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How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book's diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard's topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

This dissertation examines modernist twentieth-century applications of the pipe organ and the carillon in the United States and in the Netherlands. These keyboard instruments, historically owned by religious or governmental entities, served an exceptionally diverse variety of political, technological, social, and urban planning functions. Their powerful simultaneous associations with historicism and innovation enabled those who built and played them to anchor the instruments' novel uses in the perceived authority of tradition, church, and state. This usage became particularly evident after World War II, when Philips Electronics and the engineers and musicians whose careers were shaped by the military-industrial complex and the Cold War used the organ and carillon to present alternative visions and performances of their research, knowledge, and services.The organ served as a vehicle for innovation for early electronic music and sound synthesis pioneers in three ways. First, it provided a model for an efficient user interface for new synthesizer technologies that found both musical and military communications applications. Second, the pipe organ became the first instrument to be electronically simulated on a commercially viable basis. As a result, the first federal legal proceedings to define the successful simulation of musical sound centered on the electronic organ. Electronic organs also helped shape a historicist "neo-baroque" movement that was, in part, both a reaction to and an outgrowth of their commercial success. Third, inventors in the field of electronics, particularly military electronics, turned to organ building to satisfy a desire to connect with historicist ideas about craft and tradition. They became leaders of the Organ Reform Movement after World War II, dedicated to reviving aspects of Baroque organ building. I build on Richard Taruskin's critique of "historically informed performance" as itself a form of modernism in order to elucidate previously overlooked relationships between Reform organ building, organ recording artists, the military-industrial complex, and cold war politics.The carillon served as a vehicle for international exchange after World War II, facilitating the sharing of soundscape and landscape design ideas between America and the Netherlands. In the 1950s, the people of the Netherlands donated a carillon to the United States as a sounding symbol of political harmony between the two allies. However, the resulting political squabbles and the disharmony and decay of its bells tolled the ineffectiveness of this instrument of diplomacy. In the following decade, Philips Electronics took inspiration from suburban American corporate research parks to construct a techno-cultural complex in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This International Style park used the Dutch carillon's sonic and visual symbolism to re-center the perceived core of Eindhoven and of civic authority onto Philips' campus.An important part of the broader history of postwar expansion and the military-industrial complex are the science-fiction, mystery, and filmic spinoffs and sonic imaginaries associated with these reinvented carillons and organs, and the way such narratives cross the boundaries between high art and popular culture. The institutions and donors that built carillons often justified them with utopian rhetoric about creating community, public music, and elevating general musical taste. However, a vein of dystopian fiction about bells in literature, opera, film, and television counterbalanced that discourse. The realm of fiction ties together this dissertation's overarching themes of historical revival, technological innovation, modernism, and military electronics research.

Objective: The author reviews the paper by Kroemer (1972) on the design of the split geometry keyboard and the subsequent 35 years of research on the topic. Background: It was first suggested in the 1920s that arm strain in the typist could be reduced by splitting the keyboard into two halves and inclining the two halves laterally. The first systematic research on the split keyboard was conducted by Kroemer in the 1960s and published in his 1972 article. Methods: The literature on split geometry keyboards was identified, and the progression of the research was reviewed. Results: The Kroemer article marked the beginning of a prolonged, worldwide research effort to determine whether and how the split keyboard design might improve comfort and prevent pain in keyboard users. Conclusions: In the early 1990s, split keyboard designs began to be broadly commercially available. Clear evidence of a health benefit of the split keyboards emerged in the late 1990s. By 2006, a split keyboard was the number one—selling keyboard, of all keyboards sold, in the U.S. retail market. Application: The history of research on this topic, the challenges to changing the conventional design, and the broader acceptance of the split design are a success story with lessons for all of us.

The 20th Century has been called the era of displacement, exile, and mass migration. Bringing their music with them, migrants arrived in Britain throughout the century from all over the world. To this day, however, there has been no holistic discussion of their impact on British musical life. While excellent scholarly investigations of migrations and mobility as crucial factors for music in Britain have been undertaken, the field is fragmented, with insufficient collaboration across discussions of specific musical genres and diasporic communities. More broadly, musicology has long neglected migrations and migrants in its historicisation of a national cultural history. This forum places the migrant within discourses on national identity. The authors embrace a multi-faceted approach to the history of Britain's diverse musical immigrants across a wide range of musical styles and genres that span the entirety of the 20th century, reaching into the late 19th and the early 21st centuries. We reveal the impact of immigrant composers and second-generation migrants and diasporic communities with global backgrounds on popular music, musical comedy, jazz, concert music, folk music, and film music. The forum highlights the connections across genres, the time period, and diverse migrant backgrounds, thus revealing a multi-faceted narrative in which debates concerning 'the national' form a current in British musical life and open up questions regarding constructions of a national music history and historiography. The forum thus highlights the contributions of immigrants to British musical life; the extent to which immigrants are, or are not, narrated as part of British music history and the extent to which their musics have been marginalised or otherwise; and what opportunities this poses for an understanding of British music. In combination, the contributions challenge the notion that the migrant and the nation are incompatible, highlighting instead a narrative of (musical) diversity. Discussing the impact of migration as a sonically enriching experience seems urgent given how current debates frame immigration as a crisis at the heart of national socio-cultural discourses more broadly. Putting music centre stage, this colloquy widens the debate on migration as it encourages a discourse that is not restricted solely to economic, legal, and narrow political contexts. The focus on music allows for an exploration of the impact of highly skilled creative migrants on British cultural history. In turn, it sets it against questions of national belonging and the sonic-cultural narratisation of the nation. The forum includes contributions by Florian Scheding, Justin Williams (University of Bristol), Catherine Tackley (University of Liverpool), Derek B. Scott (University of Leeds), Erik Levi (Royal Holloway University of London), and Tom Western (University of Edinburgh).

The N-Word's Musical Contours -- Out of Music : The N-Word's Material, Environmental, and Social Contours -- John Lennon's N-Word Moment -- Interlude. Diverse Opinions -- Philosorock : John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Other White Musicians Who Sing the N-Word -- Black Demystification, White Bewilderment : Transformation and Numbing in Black Comedy and Black Music -- Muhammad Ali, Rap, and That Word -- A Hip-Hop Icon -- A Sensible Rule : A Case Study -- Inviting Destruction Beyond the Music -- Conclusion. Welcome to the Conversation, Country Music.