Pierre Boulez spent a great deal of time in post-war Germany. His close connection with the country began when Heinrich Strobel commissioned him to compose Polyphonie X, initiating his ongoing close contact with both Strobel and the city of Baden-Baden, where he would take up residence in 1958. The chapter considers the 1951 premiere of Polyphonie X at Donaueschingen and the controversy which followed. It also contextualises the piece within the various compositional projects Boulez was preoccupied with at the time. The chapter considers Boulez’s attitude towards dodecaphony as focused on the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress of 1951 and his reflections on how Webern might be approached profitably by composers of new music. Given Boulez’s move to Germany in the late 1950s, the chapter reviews his disillusionment with the musical scene in France and the fact that a number of his most important compositions were first premiered in Germany.

By the early 1950s, Boulez became known for his controversial and outspoken statements, his notorious snipes at non-serial but otherwise progressive contemporaries, creating a rift that divided French composers into competing factions. Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana, as well as others represented not only at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but also the Warsaw Autumn Festival as leading figures in French contemporary music, found themselves excluded from the Concerts du Domaine musical and subject to what has been called the Boulezian ‘aesthetic of refusal’. Contextualising these issues, this chapter considers Jolivet’s influence on the young Boulez, their subsequent rupture in the very public affaire de scandale that followed and Boulez’s later reconciliations. Compositional common denominators linking particular works of Ohana and Dutilleux with Boulez are also explored in relation to Debussy as well as non-serial dodecaphonic techniques and the style incantatoire to reveal closer aesthetic links than any may have wished to admit.

The Nigerian-born composer Akin Euba (1935–2020) saw it as his life’s mission to create an ‘African art music’: ‘a form of music [that is] universal to all Africa’. As the chapter will outline, his career took him from Lagos to Bayreuth (Germany) and, eventually, Pittsburgh (USA), in the course of which he came up with the notions of ‘African pianism’, ‘creative ethnomusicology’ and, finally, ‘intercultural composition’, of which he was an acknowledged pioneer. Rather than seeing intercultural composition as a contradiction of African art music, I argue that Euba’s music embodies the concept of cosmopolitanism as a series of concentric circles as proposed by the Stoics, whereby the local (Yoruba) is contained in a wider (pan-African) sphere, which is in turn encapsulated in the universal. Compositionally, this vision is realised through the combination of elements from Yoruba music, such as timelines, other African influences from the likes of xylophone and mbira music and Western modernism, exemplified by serialism. As my analyses show, these elements are integrated to such an extent as to become inextricable.

Bernstein’s fame, reputation, and personality have for the most part been seen as excessive and problematic. This perception militated from the start against his position in time, place, and tradition as a serious composer being influential or even accepted. Yet from the golden moment of opportunity for American composers in which he grew to adulthood to his barely noticed final works, he was following a diligent route of creative output that may yet bear fruit at greater distance from the man himself, though it would be difficult to claim that, taken as a whole, it has yet done so.

This chapter discusses serialism’s varied formal and sociopolitical meanings and implications – its aesthetics and, to a lesser degree, its mechanics – in the USSR, by examining the central figures in Soviet serialism, among them Andrey Volkonsky, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Valentin Sylvestrov. It also points to representative compositions, performances, publications, and recordings. This chapter is particularly concerned with the aural culture of serialism in the post-war USSR as well as with thinking about serialism as both performative presence and material artifact. Other topics covered include the place of Soviet serialism in the cultural Cold War as well as the censorship and control of serialism in the USSR.

According to standard accounts, twentieth-century music in Latin America was dominated by ‘folkloristic nationalism’. As this chapter demonstrates, however, there has been a number of lively serialist movements that, after gaining a foothold in Buenos Aires in the 1930s, gradually coalesced to achieve a modicum of mainstream and institutional acceptance across much of the region by the 1960s. This story not only provides an important facet of Latin America’s music history, but it also touches on crucial issues beyond that, such as the way artistic innovations are disseminated; the role of migration and national, regional, and international networks, such as the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); the varying connections between aesthetic ideas and ideological and political principles; and debates about progress and tradition, national culture and universalism. The history of serialism in Latin America thus to an extent mirrors that in other regions but adds some specific elements.

This chapter considers the reception of Mahler by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, with particular attention to parallel threads of interpretation. On one hand, the triumvirate championed their idol with determination and perseverance, to make a place for him in the centuries-long progression of Western compositional history and to establish as the culmination of this history (at least provisionally) their own works, with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method as its most advanced expression. But another, backward-looking Second Viennese interpretation of Mahler’s music existed from the beginning: as the last manifestation of a musical paradise eternally closed to subsequent composers, who, unlike Mahler, rejected the commandment to leave tonality intact. As self-styled heirs, then, the Second Viennese School faced an irresolvable dilemma: their succession through an initially “atonal” and then dodecaphonic language required the destruction of this paradise, which existed on a tonal foundation.