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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Scholars have long framed similarities between Bedřich Smetana's “Vyšehrad” (the first movement of Má vlast) and Zdeněk Fibich's symphonic poem Záboj, Slavoj, and Luděk as a threat to Smetana's originality. In his biography of the composer, for example, Brian Large moved to “exonerate” Smetana from charges of “plagiarism” by arguing that Smetana began “Vyšehrad” at least two years before Záboj's premiere in 1874; not six months later as Smetana's diary attests. Rather than regarding these works' similarities as a problem, this discussion embraces their close relationships as a starting point. Situating both symphonic poems and their reception within the discourses generated by a powerful organization called the “Umělecká beseda” (“Artistic Society,” or UB, in which both Smetana and Fibich participated) illuminates the larger intellectual and aesthetic space from which they emerged. Such a process of contextualization reveals how both composers' works constructed each other and uncovers Smetana not as a “lone genius”—a composer untainted by influence—but as a participant in a shared conversation. Ultimately, this examination opens up new understandings of Smetana and his “Vyšehrad” and invites scholars to reengage with the deliberate subjectivity of Czechness and historiography more broadly.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In his 1913 manifesto “L'arte dei rumori” (The Art of Noises), Futurist painter Luigi Russolo exhorted readers to “walk across a great modern metropolis with ears more attentive than eyes.” For Russolo, attentive listening to the urban environment enacted a visionary aurality: the city was a mine for “new” noises, such as rumbling motors and jolting trams. However, Russolo's embrace of noise—much like that of Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni and Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—was undeniably a product of its time and place. This article excavates the sounds of 1913 Milan as a crucial location for the noises of early Italian Futurism. Not only was this city the Futurists' base, but it also inflected their representations of noise both through its symbolic architectural sites (above all the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele) and the buzz of its human multitudes. In this latter respect, late-nineteenth-century positivist crowd psychology can provide an illuminating context because it shares with Futurism the notion of modern, urban crowd united by a collective unconscious—one that could, moreover, be heard by the attentive listener on a city's streets. This article tracks this historical mode of listening from Russolo's manifesto until the reception of his first concert for an entire orchestra of newly wrought noise intoners—his “Gran concerto per intonarumori,” held at Milan's Teatro Dal Verme in 1914—and explores what was, in this case, a slippery (but critical) distinction between “audience” and “crowd.” Russolo's clamorously received premiere forced its listeners and performers to attend to off- (rather than on-) stage noises, thus raising still-vital questions about where to locate Futurism's noise, influence, and politics.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>When Claude Debussy called Ravel an “enchanting fakir” in 1907, he anticipated a critical approach typified by Vladimir Jankélévitch's 1939 Ravel biography. In it, Jankélévitch evoked the rich language of theatrical magic, comparing Ravel to a sorcerer, conjurer, and illusionist. Contemporary critics used similar terms to describe the composer's music as early as 1909, around the same time that a parallel narrative emerged: Ravel as a master of mechanism and artifice. A contextual study of theatrical magic, which has yet to be applied to Ravel criticism, provides a substantive connection between these narratives of mechanism, enchantment, and artifice.</jats:p> <jats:p>I begin with the French illusionist Robert-Houdin (1805–71), whose enduring legacy furnishes a forgotten background for Ravel criticism. Robert-Houdin claimed that he was not a mere juggler but “an actor playing the part of a magician,” which resonates with accounts of Ravel's Baudelairean artifice in life and work. For magicians, “illusion” was interchangeable with “effect.” The word “effect” recurs in both Ravel's writings and “The Philosophy of Composition,” a theoretical-didactic essay by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Ravel cited as one of his most important artistic influences. Ravel's appreciation of Poe has a much richer grain than has been imagined, extending beyond compositional artisanship to include literary and theatrical stratagems.</jats:p> <jats:p>Robert-Houdin, who started his career as a clockmaker, featured automata at his Soiréé fantastiques—but sometimes, like von Kempelen's Turk, these automata were illusions themselves. Ravel's fascinations with enchantment and mechanism converge in the presence of these trick machines. In the opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), Ravel uses techniques known to both magicians and cognitive neuroscientists, exploiting the aural equivalent of an afterimage and manipulating the spectator's attentional frames.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.</jats:p>