Music reflects subjectivity and identity: that idea is now deeply ingrained in both musicology and popular media commentary. The study of music across cultures and practices often addresses the enactment of subjectivity “in” music – how music expresses or represents “an” individual or “a” group. However, a sense of selfhood is also formed and continually reformed through musical practices, not least performance. How does this take place? How might the work of practitioners revea...

The concept of assemblage has emerged in recent decades as a central tool for describing, analysing, and transforming dynamic systems in a variety of disciplines. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to different fields of knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman arrangements, “assemblage” is variously applied today in the arts, philosophy, and human and social sciences, forming links not only between disciplines but also between critical thought and artistic practice. Machinic Asse...

When one realises that thousands of liturgical chants were transmitted over more than three centuries in which there were no accurate means of melodic notation, the core repertoire of Gregorian plainchant has been transmitted with an astonishing degree of uniformity.

On the other hand, these chants are reflections of a living liturgy, and thus reflections of their particular surroundings: any monastic or collegial environment could develop its own conventions in relation to what only seems to...

Our contemporary, globalised society demands new forms of listening. But what are these new forms? In Listening to the Other, Stefan Östersjö challenges conventional understandings of the ways musicians listen. He develops a transmodal understanding of listening that is situated in the body—a body that is extended by its mediation through musical instruments and other technologies. Listening habits can turn these tools—and even the body itself—into resistant objects or musical Others....