This article discusses the compositional strategies of turntablist DJsworking within the hip-hop genre, focusing on processes developed by thesemusicians such as mixing, scratching and beat juggling, all of which arecarried out on turntables. Since the development of the gramophone at theturn of the century, the turntable has become an instrument of creation aswell as reproduction, resulting in the ground-breaking compositionalstrategies of hip-hop music. Hip-hop DJs create original music from a rangeof existing musical texts and in doing so, raise questions concerningoriginality and authorship as well as questioning the division betweencomposer and performer. Hip-hop music is regarded by authors such asPoschardt (1998) as one of the final avant-gardes of the twentiethcentury; this article will explore and discuss the ground-breaking natureof the genre with reference to new compositional strategies and theturntable technology with which they are carried out.