Written from the perspective of two people currently involved in experimental and electronic music in Australia, this chapter provides an overview of some of the key movements and works in the genre, from the twentieth century to the present day. Focusing primarily on music that exploits technology and experimental approaches that progress innovation in art music contexts, it highlights some of the diverse practitioners – performers, composers, improvisers, sound artists, and instrument makers – who have pushed the boundaries of what is possible, often blurring the lines between art forms in the process. While it is unable to provide an exhaustive historical or contemporary account of the innovations that have been achieved here, or those responsible, the selected representative survey should serve to contextualise Australia’s contributions to electronic and experimental music, demonstrating our reputation for presenting ‘mavericks’ to the music world.

This chapter uses Pirandello’s collaboration with Italian modernist composer Gian Francesco Malipiero on the opera The Changeling as a way into discussing Pirandello’s relationship to and understanding of music more broadly. Several of the author’s short stories, including such works as “Old Music,” “Farewell, Leonora!” – both written in 1910 – and “Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist,” dating to 1914, make note of shifts in Italian musical taste in that period and therefore suggest a certain attention to music on the author’s part. But Pirandello’s interest in musical vanguardism is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he collaborated with Malipiero, a musician so experimental that he was dubbed the “Pirandello of the music scene.” The essay recounts their collaboration as a window onto the two men’s personalities, experimental performance at the time, and the complications for artists and intellectuals who collaborated with the Mussolini regime.

Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.