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In this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations that connected the phonograph with earlier musical devices such as the barrel organ, and with those who played them. Because of the prominent marketing role that record labels assigned to Italian opera, this commercial strategy had important consequences for the genre as well as for Italian immigrants, who leveraged opera's renewed visibility and audibility into an effective vessel for social and political empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a phenomenon of great social relevance between 1900 and 1930, the graphic advertising of the pianola must be considered as one of the first great mass media platforms linked to musical activity and, therefore, the analysis of its discourse offers valuable information about the social construction of the musical world during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article shows the results of an analysis of 200 historical advertisements through which it is possible to trace the origins of some of the current advertising rhetoric and also some of our current ideas about musical activity. In this way, the advertisements studied show some interesting links to the mindset and aesthetic and social conventions of the time but also show us to what degree these discourses are, to a large extent, still valid today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores recent, radical developments in the ways in which new music is programmed and presented. It is contextualised by a brief survey of new music programming across the history of public concert-giving, and by several new interviews with industry professionals in the UK. These illustrate various rationales behind current practice including the dissatisfaction with traditional modes of concert-giving where appropriate. They also inform the author's conviction that different branches of new music benefit from different forms of presentation, acknowledging the importance of innovative forms to certain new styles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is the proportion of German language music in total record sales in Germany a cause for optimism or for concern? This question is very difficult to answer as the national branch of the IFPI only supplies statistics on 'national repertoire' and not specifically on 'national language repertoire' — and even that covers music sung iii any language, not only in German. Since the call for a music quota for radio stations lacks a precise definition (German or German language) there is some reason to suspect that the real aim behind this discussion is not to support German music culture but rather national economic interests. As a matter of fact, the average proportion of German language songs in the charts is currently the highest it has been in the last thirty years. An analysis of the Top 20 in the national end-of-year charts of various European countries shows that the number of national language songs is generally increasing again after a substantial decline in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the case not only with record sales but also with airplay. This means that the increase cannot only be due to the massive drop in sales of international repertoire caused by file sharing on the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]