In 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

This article develops a method of understanding concepts from the Parisian Surrealist movement in music using Poulenc's treatment of cadences and fifth relations as a case study. Although music was rejected by the group's figurehead André Breton as ‘the most profoundly confusing’ of all arts, many composers were keenly involved in Surrealist circles. Notably, Poulenc's acquaintance with major figures led him to set much of their literary work. But his engagement with their aesthetic principles extends deep into the musical form. After assessing Poulenc's flirtation with the movement's ideas, I ally William Caplin's codification of the cadence to the Surrealist objet trouvé. Combining Robert Hatten's musical ‘markedness’ and literary theorist Willard Bohn's model of Surrealism in art and literature, I explore how Poulenc's music engages with the Surrealist treatment of objects, automatism, and Apollinaire's ‘fantôme véritable’.

This article explores political and aesthetic dimensions of the ‘bubu music’ made by Sierra Leonean émigré Janka Nabay while living in the United States from 2010 to 2017. It narrates Nabay's story while tracing granular flows of creative labour, collaboration, and negotiations of cultural and economic capital at some level of ethnographic detail. The central sections of the article excavate the complex and often non-linear labour that went into the production of his band's music, and gives readers a sense of the way Nabay himself intellectually framed this process. It ultimately argues that Nabay was a resilient but often-dehumanized subject who exemplified the cultural and economic cross-currents of ‘World Music 2.0’ in ways that set privileged Western values of artistic autonomy into vivid relief. As an economically precarious subject split between indigenous nationalism and Western forms of cultural capital, Nabay lived a life of profound contradictions, by turns dissenting and exuberant.

Taking its theoretical orientation from Sherry Ortner's distinction between ‘power’ and ‘projects’, this article considers the relationship between local artistic projects and the cultures in which they participate. I focus on Pleasure Garden, a collaborative project that spans site-specific installations, concerts and an album. Exploring a wide range of issues at stake in the creative process, including collaboration, gender, aesthetics, colonialism, the work concept, and commodification, I trace how Pleasure Garden’s creators variously reproduced and reworked dominant conventions, while at the same time pursuing their own distinctive commitments. Through this, I argue that Pleasure Garden’s creators negotiated a space that was inside, yet sometimes out of alignment with what I call the ‘cultures of creativity’ associated with Western art music, the music industries, late capitalism, and neoliberalism. This highlights both the powerful forces affecting musicians today and the possibilities for making things otherwise.

The fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–91) had a profound impact on economic, socio-political, and cultural conditions in Cuba during the 1990s. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’. Increasing dire economic conditions on the island led to many changes that impoverished cultural life, including the relocation of composers in Europe, the United States, and other countries in the Americas. The situations encountered by composers who migrated to Europe varied, depending on generational differences and on the dynamics of the socio-political and cultural powers to which each of them were exposed in their new reception contexts. Whether adopting an uncontested identification with the new cultural milieu or resorting to discursive strategies of appropriation and de/re-territorialized negotiation, this text centres on the compositional journeys of four Cuban composers who settled in different European cities: Leo Brouwer (Córdoba, Spain); Eduardo Morales-Caso (Madrid); Keyla Orozco (Amsterdam); and Louis Aguirre (Aalborg, Denmark). Each case represents an invaluable experience of aesthetic reconstruction in a new creative territory that, by its own transterritoriality, has in turn enriched the sonic map of the Caribbean island.

This article studies a group of nineteen Argentinean composers who settled in Paris between 1970 and 2000. In addition to social and political factors of Argentine history – including the last military dictatorship (1976–83) and the 1989 period of ‘hyperinflation’ (1989) – these composers wanted to develop their careers in a professional field with the history, size, and diversity of Paris. Since the 1970s, France began a strong state policy supporting the arts; this action promoted a process of internationalization of Paris's artistic life. Contemporary music was viewed by participants and creators as an open and cosmopolitan space. Although the paradigm of autonomy suggests that nationality is less relevant than the individuality of each composer, the latter continues to function as an identity marker and, therefore, as a classification strategy both in France and in Argentina.

Like all of Maurice Ravel's compositions, the virtuosic violin piece Tzigane, styled rapsodie de concert by the composer, rapidly became a mainstay of the concert repertory following its premiere with piano by the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi in April 1924 in London (her premiere of the orchestral version occurred in Paris on 30 November 1924 with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Colonne Orchestra). Yet, despite its popularity, no critic has included it among Ravel's major works. Reflections on Tzigane in the secondary musicological literature are very few indeed, which is somewhat surprising in the context of a new explosion of interest in Ravel. In his recent biography, Roger Nichols avers that ‘probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music’. Robert Orledge noted in 2000 that it ‘has never been among Ravel's most successful works’, a remark surely meant as a critique of the composition rather than a statement about its popularity with performers, which has been considerable. Alexis Roland-Manuel, a close friend of the composer, did not even discuss the piece in his biography of 1938. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, another close friend and consultant about the virtuoso figuration in Tzigane, confessed almost apologetically in her book on Ravel that ‘this rhapsodic piece is perhaps the only one in Ravel's oeuvre where I cannot locate – hidden in the intricacies of its tours de force – Ravel's characteristic flavour: in it, music has surrendered too much place to instrumental acrobatics’. In other words, she appears to suggest that Tzigane is a mere showpiece where Ravel's personal style has been eclipsed by fireworks, with an implicit criticism of pandering to market. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti spoke of the ‘resistance I always felt towards this brilliant and (to my mind) synthetically produced pastiche of Ravel's’. At the time of the premiere, the young Henri Sauguet told Francis Poulenc that ‘the aesthetic informing these pages is so antiquated that I am astonished anyone can still believe in it’.

Where postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.

1972: Charlotte Moorman walked onto a concert hall stage – nude – and played a cello made of ice until it melted. 2001: Joan Jeanrenaud re-staged Moorman's piece wearing a wetsuit and brandishing a pitchfork. 2017: Seth Parker Woods performed a ‘protest’ version on an obsidian-coloured ice instrument. In this article, I argue that Ice(d) Music/Cello/Bodies has become a musico-political palimpsest, a measure of the way Moorman and her art have been recuperated through performative historiography. Through a reconstruction of the historical circumstances under which Moorman, Jeanrenaud, and Parker Woods realized their performances, I show how contemporary discourses of gender and race are materialized through the physical and metaphorical resonances of human bodies in proximity to an unusual musical instrument. I explore the ‘palimpsest’ both as a theoretical lens that insists on texts as simultaneously overwritable and recoverable and as a methodology providing an analytic framework for broader study of avant-garde re-enactment.

Between 1971 and 1989, fifteen editions of the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea (Latin American Contemporary Music Courses) took place alternatively in five countries of the continent. These were intensive meetings concentrated in two weeks, consisting of classes, workshops, seminars, conferences, and concerts. One of the central concerns was contemporary art music composition, although an important space was also given to performance, technologies, innovative pedagogies, popular music, and musicology. Around 150 lecturers from different countries took part in the courses, among them, about forty-five were European. On the one hand, the courses aimed at providing updated information on contemporary international musical life. On the other hand, they encouraged its critical evaluation in relation to the history, culture, and concrete practices of Latin American musicians. This article analyses exchanges between Latin American and European musicians regarding compositional techniques, theoretical perspectives, repertoires, aesthetics, and ideological positions during the 1974 and 1977 editions of the Cursos.

This article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogotá-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works on the topic, this article traces how this collaboration has circulated on local, national, and transnational scales and theorizes the different discourses of music, race, and nation that emerge from it. Using recent critiques by thinkers of colour to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the idea of the racial assemblage and put it in dialogue with contributions to critical geography by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as well as current music scholarship from Latin America and the global north to build a interdisciplinary study that thinks embodied musicking in place.

After the Second World War, cultural politics has become a central medium for international relations. Owing to the particular conditions of their development, the relations between Latin America and Europe constituted an interesting case study in which the positioning of different nations in the realm of two competing political systems and the politics of memory concerning the recent war are intertwined. This article highlights five ‘moments’ in West Germany with respect to the relationship between Europe and Latin America in the field of music: the papers of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Berlin Festival week, the Darmstadt summer courses, the DAAD Berlin Artists Program, and the Horizonte Festival in Berlin. These sources invite an observation as to how – from the perspective of cultural politics – contrasting notions of the ‘international’ have tended to ‘fade out’ after the end of Cold War polarizations, leading to a more or less common acceptance of a notion of the ‘global’ as a privileged concept in contemporary cultural debates.

Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can confirm or disrupt the way populism constructs identity. Epistemologically, genres can enable us to both understand and misunderstand our world: we can recognize ourselves (‘us’) in the genres that undergird the music we identify with, and (mis)recognize others (‘them’) in those we find alien. But genres can be undermined; they can be integrated, hybridized and directed towards more inclusive or cosmopolitan ends, thus destablilizing ontologies frozen around pre-fixed identities. I elaborate this theory, illustrating it with examples of focused genre-transgression, particularly in South African jazz, where progressive social tendencies have sought to create an integrated, cosmopolitan society.

Created in 1984, the Anacrusa Music Association organized concerts, workshops, and festivals of contemporary music in Chile during the last years of Pinochet's military dictatorship. Crucial for these events was the collaboration with the Goethe-Institute Santiago, which enabled a space for free expression within the repressive context of the dictatorship. This article explores the circulation and reception of musical works by Chilean composers living in exile performed in the 1985, 1987, and 1989 Anacrusa festivals. The trajectories of the pieces by three main figures of the politically engaged avant-garde of the 1960s – Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Sergio Ortega, and Fernando García – can be seen as a transfer process that involved the goals of West German cultural diplomacy in Chile, as well as the interaction between Anacrusa organizers, Latin American colleagues, and performers who returned from exile.