Niall Crumlish (1974 – 2025) was a profoundly compassionate psychiatrist, uniquely gifted music journalist, and cherished husband, father, son, brother, and friend. He embodied humility, kindness, and compassion in all he did. Niall qualified in medicine from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1997; obtained membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2002; graduated with a Masters degree (MSc) in Transcultural Mental Healthcare from Queen Mary University of London in 2009; and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) from UCD in 2014. During his clinical training, Niall spent 18 months at St John of God Mental Health Services in Mzuzu, Malawi, a country which left a deep impression on him. In 2010, Niall was appointed as Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist at St James’s Hospital, Dublin with the Camac sector where his sense of humour and generosity left a lasting impression on all who worked with him. Niall was an especially gifted writer about music with an unrivalled depth of knowledge and sensibility. He wrote voraciously for Hot Press magazine from 1993 onwards, where his contributions were widely acclaimed. Through his writings in various publications and on his blog ‘Psychiatry and Songs’, Niall created a body of work that is elegant and intelligent, eloquent and heartfelt, intimate and universal.

To this day, Wajid ‘Ali Shah (1822–1887), the last nawab of Awadh, is remembered either as a hedonist and political failure who was forced to surrender his kingdom to the British East India Company or as a musical genius and important patron of the arts. However, few accounts engage with his personal religiosity and public acts of Shī’ah piety. This article examines Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own scholarship and poetry, and considers his mourning practices and investment in rites relating to Muharram. By focusing on the era of his exile in Calcutta (1856–1887), I explore how these rituals integrated the nawab into the public life of the city. More broadly, this article considers his court’s activities as a case study to explore the history of nineteenth-century Shī’ah sound art practices and examine how instrumentation, oratory, and processions were understood by contemporary Muslim scholars of religion, the arts, and music.

The Egyptian singer-composer Shaykh Imam (1918-1995) holds an almost mythical place in the social imaginary of the Arab left. An icon of dissent, he rose to fame in the late 1960s with a stream of songs commenting on current events and criticising the failings of successive political regimes. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt with fans of Imam (all of whom were involved with student / leftist politics to varying degrees during the 1960s and 1970s) and a close listening of his repertoire, explores why this generation of the Egyptian left embraced Shaykh Imam so wholeheartedly, and why they remain so attached to his songs. I argue that identifying with Shaykh Imam was not only central in bolstering leftists’ claims to be the authentic representatives of the Egyptian nation, amidst many competing claims, but importantly enabled his listeners to perform national belonging of a more intimate kind.

Los estudios sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares suelen estar mediados por enfoques tradicionales que analizan la música marcial o sus usos para los fines de la institución. Sin embargo, existe una producción musical de integrantes activos y retirados de las fuerzas militares que no es marcial, que no necesariamente está institucionalizada y que se aleja de los usos y temáticas que usualmente se asocian a la música militar. El estudio de estas producciones complejiza y enriquece los enfoques tradicionales sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares. Este texto presenta los hallazgos de la recopilación y análisis de 463 canciones compuestas y/o interpretadas por militares activos y retirados en Colombia entre 1989 y 2021, junto con entrevistas a algunos de estos artistas. Los hallazgos sugieren que abordar este tipo de música, que pocas veces es reconocida como ‘militar’, permite conocer la perspectiva del soldado como individuo en contextos de guerra y posconflicto; facilita la comprensión de la relación entre música institucional y no institucional y los distintos usos que se le da; y abre líneas de investigación sobre la forma en la que estas producciones entran en diálogo con géneros musicales, identidades regionales y el mercado artístico en el que participan.

Over the twentieth century, the Vienna Philharmonic—Austria’s flagship musical institution—became a leading player in global musical life through intercontinental touring, the distribution of recordings, and the establishment of “Austrianness” as a global brand. By framing the mobility of musicians as “world practices,” this article investigates the driving forces behind an Austrian ensemble going global. It understands the Philharmonic’s relation to the music world as an entangled history of globalizing tour destinations, cultural diplomacy, non-European audiences, the agents and interests in the music market, and musical branding. The attitudes that become visible in relation to the musicians’ global mobility and their reluctance to admit non-European players bear witness to the disruptive dimensions of world practices. In conclusion, this article proposes the Philharmonic’s entanglements with Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and the Middle East as an entry point for writing a global history of twentieth-century Austrian culture.

Words in Tagalog/Filipino can be either penult-prominent or ultima-prominent. Scholars have been divided on whether the language has stress, or only phonemic vowel length in penults and default phrase-final prominence. Using a corpus of Original Pilipino Music, we find that both prominent penults and prominent ultimas are set to longer notes and stronger beats, even in phrase-medial position. We further find that among pre-tonic syllables, those that would plausibly attract secondary stress are mostly set to longer notes and stronger beats. Text-setting does not faithfully reflect differences in phonetic cues between the two types of prominence, nor is it sensitive to presumed phonetic differences between high and low vowels. We conclude that songwriters’ text-setting decisions reflect phonological stress in Filipino, and that both penult-prominent and ultima-prominent words bear stress.

Human societies reliably develop complex cultural traditions with striking similarities. These “super-attractors” span the domains of magic and religion (e.g., shamanism, supernatural punishment beliefs), aesthetics (e.g., heroic tales, dance songs), and social institutions (e.g., justice, corporate groups), and collectively constitute what I call the “cultural manifold.” The cultural manifold represents a set of equilibrium states of social and cultural evolution: hypothetically cultureless humans placed in a novel and empty habitat will eventually produce most or all of these complex traditions. Although the study of the super-attractors has been characterized by explanatory pluralism, particularly an emphasis on processes that favor individual- or group-level benefits, I here argue that their development is primarily underlain by a process I call “subjective selection,” or the production and selective retention of variants that are evaluated as instrumentally useful for satisfying goals. Humans around the world are motivated towards similar ends, such as healing illness, explaining misfortune, calming infants, and inducing others to cooperate. As we shape, tweak, and preferentially adopt culture that appears most effective for achieving these ends, we drive the convergence of complex traditions worldwide. The predictable development of the cultural manifold reflects the capacity of humans to sculpt traditions that apparently provide them with what they want, attesting to the importance of subjective selection in shaping human culture.