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 Drawing on previously unpublished archives, in particular those of Frederic Rzewski preserved in Brussels, this article clarifies these aspects by establishing a precise chronology from 1966 to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.