Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future, Hector Berlioz’s novella from 1844, is a testament to how the composer imagined a perfect city drawing from both the musical past and his autobiography. Euphonia envisions a community of artists striving for musical perfection, which is demonstrated during a recurring festival honouring Gluck, Berlioz’s first musical idol. Composers carefully monitor musical preparation, and only knowledgeable audiences attend concerts. Berlioz’s visionary, futuristic utopia is built on nostalgia for an alternate musical culture and recent musical heritage. This imagined city arose from the composer’s experiences in the urban locales where he lived. Euphonia is Berlioz’s dream to musically revisit La Côte-Saint-André, his native city, while it also expresses a desire to engage with the nostalgic aura of the German mountains. Nostalgia seeks to build alternative realities as a response to the bittersweet memories of times gone by and the perception that the culture of the present is declining. Rather than being solely directed at reminiscing about the past, the power of nostalgia relies on its ability to create the promise of a better future. Despite that Berlioz continued to enrich his artistic outlook in Paris, the composer also faced frustrations with the musical establishment in which he worked and about which he wrote. Berlioz considered that in Paris popular opinions and habits of the musical world had tarnished music’s integrity. As it became clear that his musical ideals were not met in the real world, he imagined a perfect city-conservatory, Euphonia, where Berlioz countered the artistic realities and hardships he faced in Paris and in exchange imagined new spaces where his ideas would flourish. The utopic yet so nostalgic city of Euphonia, like Berlioz’s music, commemorated the musical values of past eras and anticipated a future of creative possibility.

Anton Rubinstein’s music has often been portrayed as a conservative, cosmopolitan foil to the progressive, nationalist compositions of the Balakirev circle. This is also how the Balakirev circle viewed it throughout the 1860s, but their opposition suddenly gave way to public adulation in 1869. Ostensibly, the reason for this about-face was musical, since with Ivan IV (1868) and Don Quixote (1870), Rubinstein finally produced two explicitly programmatic symphonic pictures. Yet the difference between Rubinstein’s symphonic pictures and his earlier works was not as radical as the Balakirev circle made it out to be, and at least part of the circle’s motivation for suddenly praising them seems to have originated in extramusical concerns. In 1869, Balakirev was dismissed as the director of the Russian Musical Society and threw himself into organizing the Free Music School concerts, which he intended as a competitive alternative to those of the RMS. In order to attract audiences, he became determined to secure the Saint Petersburg premiere of Ivan IV as well as Rubinstein’s performances as a soloist, and it was in this context that the Balakirev circle bombarded the press with glowing reviews of Rubinstein’s music. In the short run, this rapprochement even grew beyond a marriage of convenience and developed into regular meetings at which Rubinstein and the Balakirev circle presented their compositions for criticism. These meetings were ephemeral, but in later years most of the Balakirev circle maintained a polite relationship with Rubinstein. The exception was Vladimir Stasov, who erased the rapprochement from his memory and reverted to peddling the image of Rubinstein as the archconservative enemy of Russian music that he had already constructed in the 1860s. Alas, it was Stasov who shaped twentieth-century historiography of Russian music, and this is why the events of 1869–71 have remained obscured in modern scholarship.

In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. Many scholars have pointed out in recent years how intense the sonic environments of war can be, and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 was no exception. Not only was the war itself full of sound and sonic media such as gramophones and telephones, the narration of the war, including most (in)famously that of Futurist author F.T. Marinetti, focused from the outset on the sonic intensities of the conflict. In addition, the war became a site for the cultivation of sonic media: Guglielmo Marconi not only deployed his radio technology for the Italian cause, he personally travelled to Libya to test and refine radio in the unique geographies there. In this article, I consider these Italian-centric narratives of war alongside accounts of the sonic experiences of the Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces in their resistance to the Italian occupation, considering the sonic techniques deployed both for and against Italian colonialism. I focus on three particular sonic techniques of that resistance: first, ‘counterlistening’, or ways of listening that subvert empire’s auralities; second, ululation (mostly by women) on the battlefield and beyond; and third, jihad, especially its sonic articulations as a set of declarations, battle cries, religious chanting, and even poetry. For both sides, sound played a much greater role in the war than just being a by-product of activity; these sonic techniques both shaped the war and were shaped by it, producing new forms of sonic experience that played important roles in constituting the colonial and anticolonial in Libya.

Music was important in John Stuart Mill’s life. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented improviser. His works include treatments of various philosophical aspects of music, including its metaphysics, its epistemology, the sources and nature of its value, and its aesthetics. Some of his ideas on musical aesthetics are still of interest. This applies to his distinction between those reactions to music that are based on associations with non-musical experiences and those that are based on properties of the music itself. It also applies to his concepts of poetic and oratorical modes of musical expression. In addition to his other achievements, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.

London’s nineteenth-century sailortown – centred around Ratcliffe Highway and the surrounding docklands – was a vital hub of maritime activity. Yet much of what is known about this space derives from landsmen’s accounts: narratives by Victorian reformers, novelists and journalists who often portrayed the sailortown as a site of crime, vice and moral degeneration. In contrast, sea shanties, rooted in the lived experiences of sailors themselves, offer an alternative perspective, illuminating the values and self-perceptions of the maritime community. This article examines how London’s sailortown is represented in shanty repertoire, analysing the lyrics of shanties associated with the city to reveal recurring themes, such as encounters with women, financial exploitation, alcohol consumption and the dangers of the Highway. These songs provide insight not only into the everyday lives of sailors ashore but also into how they navigated and interpreted urban spaces. Furthermore, by considering the broader soundscapes of the docklands (including the influence of street performers, public houses and the music hall), this study explores how urban auditory culture shaped the content and form of shanties. By highlighting sailors’ voices through their songs, this article reconstructs a more nuanced and culturally embedded understanding of London’s sailortown and its place within the wider maritime world.

Starting in the 1830s, French musicians began to fully engage with the concept of nostalgia as an affective category and as a musical trait. The deliberate artistic process of naming music and musical works as ‘nostalgia’ contributed to the demedicalization of the term while transforming its original meaning as homesickness into a spectrum of spatiotemporal emotions. Musical renditions of nostalgia also displaced expressions and discussions of this emotion away from the countryside, where it had originally been rooted, towards the city. Musicians thus directly participated in the transformation of nostalgia into a commodity, a fashionable product that could be purchased in music stores, experienced firsthand in entertainment venues, and tailored to the needs and desires of an urban population.

This article traces the shift in the evocation of nostalgia in music and the musical press during the nineteenth century in Paris, where it became most prevalent in dozens of vocal romances and instrumental pieces. The compositions that I analyse, rather than forming a unified depiction of the city, offer a range of sonorous and thematic ideas that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the place nostalgia played in the imagination of an urban population increasingly conscious of its artistic value and impact. I thus uncover three main stages in this shift, which show how successive generations of musicians, influenced by different attitudes to urbanity, conceived nostalgia. I investigate why composers drawn to nostalgia were attracted to certain types of musical and formal models, what these choices reveal about their understanding of nostalgia and its purpose, and, more importantly, what this musical nostalgia sounded like. This article provides the first overview of works that deliberately use nostalgia as an explicit topic across genres and generations in nineteenth-century Paris.