The body acquires knowledge through interactions with the world. This knowledge resides in the body and shapes our physical, social and emotional experiences. Older adults possess extensive embodied knowledge, but its expression can be suppressed by environmental and social change, such as relocating to a residential care home (RCH). Dancing is more than movement; it is an embodied activity that involves complex interactions among the body, space, time and other people. Dance has been shown to benefit older adults, yet existing research often focuses on physical and cognitive outcomes, with limited attention to dance as an embodied lived experience, especially in an RCH context. This study explores six older adults’ lived experiences of dancing. Its interpretative phenomenological analysis reveals that participants possessed a vast reserve of embodied knowledge which emerged when they participated in synchronised seated dance. Two superordinate themes – embodied musicality and rekindled connections to the lifeworld – detail how older adults expressed embodied knowledge during dance, becoming connected with their body, space, time and others, nurturing a sense of self. Dancing also helped participants navigate the changes in their body and environment, enriching their living experience in an RCH. The findings contribute to the broader field of dance research, demonstrating how seated dance facilitates accessing and expressing embodied knowledge later in life, and to the limited research on dance in RCHs, positioning dance as a meaningful mode of self-expression and continuity for older adults, supporting their transition to these settings with rich emotional experiences.

Does music sound all the same nowadays? This article revives the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry by recontextualizing it within contemporary financialized platform capitalism. We argue that Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) like Spotify showcase the proliferation of the future-oriented asset logic inherent to both financialization and platformization. This process intensifies the standardization of music that was first recognized by Theodor Adorno. The playlist is the central device of this assetization of music, contributing to a noticeable decrease in sonic and stylistic diversity in music. We illustrate this novel development through a diachronic content analysis of hip-hop music, comparing Apple Music’s Hip-Hop/R&B Hits: 2002 playlist based on hip-hop charts from the pre-DSP era and Spotify’s largest in-house curated playlist RapCaviar (from 2022). Rather than democratizing the music market, as Spotify is often hailed to do, the twenty-first-century culture industry facilitates further homogenization of artistic expression. Our findings contribute to ongoing political economy debates about the effects of financialization, platformization, and assetization on music, culture, and the everyday.

A Primeira República (1889–1930) é considerada um divisor de águas da história cultural brasileira graças ao modernismo. No entanto, muito do que foi escrito sobre o período deriva diretamente das concepções nacionalistas dos modernistas, que estabeleceram o paradigma da identidade nacional que ainda hoje é válido, o que leva à desconsideração dos trabalhos da geração que lhes é anterior. O objetivo deste artigo é problematizar emergência de um campo artístico autônomo no Brasil a partir de uma análise das tomadas de posição dos atores da época frente ao par “nacionalismo” e “cosmopolitismo”. O argumento central é que esse período marca o começo da ascensão de um regime artístico moderno no Brasil, que tem como base a ideia de autonomização de campo profissional, que se realiza em um espaço artístico e literário nacional secundário dentro do espaço mundial. Assim, para se autonomizar e proclamar sua liberdade estética, as artes no Brasil devem se libertar não somente da dominação política, mas também da dominação internacional.

Niall Crumlish (1974 – 2025) was a profoundly compassionate psychiatrist, uniquely gifted music journalist, and cherished husband, father, son, brother, and friend. He embodied humility, kindness, and compassion in all he did. Niall qualified in medicine from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1997; obtained membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2002; graduated with a Masters degree (MSc) in Transcultural Mental Healthcare from Queen Mary University of London in 2009; and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) from UCD in 2014. During his clinical training, Niall spent 18 months at St John of God Mental Health Services in Mzuzu, Malawi, a country which left a deep impression on him. In 2010, Niall was appointed as Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist at St James’s Hospital, Dublin with the Camac sector where his sense of humour and generosity left a lasting impression on all who worked with him. Niall was an especially gifted writer about music with an unrivalled depth of knowledge and sensibility. He wrote voraciously for Hot Press magazine from 1993 onwards, where his contributions were widely acclaimed. Through his writings in various publications and on his blog ‘Psychiatry and Songs’, Niall created a body of work that is elegant and intelligent, eloquent and heartfelt, intimate and universal.

To this day, Wajid ‘Ali Shah (1822–1887), the last nawab of Awadh, is remembered either as a hedonist and political failure who was forced to surrender his kingdom to the British East India Company or as a musical genius and important patron of the arts. However, few accounts engage with his personal religiosity and public acts of Shī’ah piety. This article examines Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own scholarship and poetry, and considers his mourning practices and investment in rites relating to Muharram. By focusing on the era of his exile in Calcutta (1856–1887), I explore how these rituals integrated the nawab into the public life of the city. More broadly, this article considers his court’s activities as a case study to explore the history of nineteenth-century Shī’ah sound art practices and examine how instrumentation, oratory, and processions were understood by contemporary Muslim scholars of religion, the arts, and music.

The Egyptian singer-composer Shaykh Imam (1918-1995) holds an almost mythical place in the social imaginary of the Arab left. An icon of dissent, he rose to fame in the late 1960s with a stream of songs commenting on current events and criticising the failings of successive political regimes. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt with fans of Imam (all of whom were involved with student / leftist politics to varying degrees during the 1960s and 1970s) and a close listening of his repertoire, explores why this generation of the Egyptian left embraced Shaykh Imam so wholeheartedly, and why they remain so attached to his songs. I argue that identifying with Shaykh Imam was not only central in bolstering leftists’ claims to be the authentic representatives of the Egyptian nation, amidst many competing claims, but importantly enabled his listeners to perform national belonging of a more intimate kind.

Los estudios sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares suelen estar mediados por enfoques tradicionales que analizan la música marcial o sus usos para los fines de la institución. Sin embargo, existe una producción musical de integrantes activos y retirados de las fuerzas militares que no es marcial, que no necesariamente está institucionalizada y que se aleja de los usos y temáticas que usualmente se asocian a la música militar. El estudio de estas producciones complejiza y enriquece los enfoques tradicionales sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares. Este texto presenta los hallazgos de la recopilación y análisis de 463 canciones compuestas y/o interpretadas por militares activos y retirados en Colombia entre 1989 y 2021, junto con entrevistas a algunos de estos artistas. Los hallazgos sugieren que abordar este tipo de música, que pocas veces es reconocida como ‘militar’, permite conocer la perspectiva del soldado como individuo en contextos de guerra y posconflicto; facilita la comprensión de la relación entre música institucional y no institucional y los distintos usos que se le da; y abre líneas de investigación sobre la forma en la que estas producciones entran en diálogo con géneros musicales, identidades regionales y el mercado artístico en el que participan.