This article offers an archival study of free improvisation and sibling practices at the London Musicians Collective (LMC) during this institution’s heyday in the 1970s and 80s. In the process, I seize upon Collective activities to scrutinize theories of music and democracy in contexts of improvisation, proposing that stylistic, ideological, and experiential fractures among LMC members — which were legion — index an adversarial mode of organizing that contrasts with sunnier depictions of improvisation and democratic self-determination. Such differences, I suggest, arose from fundamentally yet productively opposed articulations of subjectivity, which I regard as assuming feminist, posthuman, entrepreneurial, and other reflexive forms.

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.

Posthuman understanding of music and bodies as matter highlights otherwise forms of musical embodied learning. In this paper, we focus on an early childhood classroom music event and think diffractively with cognitive and posthuman theories in order to extend our insight into it. Accordingly, we explore cognitive approaches to music and movement, as well as posthuman concepts such as agency, embodiment, affect and desire, (de)territorialisations and assemblages. As music educators, we acknowledge the relationship between music and movement in early childhood, but our posthuman reading of the event enables a more equitable understanding of children’s music learning.

This article presents the psalm differentiae in the fifteenth-century Olivetan Psalter kept at the Łódź Archdiocesan Museum, the only book of this provenance that has been identified in Poland. The author identifies psalm differentiae and determines the degree to which they belong to the most widely applied euouae schemata in musical manuscripts and to what extent this book may contains euouae melodic variants without a correspondence in the chant tradition. The codex contains single psalm cadences which, if confirmed by further source research, may be considered original.

This article introduces the Voice Leaf, an outsider among Baschet’s numerous sound sculptures because of the use of the performative voice. Conceived in 1965 by French pioneers Bernard and François Baschet, the sculpture for voice consists of a stainless steel sheet folded as a leaf using origami technique. This article explores how voice and sculpture interplay acoustically by evaluating the voice’s agency and the sculpture’s aural dynamic gain. In this mutualist relationship, multiple senses are mobilised: aural, visual and haptic. The voice harboured in the sculptural leaf gains materiality and a resonance altered by the sculpture’s intrinsic properties. The article draws from conversations at the Structures Sonores Baschet Association open day with chairperson Pierre Cuffini and former workshop and acoustics research director Frédéric Fradet, as well as an interview with multidisciplinary artist and long-term collaborator of Bernard Baschet, Sophie Chénet.

This article considers Éliane Radigue and her use of the modular synthesiser, the ARP 2500, as a conduit for musical expression. It examines her seminal work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) and considers current reconnections to her work, including tribute concerts at the Electronic Music Education and Preservation Project, Philadelphia; Kali Malone’s 2022 album, Living Touch, which uses Radigue’s ARP 2500; and the author’s own experience of recording on the machine. As the article points out, these reconnections complement both electronic music compositional methodologies and their future direction. Radigue’s tactile and collaborative approach with the ARP 2500 is an interaction that embodies both the past and future.

This article assesses the state of research on the Tropologion of late antique Jerusalem. It is argued that the external and internal evidence points to a date of its redaction not before the later sixth century; this pertains both to the annual cycle, which presupposes the definitive introduction of Christmas in Jerusalem under emperor Justinian, and to the Oktoechos part of ordinary Sundays; also the famous chants for the veneration of the Cross, in part received in East and West, may be relatively late creations. While the reference of the book title to the ‘canon of the Anastasis’ implies a certain canonicity of the repertoire, its contents was subject to significant change; the role of particularly the Armenian tradition still requires further investigation. In any case, the history of the Hagiopolite Tropologion and its influence can only be written as a decidedly regional history.

This article is a discussion with supporting commentary, exploring the complex interplay and role of experimentation in various British Black music genres. We consider these as rich sources of cultural production, what we term the ‘Black Box’. As part of this Black Box discussion, we consider the researcher’s role in studying cultural production at global, national, regional and community levels. We critique the tendency of Western markets to both commodify and homogenise as well as raise concerns about perpetuating forms of neo-colonialism, especially with the increased importance of Africa, particularly styles such as afrobeats. Our discussion highlights the paradox of late corporate capitalism’s short-term focus, and we consider whether there is potential for a technological infrastructure to create genuine cultural and economic growth, that also challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American dominance of the music industry. Within this flux, the importance of experimentation and the emergence of micro-genres facilitated by the internet advances a global dispersal of new sounds. However, this diversity is shadowed by the continued relevance of major label structures and the role of streaming platforms in controlling and mediating artist–fan relationships.

This editorial examines the systemic exclusion of Black and South Asian artists from the field of experimental sound, highlighting the historical and institutional biases that have marginalised their contributions. While experimental sound is often framed as a universal, ethnically neutral practice, this narrative obscures the racial and cultural biases shaping the discipline. The marginalisation of these artists is not simply about visibility; it reflects deeper socio-cultural and institutional mechanisms that have historically sidelined their radical sonic innovations. This issue challenges the Eurocentric frameworks that dominate the discourse, drawing attention to the pioneering contributions of Black and South Asian musicians whose work expands the possibilities of experimental sound. By centring these voices, we aim to decolonise the field and offer a more inclusive understanding of experimental sound that recognises its global, diverse influences. Through contributions from artists and scholars, this issue explores how race, identity, and culture intersect within sonic experimentation, offering critical perspectives that question established narratives. Ultimately, this collection aims to reshape the future of experimental sound by amplifying underrepresented voices, advocating for a more equitable and representative sonic landscape that acknowledges the depth of contributions from historically marginalised communities.

Two of the most important creative stimuli for Edward Cowie throughout his composing life have been the natural world and working closely with performers, such as the BBC Singers and Kreutzer Quartet. Over the last four years, he and I have been in the studio recording his bird portrait duo cycles, and three geologically themed piano sonatas collectively titled Rock Music. Reflecting on this music and exploring, through my written correspondence with Cowie, how our outlooks align, offers insights into the relationship between music and the environment, particularly when forms and processes with such a rich history as the sonata are in the frame. The gap between the perspectives of performer and composer is also a lens through which salient interpretative matters can be perceived.

This article investigates the innovative pedagogical approaches and cultural integration of electroacoustic music in Papua, Indonesia, through the work of composer and educator Markus Rumbino. Born in 1989 in Jayapura, Papua, Rumbino is the first professional electroacoustic composer from eastern Indonesia. After returning to Jayapura in 2013 to join the Institute of Arts and Culture (ISBI) Tanah Papua, he faced unique challenges in a region where electroacoustic music is largely unfamiliar and often misunderstood. The study explores how Rumbino bridges Western music education with Indigenous Papuan sound environments to foster cultural identity and confidence among his students – primarily Indigenous from East Indonesia, including natives from the Papuan Highlands with limited formal musical training. Through detailed interviews and analysis, the article examines his innovative use of soundscape composition, listening exercises and soundwalk methodologies as pedagogical tools. By engaging students in critical listening and exploration of their local soundscapes, Rumbino reconnects them with their cultural heritage while introducing contemporary artistic expressions. Situating his methods within the broader context of soundscape literature and inclusive educational practices in electroacoustic music, this article highlights the transformative potential of integrating local soundscapes into music education. This contributes to discussions on culturally responsive teaching methods and the role of environmental sounds in fostering musical creativity.

This article explores an under-discussed and unclaimed conceptualisation of futurity that can be located within historical sound practices and sonic thoughts of the Indian subcontinent. In the 1950s and 1960s, this alternative sonic worldview influenced Western music and its sound pallet without credit. The intervention of this futurism in the Western model of music, sounding and listening was revolutionary, proliferating an alternate aesthesis of time, space and subjectivities in sound practices – with an emergent environmentality, manifesting arguably in the birth of ambient music and sounding arts and remodelling of sensing the world from a relational perspective. Yet, this sonic worldview, knowledge system and a radical sense of non-linear futurity were not recognised then. But the importance of the futurity can be appreciated today on the verge of multiple planetary crises. It is in this time and day that a futurist vision may provide a new sense of surviving for a posterity and generate a possibility of emancipation from the fear and loathing for a dystopian tomorrow, which is construed from a Western perspective entrenched in its rationality. How can we hear possible futures from perspectives of South Asia that have been marginalised in sonic epistemologies by an absence of voices, which could offer new grounds?