This special issue of Twentieth Century Music explores how music and sound were created, performed, perceived, discussed and/or understood throughout different kinds of transatlantic encounters, occurring all along the twentieth century. In order to reflect on the interactions within and across the Atlantic Ocean, the issue focuses on various human and non-human actors and practices that originated from these encounters. In this perspective, the polysemic term encounter is meant to designate a wide range of phenomena, from fruitful intercultural exchanges to downward cultural domination, including different forms of incomprehension, opportunistic behaviour, and conflict. Thus, this issue tries to understand how certain moments of encounter (limited in time and space) might have shaped ways of making and understanding music and sound. The authors propose emphasizing moments of encounter as a rich source for transversal and intersectional analysis, allowing for a multiscale account of musical and sonic encounters.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, pianos were ubiquitous across the world. Drawing on ongoing conversations on the role of the instrument as a site of transcultural encounter, this article expands these discussions by tracing the connections embedded in pianos’ materials – specifically ivory, one of the primary components for the construction of piano keyboards. This article shows that this commodity mediated a series of exchanges between environmental and musical cultures, as well as between East Africa, Europe, and the United States. From the warehouses of European and American traders in Zanzibar to ivory auction houses in London and Antwerp, and from these sites to American keyboard factories and consumers’ homes, piano ivory enabled differentiated experiences of a globalizing world, revealing hitherto unexamined entanglements between music, capitalism, and transatlantic encounters.

This article analyses the work of the Chilean composer and musicologist Carlos Lavín, addressing the imaginary that he constructed around the Mapuche people and his reception of European music from the early twentieth century during his stay as a student and researcher in Germany and France. Based on a review of the composer’s published works and a detailed musical analysis of two of his piano works, Suite Andina and Mythes Araucans, the article contrasts these with his theory of the bipartite tonal organization of South American Indigenous populations. It demonstrates how musical and musicological practices operate in the sonic representation of Mapuche alterity, and how this appropriation functioned as a rhetorical resource in the construction of a national imaginary.

In 1942 and 1943, Orson Welles produced the radio series Hello Americans, sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, as part of his efforts as a wartime goodwill ambassador. The twelve thirty-minute episodes explore various regions of Central and South America – including Brazil, the Andes, the Caribbean, and Mexico – and address themes of history and culture. This article examines the sonic strategies – encompassing music and sound – that Welles employed to promote a Pan-Americanist agenda within Hello Americans, focusing on how radio as a medium becomes a site of transatlantic encounter. How does Welles’s use of sound and music shape and communicate a particular vision of Latin American identity within the broader context of Pan-American cultural exchanges? This analysis explores how sonic elements serve as tools of cultural diplomacy during moments of encounter, illustrating how music and sound can foster understanding while also constructing idealized images of Latin America and the Caribbean.

This article analyses the American influences that contributed to Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman’s (1882–1947) establishment of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936. Although Huberman is remembered for his pivotal role in the orchestra’s creation, his political and musical vision was significantly shaped by his visits to the United States, beginning in the 1920s. These experiences transformed him into a prominent advocate of the Pan-Europe movement and a vocal critic of the Nazi regime. This paper argues that American ideals and cultural dynamics played a crucial role in shaping the orchestra’s identity and vision. Ultimately, it demonstrates that the Palestine Symphony Orchestra’s formation was not solely rooted in its German origins but was also influenced by American values and aspirations.

During the Second World War and the Cold War, the U.S. military developed a hydrophone array system called SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) to listen underwater in the ocean. This arose in response to the threat posed by enemy submarines. But this technology was also fundamental for listening to oceanic living beings. This paper explores the history of the invention of SOSUS as fundamental to redefining a subaquatic Caribbean by tracing the history of research that led to its deployment. Through the interrelationship between military and environmental sonic history, the author seek to problematize the notion of encounter and explore the following questions: What does the encounter between animal and machine biopower tell us about the history of acoustic Atlantic crossings? Moreover, why was SOSUS deployed in the Caribbean initially and what sort of understandings of the submarine ocean and the history of the Anthropocene does this give rise to?

This article offers an in-depth analysis of the creative activity of the Grupo de Experimentación Musical (GEM) within the Argentine musical scene of the late 1960s. Led by Gerardo Gandini, GEM emerged as a collective of composers who explored the timbral potential of both traditional instruments and everyday objects. The study examines the group’s methodology of guided and free improvisation, paying particular attention to its productive reception of foreign improvisation ensembles. Drawing on cultural history, reception theory, and interviews, the article shows how GEM’s young composers reinterpreted avant-garde techniques from European and North American traditions. It also considers the individual contributions of the members and their reception of figures such as Larry Austin, Earle Brown, John Cage, Luis de Pablo, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis. The article concludes that GEM’s strategies were rooted in avant-garde compositional procedures and in dialogue with contemporary improvisational practices abroad.

This article traces Canada’s transatlantic musical exchanges with Europe during the 1970s, as facilitated by the Canadian Government’s Department of External Affairs’ (DEA) Cultural Affairs Division. Through an archival analysis of documentation pertaining to the planning activities of the Cultural Affairs Division, this article focuses on two all-Canadian musical events funded by the division: the 1972 performance of Canadian contemporary music in Rome, and the 1977 two-week long festival of Canadian contemporary music, Musicanada, hosted in London and Paris. This article argues that these two events act as useful case studies to demonstrate how the works of Canadian contemporary composers were used for strategic soft-power purposes by the DEA’s Cultural Affairs Division in fulfilling its transatlantic diplomatic aims of projecting an image of Canadian culture which was both distinct from the United States and would appeal to European cultural elites.