terms of concrete moves in forms of improvisation may help us understand how jazz improvisation is constantly redefined, and how different modes of relationships between past and present affect its performance practice. This methodology offers systematic analysis of embodied knowledge and experience, of imagined worlds, metaphors, allegories and the valuations of social significance and personal affect.

Mainstream views on the evolution of opera composition towards its present form are fraught with reductionist – such as Wagnerian – views. These tend to neglect the wider subtleties of an extraordinarily nuanced creative landscape with many landmark influences and threads through time. A particularly barren territory is opera composition of the latter part of the nineteenth century in Italy. This is unfortunate because the heritage in question stands at the end of a long and distinguished tradition that is worthy of study. This study demonstrates that partimento traditions and their effects are a key factor in this legacy. The Neapolitan compositional school is shown to be very much alive. Understanding this not only sheds light on the late nineteenth-century Italian opera composition but also serves as a small and modest shift towards a view of the evolution of opera composition, as a myriad of fluid forces rather than monolithic steps. To begin the task of filling this gap in music scholarship, this thesis selects three figures who are arguably the last of the great Italian opera composers – Alfredo Catalani, Francesco Cilea and Umberto Giordano – to explore their early pedagogical foundations that underpinned their later professional activity. The three are also viewed in the shadow of Giuseppe Verdi, who is relevant for his influence on the Giovane Scuola generation. The approach employed in this research exploits a multitude of rare sources such as sketches, counterpoint notebooks, and the studies of these individuals as pupils. It reconstructs not only the specifics of the composers’ training, but also the prevalent compositional theory and practice of the time. In parallel, it undertakes an analysis of relevant aspects of their early compositions and operatic works.

This thesis considers how musical culture shapes, and is shaped by, the contested redevelopment of contemporary Marseille. Drawing on ethnographic research and documentary analysis, it investigates debates about cultural representation, struggles over the regulation of nightlife, the production of grassroots scenes, and other practices in and through which music is made meaningful. The thesis focuses primarily on the period from 2013 to 2016, when the research was carried out. A secondary frame, extending back to the early 1990s, provides the immediate historical background, and where relevant I also discuss processes and events from earlier periods. Unlike some ethnomusicological studies, the focus is not on a single genre, idiom, form or other normative category of music. Nor does the study aspire to reflect the totality of musical culture in Marseille. Instead, the prism of urban change serves to centre the thesis on moments and processes through which music informs and performs the changing city. In addition to this interest in urban change, my decisions about which aspects and locations of musical culture to focus on were, of course, linked partly to my own subject position, and I address the implications of this in the methodology section. The thesis addresses three overarching research questions. To what extent has musical culture been restricted or marginalised in the context of urban redevelopment? How have musicians and audiences used music to narrate and negotiate the city in new ways? And finally, how are technological changes inflecting the ways in which musical culture inhabits the city? To address these questions I present four case studies. Chapter One investigates two controversies surrounding the musical programming of a major arts festival; Chapter Two examines a new initiative focused on the local circulation of post-war North African musical media; Chapter Three addresses Occitan-language music and its interface with the cosmopolitan city; and Chapter Four analyses the position of a neighbourhood’s DIY music scenes in relation to the advance of gentrification. Through these case studies, the thesis seeks to contribute to broader discussions about the relationship between music and the right to the city in late modernity.

The study of gesture offers a promising extension of semiotic theory. Naomi Cumming (2001), Robert Hatten (2004), and David Lidov (2005), and others have laid the foundations for a critical examination of gestures in music. Their work is, however, married to notated scores of the Western art music tradition: a fact that Giles Hooper (2013) regards as an ironic circling back towards music conceived through implicit analytical-structuralist assumptions. In this thesis, I re-evaluate and develop current models of gesture into a theory of gestural transformation. I explore its practical applications as a tool for interpreting popular music by comparing two or more recorded performances of the same song to establish which alterations may transform perceptions of style, meaning, and authenticity. The small number of musicological studies that analyse recorded tracks are complicit in distorting the relative influence of particular musical features when defining musical meaning; these include analyses by David Brackett (2000) and Keir Keightley (2001). In confining discussion of the sonic artefact to readily definable aspects such as instrumentation, harmony and lyrics, these analyses oppose the common-sense view that musical meaning is contingent on the listener’s perceptual-imaginative interpretation of how a musical unit is performed. To explore an alternative analytical method, I focus on case studies drawn from the "Punk Goes ..." series of compilation albums, in which contemporary punk- rock artists re-record popular songs. These albums contain cover-versions by bands such as A Day To Remember, Woe, Is Me, and We Came As Romans, and demonstrate numerous approaches to creating a cover-version. This allows for a comprehensive application of the gestural transformation theory. The analyses within this thesis challenge assumptions that equate musical phrases with fixed nodes of musical meaning, suggesting instead that the interpreted manner of performance is more significant than syntactical concerns. In addition, the analyses investigate a new concept of play that exposes the problems with established musicological taxonomies and plays a significant part in the construction of stylistic, subcultural, and personal authenticities.

Two-part compositions were one of the main means through which music was taught during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and they therefore played an important role in preparing both professional and amateur musicians. The main focus of my work is formed by the published volumes of duos ranging in date from 1521, the year when the first collection was issued, to 1744, the date of publication of Angelo Bertalotti’s Solfeggi, though I also take into account duos published in musical treatises. The importance of duos during this period is evidenced by the number of extant collections - more than sixty in Italy alone - and these publications reveal an essential continuity in the teaching of music theory and practice over a period of 250 years. So far, only a fraction of the music used for this purpose has been studied by other scholars. During this period all two-part didactic music served consistent and well-defined functions: the teaching of note-values and solmization; the teaching of modality and composition; as the basis for practising both vocal and instrumental music. My thesis traces the history of the genre, analyses aspects of the compositional structure of duos and examines the detail the various functions of duos. It also considers the intended readership of volumes of duos, through study of the publishers, composers and dedicates involved.

This thesis is an investigation into the reception of Russian music in England for the period 1893-1929 and the influence it had on English composers. Part I deals with the critical reception of Russian music in England in the cultural and political context of the period from the year of Tchaikovsky’s last successful visit to London in 1893 to the last season of Diaghilev’s Ballet russes in 1929. The broad theme examines how Russian music presented a challenge to the accepted aesthetic norms of the day and how this, combined with the contextual perceptions of Russia and Russian people, problematized the reception of Russian music, the result of which still informs some of our attitudes towards Russian composers today. Part II examines the influence that Russian music had on British composers of the period, specifically Stanford, Bantock, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Frank Bridge, Bax, Bliss and Walton. A combination of comparative examples and critical discussion of the music is used to illustrates how Russian music influenced these composers and, as a result, demonstrate the key role Russian music played in helping them to find their compositional voice.

This thesis investigates the teaching and legacy of Leopold Auer; it addresses, in particular to what extent his promulgation of the ‘German’ School of Violin Playing was instrumental in establishing the ‘Russian’ and ‘American’ Schools. Recent research in late 19th-century violin performance-practice has focused mainly on the ‘German’ and ‘Franco-Belgian’ Schools, and on tracing ‘genealogies’ of violin playing, especially within the ‘German’ school itself. Auer, however, has been little studied, as remarkably is also true for descendents of the German school such as Ossip Schnirlin, Benno Rabinof, and Mischa Weisbord. This research will also briefly examine the authority of Joachim and Auer (who were both native Hungarians) on their students with regards to Hungarian musical gestures and Gypsy performance styles, in an era where violin playing was more uniform and the style hongrois gradually disappearing from Western music altogether. A clearer picture of Auer, his influence and the achievements of his students, allows us to form a more sophisticated image of late 19th-century to early 20th-century violin performance practice, and of the much disputed question of the existence of distinct national schools in this important transitional era.

The quality of their work, past and present, is being compared to the great masters of the past, and critics like what they see. Women are composing with the same skill and determination of the modern male composer, and they are succeeding. One women in particular is making a name for herself, not only as a contemporary composer, but also as a strong and articulate supporter for the music and musicians of the present day. Her name is Libby Larsen.