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.

The 1984 Helsinki Festival introduced Finnish and international audiences to contemporary Soviet composers via what was perhaps the largest repertory of contemporary Soviet music in the West up to that point. The week of concerts did not include any premieres, but several works by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Denisov that were performed during the festival were recent compositions that had received only a few performances at that point. And yet, the week was also a compromise, prominently featuring Khrennikov and other conservative composers. This article discusses the context and processes that led to the festival’s realisation and its relation to changes in the Soviet musical world at the time. In the past, Soviet authorities often torpedoed attempts to perform nonconformist works in the West and almost never allowed composers to travel. In Helsinki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and several other composers were allowed to attend.

This article concerns a ‘craze’ for the tango that dominated Paris from 1911 to 1914. The dance floor of the amusement park Magic-City was one of the most elite venues in the city, and a significant site of the transformations to tango culture that took place. The Parisian tango, as exemplified by music composed by Magic-City affiliates René André and Camille de Rhynal, fit into specifically French notions of cosmopolitanism and aligned the dance with the idealized urban woman, referred to in advertisements, fiction, and the press as la Parisienne. At venues such as Magic-City, the tango was shaped into a form that suited middle- and upper-class French urban life and is reflective of ‘cosmopolitan modernity’, a concept borrowed from cultural theorist Mica Nava.

The erection of the Berlin Wall in November 1961 gave the separation between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and particularly between the two Germanies, an enduring symbol. It also concretized the division of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which had been separated by the Second World War, in a seemingly unsurmountable way. But while the wall made cross-border academic collaborations considerably more difficult, it did not prevent them entirely. This article relies on previously unexplored primary sources to relate and contextualize the extraordinary story of how two ethnomusicologists were able to bring together a large part of the cylinder collections of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, even as the geopolitical situation surrounding them grew ever more tense. From 1966 to 1967, Kurt Reinhard, then head of the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the Ethnomusicology Department of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin, and Erich Stockmann, an academic employee of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and caretaker of the archival recordings returned by the Soviets, succeeded in exchanging and copying over 5,000 cylinder recordings and their documentation despite a litany of political and financial difficulties. Their collaboration illuminates a little-known aspect of the history of this foundational archive, while raising important questions about ethnomusicology’s political history and the roles the Cold War and Second World War played in the discipline’s formation.

Kongolandsbyen was an ‘ethnographic village’ staged in Oslo as part of Norway’s Jubilee Exhibition of 1914. The ‘village’ housed and displayed a troupe of eighty Senegalese performers including musicians playing kora, balafon, and other instruments. Examining music’s performance and reception in Kongolandsbyen demonstrates how colonialist practices and beliefs influenced even European nations, such as Norway, that were nominally non-imperialist. Kongolandsbyen’s promoters mimicked exhibitions common in France and Germany at which audiences sought both to learn about unfamiliar societies and to be entertained by sensationalized, ostensibly ‘primitive’, performances. By demonstrating fluency in the tired but familiar genre of the ‘ethnographic village’, Norwegians emulated the prestige of European imperial powers to challenge Norway’s marginal status as a newly independent, small country with limited geopolitical influence. Kongolandsbyen’s Senegalese performers pushed back against colonialist, racist representations through both thoughtful presentations of their musical traditions and an insistence on their own modernity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two months after its premiere in Leipzig, Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest (1930) came to the Berlin Kroll Opera, a notorious centre for experimental, modernist productions. Inevitably, critics compared the two productions, much to the Berlin production’s detriment. In particular, critics faulted the Berlin stage designs by Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. I argue that this reception reflected a fundamental divergence in Krenek and de Chirico’s neoclassicism, which was only exacerbated by how neither Krenek nor de Chirico’s neoclassicism aligned with pre-existing expectations about the Kroll Opera’s production aesthetic, as exemplified in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (staged at the Kroll in 1928). Attending to these differences not only explains the troubled reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll, but also provides fertile ground to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory meanings ascribed to neoclassicism in the interwar period, especially as it moved between media and across national borders.

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.

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.