Between 1900 and 1920 more than three million Italians immigrated to the United States Most of those immigrants had little education and less money, and most of them settled in or near New York City. One result of this wave of immigration was a change in New York's audience for opera: at the very moment that cultural arbiters were repositioning opera as a high art demanding a cultivated audience, unrefined but enthusiastic Italian immigrants were filling the galleries at the Metropolitan Opera House, especially after the arrival in 1903 of Enrico Caruso.
      Documenting this demographic shift were operatic novelty songs-comic popular songs that allude to opera and were sung in vaudeville, musical comedies, and topical revues. Some of the best operatic novelties are the work of two Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, Gus Edwards and Edward Madden, who between 1908 and 1912 wrote songs that comment satirically on the star status of Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini and on the aspirations of would-be opera singers from the Italian American working class. Beyond their entertainment value, which is still considerable for listeners who can recognize the allusions, these songs shed light on opera reception in the United States during opera's transition from an art of the people to the reserve of a cultivated elite.
 

   Despite a lack of information on the lives of the trouvères archival research enables us to get a glimpse of their social activities and literary efforts. Close study of medieval vernacular poetry shows a linguistic affinity between the written practices of the poet and the clerk. Medieval musical structures further reflect a special treatment of poetic and musical forms, depicting a proficient authorship in both Latin and vernacular grounds.
    Medievalists have established Latin as the language of the "literate" people. This elite of individuals was familiar with concepts of reading and scripture that made written record a prime characteristic of Latin literacy. Vernacular practices, on the other hand, were customary to the larger part of an uneducated laity. These relied heavily on oral tradition, since the historicity of its testimony had more social significance. In this light, it is not possible to regard the development of vernacular literacy as a phenomenon suddenly derived from standardized Latin practices. It is rather the result of a change in thinking, a process of evolution that de-emphasized oral tradition to rely on concrete written practices.
     This paper shows that the musical practices of the trouvères provided an arena for linguistic negotiation, a space where literary modes mutually participated in shaping the emergence of a vernacular literacy. I therefore would like to explore the role of the trouvère as agent to this process and the impact that his poetry, delivered through music, had on the proliferation of a vernacular written practice in the middle ages.
 

     On college and university campuses across the United States, small a cappella ensembles, largely student-run and without faculty involvement, have been growing in numbers and prominence over the past two decades. A distinguishing feature of these groups is their highly social nature. Within them, interaction is constant and a group's ultimate goal-the performance of its music-can be best understood as a result of this intense, musically shaped social interaction.
      By drawing on performance theory and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field, this paper proposes an understanding of collegiate a cappella groups as ensembles in which performance-formal and quotidian-is multi-contextual and dependent upon a multi-layered complex of musical and social interaction. Theoretical findings are supported with ethnographic data to illustrate multiple levels of interaction ranging from the personal to the group to the regional and the national. Performances of power shape the way individuals and groups interact, explaining both the consistency within and between groups as well as trends across larger scenes. Understanding this interaction in the collegiate a cappella context can be fruitful for understanding more general intersections between the musical and the personal, music and power, and musical and social performance.
 

     "You can come out from under you seat now, Aunt Martha, it's all over." With these comforting words to an imaginary subscriber, Alan Rich opened his review of a New York Phiharmonic concert held on 6 February 1964 caricaturing the reaction of performers, audience, and critics. The orchestra, under the glamorous baton of Leonard Bernstein, had played Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage.
      Commissioned by Montreal Semaine Internationale de Musique Actuelle of 1961, Atlas Eclipticalis was Cage's first large orchestral project and a fruit of his radical phase in the realm of indeterminacy. The sketches of Atlas, which have not been he subject of previous scholarly study, reveal Cage's herculean effort to abandon all intention by opening through chance the creative process itself to an unpredictable intervention of performers.
      Confronted with a music that by no means fit into the work-concept framework, the critics deplored Atlas, calling it among other things "a new kind of insanity." Creating totally indeterminate music Cage subverted the notion of artwork by transfiguring it into an "open process." Cage's musical processes are ontological mutants whose inner nature resists the very idea of reification.

     Helmholtz's psychophysiological harmonic theory appears broadly as a modernist program for reconfiguring the constitution of aurality for modern contexts. This occurred partly through shifting the notion of attention away from the Enlightenment assumption of a rapt, unified listening subject in order to account for an industrial-age, empiricist, specialist listener prone to distraction. This listener emerges at particular spots and moments in modernity, including the workshops of mid-nineteenth-century scientific- and musical-instrument builders and in the laboratories of post-Helmholtz experimental psychologists.
      A few decades later, Edgard Varèse would open a field for the play of exploratory attention in Octandre, which recapitulates some of the anxieties associated with Helmholtzian aurality. It comes as no surprise that his downtown-New-York apartment housed a laboratory space marked by the conditions similar to those in which this aurality had first emerged.
      In any of these contexts, distraction need not be assessed as pathological but frequently appears as co-present with and as flowing in and out of extreme attention, which is as fickle and fluttering as its subject is fallible. In spite of this paradox of the modern psychological listening subject, Helmholtz's and Varèse's shared enthusiasm for technological modernization cannot be separated from their shared interest in harnessing and honing attention as a means toward increasing the production of potential musical meaning.

     To musicologists brought up since the heyday of post-War modernist analysis, Pierre Boulez's arrest in November 2001 on a charge of international terrorism was coloured by a somewhat uncomfortable irony. In the context of a historical process in which Boulez has been iconicised as a defender and legitimator of abstract organisational principles, we are not used to having to make the connection between him and the problems and politics of a real world that lies outside the narrowly defined serial aesthetic.
     This paper considers Boulez's Structures 1a (1952) in response to a challenge issued by Susan McClary in 1989 for new methodologies that would hope to reach a more critical understanding of serial music by thinking beyond the terms of formalist analysis. It takes the work's remarkable première - at an anti-Communist music festival backed by the CIA - as a starting point to argue that Boulez's musical thinking was shaped by tensions in the cultural politics of early Cold-War Paris. Drawing on contemporary aural responses to this first performance, it will re-examine our problematic placing of Structures 1a as an archetype of serial autonomy and counter the modernist defence that, for the young Boulez at least, music composed with the intention of being autonomous should also have been meaningless in any context outside itself.