This article focuses on the documentary The Songs of Fire by Nikos Koundouros (1975). Shot immediately after the fall of the military dictatorship (1967–74) in Greece, it exhumes the elation of three public concerts and demonstrations, capturing the enthusiasm for the return to democracy expressed through singing and chanting. The article focuses on the ways in which popular songs became the vehicles of the popular demand for democracy during the early transition to democracy. It shows how the film was crucial in establishing a narrative of resistance in collective memory that was centred on singing and listening, investigating the ways in which this sonic narrative, performed collectively and publicly, also betrays a latent reaction to a brutal regime fought by the few. It argues that collective singing seems to merge in memory with the ‘singing resistance’ performed individually and in secret during the dictatorship. Extended back in time, this sonic narrative registers an unconscious desire to repress the fact that large parts of society had remained silent during the regime's seven-year rule.

This article examines how musical practices in 1970s Spain formed ways of imagining democracy and how they participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality for the final years of Franco's dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. I shall analyse two case studies: a large-scale experimental art festival held in the streets of Pamplona in 1972 and a grassroots musical collective created in 1973 on the initiative of the composer Llorenç Barber. Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between music and democracy, participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, and the insights of political science and philosophy into democracy, I offer a critical reassessment of the Pamplona festival and explore the relationship between grassroots collaboration and ideas of participatory democracy, and analyse the significance of this relationship in 1970s Spain.

During South Korea's authoritarian period (1961–87), student activists employed songs to express their anti-government and pro-democratic views. Known as minjung kayo (people's songs), these protest songs can be traced to the modern American folk music embraced by South Korean youth in the 1960s. By the late 1980s, however, minjung kayo carried emphatically anti-American, nationalistic, and socialist tones, echoing the minjung ideals that strove to achieve authentic ‘Koreanness’. This article unravels the complexities underlying the process of minjung kayo's development into an emblem of the pro-democratic movement, which entailed a shift away from its initial reflective and poetic style inspired by American folk music (exemplified in the songs of Kim Min-ki) and a move towards the militant style influenced by the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler. It argues that minjung kayo embodied the complex relationship South Korean activists held with their colonial past and autocratic present, as well as visions of their democratic future.

The opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 provided a spectacular climax for Samuel Huntington's third wave of democracy. It represented the triumph not only of a people over their oppressive regime but also, ultimately, of Western economic liberalism; the post-socialist democracy of German reunification was a singular one with consumerism at its core. In the early 1990s, many East German reform socialists resisted this inevitability, and exploited the temporary political and bureaucratic void that emerged in East Berlin as a space in which to imagine alternative democratic futures from the socialist past. In this article I explore the attempts by two very different East Berlin musical communities to incubate anti-capitalist worlds from the legacies – both official and unofficial – of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). First, I reflect on the autonomous musical worlds that were created by members of the GDR's alternative bands in occupied buildings in Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Second, I consider the articulation by the ZwischenWelt-Festival, a reincarnation of the GDR's Festival of Political Song, of a more outward-looking future for East Germany, based on the ideals of international solidarity.

This article is a study of Chilean popular music produced during the 1990s, the first decade following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. The return of democracy and a period of strong economic growth contributed to a boom in the Chilean music industry. A wealth of music was recorded and the opportunities for listening to live music multiplied. The article's main objectives are to illuminate the ways in which Chilean popular music addressed democracy's inspiring promises and frustrating limits and to consider how Chileans used popular music to foster new post-authoritarian identities. First, it argues that music was used to reclaim national symbols that had been coopted by the dictatorship. Second, it considers the music of two generations of musicians who returned to the country after living in exile. Finally, it focuses on punk and hip-hop, the styles that produced the most significant examples of protest music in the post-authoritarian period.

In 2004, Cape Town Opera mounted a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the former apartheid prison on Robben Island. Sponsored by Den Norske Opera, and endorsed by the South African government, the production was presented as a celebration of the country's tenth year of democracy. This article investigates the vision of democracy performed by Fidelio on Robben Island and asks how it interacts with the founding principles of the new South African political order. Situating the production within the context of contemporaneous debates about cultural identity and representation in a democratic South Africa, I argue that Fidelio on Robben Island performed a legitimizing function designed to endorse the validity of the state and of opera as a democratic cultural form.