This chapter uses music analysis to understand two different strategies for unfolding musical material from initial ideas, one by Debussy and the other by Schoenberg. This approach considers how pieces might be formed from a small fragment of musical ‘DNA’ for a composer to expand, before looking further to understand this process of ‘unfolding’ are shaped by different aesthetic, cultural and historical conditions.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

From 31 October to 12 December 2015, Rumpsti Pumsti, a record store in Berlin devoted to experimental music and sound art, hosted an exhibition of early works by the German artist Christina Kubisch (b. 1948), one of the world’s foremost sound artists. The Vibrations exhibition focused on a series of works titled Dirty Electronics that Kubisch created between 1975 and 1980 in which she paired orchestral instruments with vibrators. On the floor were four wooden boxes each holding one flute and one vibrator, creating a jittery, buzzing flute quartet. Mounted on one wall was a photograph of a cello with a vibrator held to its strings. On another were technical diagrams. Kubisch, best known for her works with electronics, had produced intricately detailed diagrams of how to construct and use vibrators in various musical settings.

Here we provide space for three living composers to reflect on their careers, and on their works. Together they form an indicator of the ways in which women composers have gained increasing recognition in contemporary culture. Among other distinctions, Nicola LeFanu was featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 to mark her seventieth birthday, while both Roxanna Panufnik and Shirley J. Thompson were among those commissioned to produce new compositions for the coronation of King Charles III (6 May 2023).

The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

This brief introduction asks what a compositional technique actually is, and what sorts of skills, knowledge, and experience a composer needs to draw on when working with music and sound. It thinks first about the idea of musical genre and function, before briefly addressing musical technology, style, and finally the importance of listening as a core compositional technique.

This chapter examines ways of working as a composer for screen, explaining every step of the process – from reading through a script or treatment to the final recordings and edits – and offers advice on how to approach collaboration and networking in the film industry.