Through ethnographical, historical, archival, and analytical lenses, this article explores Zheng Xiaoying’s (1929–) Mandarin re-translations of Das Lied von der Erde as a prism that refracts critical light on intersections of translation, epistemology, interculturality, and post-/decoloniality. The article first provides a reception history of Das Lied in China to contextualize Zheng’s re-translations, and then examines her archives to discuss the cultural dynamics of translation and musical knowledge-making in China. The article ends with a provocation from Hong Kong to reflect on the stakes of celebrating translation as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonial goals, and to position translation in intercultural musical exchange as an arbiter of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.

Discussions of sample-based music are traditionally single-authored, despite the frequency of multi-genre content found within this repertoire. This article builds a case for a new approach for future analyses, justified by highlighting repertoire that embeds samples from different genres, times, and cultures and that calls upon a variety of disciplinary expertise to attend to these disparate contents. Multi-voice commentary is an approach that includes insider voices to speak to the content of sample-based music, building a reception network that runs counter to single authorial modes, broadening the narrative around sample-based music and its lineage. Certain sample-based works are most in need of this new approach, based on situations of ‘sampling up’, ‘down’, or ‘sideways’, tendencies developed from Nader’s concept of ‘studying up’ and Walser’s writings on ‘appropriations from below’. Theoretical ideas from Fish and Barthes are also brought into this discussion to further the case for a multiplicity of readings.

Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.