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.

Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) enjoys cult status in the history of avant-garde music in the second half of the twentieth century. Founded in Rome at the turn of 1966 and 1967 on the initiative of the American composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski, MEV, together with the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (GINC), introduced free improvisation to the European continent. However, many aspects of the group’s early years remain obscure, particularly with regard to their first performances and their transition to improvisation. Drawing on previously unpublished archives, in particular those of Frederic Rzewski preserved in Brussels, this article clarifies these aspects by establishing a precise chronology from 1966 to 1968. Far from following the aesthetics of GINC, MEV seems to have been more influenced by the Living Theatre, whose Artaudian and political approach encouraged its shift towards musical spontaneity and audience participation. This study thus offers a new perspective on the origins of MEV and its place within the Italo-American avant-garde of the period.

This special issue presents the perspectives of five composers—Hilda Paredes, Andile Khumalo, Marisol Jiménez, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Philippe Manoury—on music and politics today. Originating in the online lecture series ‘Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Music’, presented in 2021–22 by Universität Bern, McGill University, and Université de Montréal, the articles in this issue expand the composers’ original lectures into statements on the political contexts of their music and the potential of contemporary composition to effect social change. Their works address inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and violence, as well as the global threat of irreversible climate change. Another shared theme is the legacy of colonialism, both as a driving force of these social crises and a continuing challenge for composers who must reckon with Eurocentric attitudes and assumptions. These reflections on the transformative possibilities of musical creation illustrate a wide range of strategies for political engagement and praxis.

In the newly fluid territory between jazz, rock, performance art, and the avant-garde in the late 1960s, members of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris initiated experiments in improvised electronic music. This article focuses on two iterations of a group centred on Alain Savouret, Pierre Boeswillwald, and Christian Clozier, who were either students on the GRM’s 1968 course at the Paris Conservatoire or researchers at the GRM. The article follows the group’s development from a practice of ‘live musique concrète’ with hand-built electroacoustic devices, tape effects, and synthesizers to a pluralist improvisation that engaged collaborators from free jazz and European and non-European folk traditions. This history results in two lines of argument: the first concerns the relationship between new electronic instruments and new modes of performance around 1970, while the second concerns the promise of electronic music as the site of a cross-cultural fusion of genres and traditions.

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.

In this article, I address the political, social, and humanitarian issues at the core of my works for the stage. Through examples from my operas El Palacio Imaginado (2003), La tierra de la miel (2012), and Harriet (2018), I discuss how gender issues, social justice, and the burden of racism have transformed my musical language. La tierra de la miel dramatizes the tragedy of human trafficking on the US/Mexico border through the fictionalized story of two of its victims, driven into prostitution and physically and sexually abused. The opera seeks to give a voice to the hundreds of Mexican women (often from Indigenous communities) murdered along the border between the US and Mexico. Harriet recounts episodes from the life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, including her concerted actions to end the institution of slavery, and ends with a message expressing hope for a continuation of her fight against slavery and racism.

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.

Music cannot be separated from the politics which define the lived experiences of the twenty-first-century African composer. This article challenges the widespread error that African music is a homogeneous musical culture in which rhythm plays a primary role. This stereotype excludes African composers who do not focus on rhythm, while conversely, music by composers who do write rhythmically is dismissed as lacking intellectual complexity. How can we have our voices heard without being put in a box defining how our music should sound? How can African music be as independent and intellectually strong as any other music? Drawing on an overview of the current scene and excerpts from his own works, the author underscores the inherent hybridity of African music. His compositions include influences from jazz, African musics from different traditions, French spectralism, and more. His music is therefore a hybrid that does not reproduce its influences, but rather develops its own space.

Only months after starting as KPFA’s music director, Charles Amirkhanian launched the radio show Ode to Gravity in March 1970. The evocative name referred to his 1968 experimental theatre piece that involved dropping objects such as a marble and car fender into a circle of spectators. The radio programme similarly released a range of avant-garde music and sound objects over the airwaves, reflecting Amirkhanian’s preferred title as KPFA’s ‘Sound Sensitivity Information Director’. Informed by analyses of archival broadcasts and other primary sources, this article frames Ode to Gravity as a conceptual extension of the 1968 piece and long-running ‘sound sensitivity’ experiment that sought to make sense of the contemporary musical landscape by collecting and propagating sonic data. Ode to Gravity’s consciousness-raising mission broadly, and the changes in content and presentation style over its twenty-five-year history specifically, add further texture to our understanding of post-war avant-garde impulses in music and sound.

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.

By eliminating spoken words and more novel musical and staging effects used in the original Ghost Opera, Tan Dun’s Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa offers an analytical opportunity to show how he uses more conventional musical techniques to depict an intercultural and personal ritual. Yet, studying Tan’s usage of borrowed musical elements illuminates the commonalities and irreconcilable differences between Eastern and Western sounds. The construction of such an intercultural soundscape nonetheless requires a distinction between Chinese and Western musical practices. The Chinese sounds used in this work are also mediated by the Chinese state or Tan himself from rural communities through modernist and Orientalist means, while Tan’s compositional approach remains centred on Western-based musical means. This shows Tan’s agency to both place Chinese peasant culture at the periphery and elevate such elements to high art for Western audiences.

This article explores political dimensions in Jiménez’s work, particularly the themes of liberation from societal oppression and memorialization of victims of violence. A focus is XLIII Memoriam Vivere, dedicated to the memory of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were abducted and murdered in on September 26, 2014; the perpetrators have not yet been brought to justice. The memory of the forty-three students is evoked through numerous references to the number 43 and the motto ‘Vivos’ (alive), presenting a reflection on a crime that has left a deep wound in the Mexican collective memory and an act of resistance against the forgetting of this injustice. In other works, the author address the oppression perpetuated by patriarchal and religious structures and interrogate the entrenchment of traditional gender roles. Music today must both confront the complex issues of our world and inspire actions to transform it.

In soundscape composition, environmental sounds form a ‘language’ that highlights the voices of the environment for everyone’s contemplation. Ideally, they create an atmosphere and space of listening that allow us to grapple with and perceive more deeply the ecological imbalances, social inequalities, cultural gaps, and political issues in which we find ourselves. With the help of compositional examples, the author traces ways in which soundscape compositions can be a forum for ‘speaking back’ in protest, making oppositional voices heard while simultaneously exploring artistic-poetic expressions for a deeper listening engagement with the sonic complexity of environmental sounds and the meanings they carry within them. Furthermore, the author considers whether and how a soundscape composition can be a relationship-builder between environment and listener: can it be an agent for listening to the land, to the natural world, in ways that make urgent and necessary changes of human behaviour possible?

This article seeks to cast a critical eye on musical modernism through the experiences of its percussionist practitioners. It charts the origins and accepted truisms of percussion ontology as it is understood through the modernist sensibility, and demonstrates how certain modernist assumptions have been inherited by many contemporary practitioners. Some of these individuals’ resulting expressions of grief, anger, and sadness in the wake of modernism's waning are presented, and a reparative reading of modernist percussion that seeks to make the repertory inhabitable and sustaining is instead offered. This practice is illustrated through a feminist and performer-led analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte (1958–60), for piano, percussion, and tape. It is ultimately argued that performer knowledge and affective attachment is essential to understanding modernism's history and aesthetics, as well as its place in the contemporary moment.

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?

Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto’s gigantic artwork ‘Our Ship Drum Earth’ was featured in Lisbon for five months in 2024. Taking the form of a ship, the piece played on and critiqued the omnipresent nautical emblem of Lisbon’s iconography that celebrates the ‘Age of Discovery’ as sacrosanct history of Portugal. The installation contained percussion instruments from diverse cultures around the world, making reference to the musical traditions that were encountered and forged through Portuguese colonialism. During the exhibition, visitors were invited to freely play the instruments, forging musical hybridities that might represent new, convivial possibilities for global conversation. The ship also hosted several performance events featuring predominantly immigrant ensembles from ex-colonies of the Portuguese Empire. In this article, I argue that, through performance, the sculpture accumulated new meanings, providing a foundation to experimentally and collaboratively respond to Neto’s invitation to musically construct decolonial futures arising from the postcolonial present.

The social and political upheavals that rock our world are rarely treated in the world of contemporary ‘art music’ composition. Popular music reaches a larger public and seems more at ease in addressing these themes. But is it intrinsically linked with such content in its musical expression, or only through its lyrics? Would art music, for its part, lose its ‘purity’ by abandoning its stance of abstraction in approaching these subjects? This article draws on examples from the author's works Kein Licht (2017) and Lab.Oratorium (2019). Kein Licht, a ‘Thinkspiel’, imagines a future in which humankind’s appetite for energy consumption has led our species to the verge of extinction. The semi-staged Lab.Oratorium addresses the humanitarian crisis of immigration into Europe. Both works reflect the evolution of traditional genres (opera, oratorio) with theatrical elements.

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.