Every introduction requires a point of departure; let us take the world for a change. In recent decades, scholarly studies have underlined the fact that the degree of entanglement of natural and social phenomena makes it impossible to reduce them to isolated local configurations. Everything depends directly or indirectly on events, situations, and relationships that happen elsewhere at the same time, or have happened somewhere in the past. In the field of history, awareness of that fact has inspired efforts to move away from national histories, conceived as grand narratives of which each nation would be the main character, or even the only one deserving to be named. A comparable movement has led away from totalizing early studies of globalization, inherited from mythical and religious cosmogonies, often transposed into the intellectual field as philosophies of history. Connected histories, global history, and other currents in the social sciences now seek to observe socio-historical events at the macro level without losing sight of the complexities of the micro level, and dwell on the micro without neglecting its insertion in a broader context. Public concerns about climate change and the extinction of species have further stimulated the development of global studies in the perspective of the Anthropocene, which invites us to think about the interconnectedness of human and non-human societies at the planetary level. Some have even adopted the vision of Earth as a single living being, promoted by James Lovelock and Bruno Latour under the name of Gaia.Footnote ¹

Works of art have often been epistemological and practical gateways to understand such global connections, mostly because of their fundamental role in the production and reproduction of social imaginaries of identity and otherness. Since Antiquity – and even more so in the last centuries identified with Modernity – the contemplation of surprising and sometimes disturbing images from afar produced by visual artists of various genres, along with the listening to or reading of travel accounts rooted in both testimonies and fantasies of occasional or professional writers, have been a common – and at times exclusive – means of discovering distant places and peoples or, rather, their more or less realistic representations. Cultural productions have had a key role in shaping the imaginaries of colonization and decolonization, thus turning works of art into privileged sources for understanding how power classifies and hierarchizes the groupings of beings, human and non-human, as well as their typified environments. This logic of power was particularly instrumental whenever empires managed to stabilize, by way of symbolic and physical violence, the broader geographies of transnational domination. Hence the pertinence of a transnational socio-history of artistic professions, to cope with the inextricable web of imaginary, material, social, economic, and political interactions between actors of the art worlds in different regions of the globe. Throughout the history of the world, and in tune with the desires of cultural producers and their audiences, the arts have played an essential role in shaping cognitive appraisals of otherness as experiences of aesthetic enjoyment, experiences incorporated into everyday life through a whole range of cultural practices, from the most frivolous to the most solemn. In these multifarious cognitive, hedonic, and imaginary activities, the production of figures of the Other was as important as the staging of the producing subject itself, also including in many cases the relationship between the two, what is commonly referred to as an encounter.

Musicology and sound studies have participated in this process, developing specific modes to describe and analyse encounters between individuals, and between cultures. The voice of the producing subject, and the multiple transpositions of the subjective position in the formal economy of musical works, have been as crucial in the social life of music as the concomitant production of voices and sounds of the Other. In recent years, studies in ecomusicology have extended these inquiries to material and environmental conditions, occasionally following contemporary anthropology’s suggestion to suspend and criticize dominant ontological distributions of nature and culture.Footnote ² The growing intimacy between appraisals of the musical and appraisals of the sonic has reconfigured scrutiny of the sonic arts at large, as they evolve in institutional settings for pleasurable listening, and as they function as instruments of domination, control, and even torture.Footnote ³

Listening to music as a way of travelling, listening to have new experiences of space and time, travelling to listen to new real or imaginary beings, are all commonplaces with a very long history. One can even think of imaginary acoustic spaces such as Paradise – whose imaginary doors religions tried to open, with debatable success – or real sound spaces transfigured (that is, deformed) by the mediations of technology and the market, such as the ‘worlds’ sounded by World Music.Footnote ⁴ The cliché has even given place to advertising campaigns that promote classical music concerts and transatlantic flights side by side, as parallel ways to flee away from the uncomfortable political realities of Latin American countries.Footnote ⁵ A kind of ontological privilege of music as a means of transport resonates in the ancient notion that the power of sound on individuals is based on movement, namely the motion of the soul, inscribed in the very etymology of emotion. Thus, Roberto Ignacio Díaz writes in his recent Latin America and the Transports of Opera that ‘the various objects in the archive of Latin America and opera yield a rich story of transports – motion and emotions – sailing back and forth, literally and metaphorically, across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the Americas’.Footnote ⁶

Even if Díaz does not elaborate on it, his suggestion enriches the conversation about mobilities of listening by seriously engaging the idea that one can travel through music without ever leaving home, or even moving from one’s seat in the concert hall. Observation of music’s agency for producing and modulating emotions, favoured by the atmospheres of listening spacesFootnote ⁷ and by digital recommendation devices such as streaming platforms, might further contribute to the pragmatist sociology of emotions,Footnote ⁸ and to the critique of ‘emotional capitalism’.Footnote ⁹ Of course, music and musicians do move physically in space and time, as do the physical traces of what they perform and feel. The dynamic notion of static listening quite naturally connects with the observation of the physical displacements of listeners and the technologies that enable them, explored at the micro level by Michael Bull and other ethnographers of music in everyday life.Footnote ¹⁰ Building on investigations into the psychology of perception, we can sketch a typology of musical transports by distinguishing appraisals of sound and music in studies on migration and diasporas; soft power and cultural diplomacy; the environmental history of instruments and other sound technologies; transnational concert life and the economy of music performances and their recorded reproductions; the real and virtual circulation of topical imaginaries and multimodal aesthetic objects; and the dissemination of ideas about sound, music, and the listening experience. Needless to say, this list is not exclusive.

Within the framework of this rather unlimited field of study, to which we have personally contributed from quite different perspectives,Footnote ¹¹ our take here is more historical than ethnographic. As its title makes clear, this special issue of Twentieth-Century Music is characterized by the notion of ‘transatlantic encounters’. The following articles explore how music was created, performed, perceived, discussed, and/or understood throughout different kinds of such encounters, occurring throughout the twentieth century. To reflect on contacts across the Atlantic Ocean, we focus on actors such as musicians, composers, critics, politicians, and audiences, as well as on music works and musical practices that originated in such relations, performed them, and/or represented them. Thus, we seek to enrich existing conversations in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music history, where encounters have been analysed through mobility,Footnote ¹² transnational,Footnote ¹³ border,Footnote ¹⁴ migration,Footnote ¹⁵ and global studies.Footnote ¹⁶ It should come as no surprise that the map for studying encounters closely resembles that for studying transport.

In practice, the idea for this special issue stemmed from a conference on transatlantic encounters between European and Latin American music and musicians, held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in September 2023. At this event, the convening theme was the encounter between people and sounds geographically bound to Western Europe and some countries of Latin America.Footnote ¹⁷ However, the presentations and the ensuing debates made it clear to us that these limits were inadequate, and that it was necessary to broaden the geographical spectrum. Events in such regions of the world could not be dissociated from what was happening in other areas, particularly Africa. The infamous vortex of Africa’s connection with the Americas and Europe was of course the history of slavery, understood as an extreme and systemic form of colonial domination.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, the tripartition between continents may be reductionist, given the shifting power dynamics between North and South America, and their variable connections with parts of Europe and Africa. In The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850, editors Canny and Morgan state that ‘the dominant Eurocentric model is challenged by essays that demonstrate the persistent influence over their destinies exercised by Native Americans and Africans until well into the eighteenth century. Received wisdom is therefore modified in light of the better appreciation of the part played by Native Americans and Africans in shaping the course of events’.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, it became necessary for our current project to potentially include all relations framed across the Atlantic, and even those whose theatre is the Atlantic Ocean itself, no longer considered as an abstract interface between worlds purely continental, or even terrestrial, in character, but taken as a stage for encounters on its own liquid ground.Footnote ²⁰

Although everyday usage tends to favour a constructive and peaceful notion of encounter, whether between people or between cultures, the term is in fact polysemic. In the following articles, encounter is meant to designate a wide range of phenomena, from fruitful intercultural exchanges to downward cultural domination, including different forms of incomprehension, opportunistic behaviour, and conflict. With that in mind, in this issue we try to understand how certain encounters shaped ways of making and understanding music and sound. Indeed, the term ‘encounter’ is not only intended to refer to moments of coexistence between people, but also to designate contacts with other kinds of beings, objects, and entities.

By so doing, we intend to contribute to a debate on the notion of encounter itself, ongoing in the social sciences, especially in anthropologyFootnote ²¹ and geography.Footnote ²² For instance, Faier and Rofel usefully define encounters as ‘engagements across difference: a chance meeting, a sensory exchange, an extended confrontation, a passionate tryst’, which they analyse through ‘ethnographies of encounter’ in order to show how ‘meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things’.Footnote ²³ Also, historian Cécile Vidal thinks that the term encounter is apt but must be handled with care, since it

Encounters operate over time in different ways. Transatlantic encounters between individuals and peoples have been going on at least since the European colonization of the Americas and Africa, and subsequent migrations have further contributed to their multiplication. The literature on the music produced in the context of British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonization necessarily implied some broad notion of transatlantic encounter, without always avoiding the reproduction of colonial and ethnocentric discourses. The birth of American nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped shape new collective identities and differences on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually giving way to nationalist discourses on local arts and culture, as well as to new opportunities for transnational interactions. This process crystallized during the twentieth century in intense transatlantic artistic exchanges, that even the two World Wars did not totally interrupt, rather on the contrary. For instance, the booming of jazz in Europe following the arrival of U.S. troops during the Great War has still a paradigmatic, indeed legendary status, as an emblem of what a cultural encounter is in the first place. We can also mention the impact of networks of exiled musicians who, crossing the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas since the Spanish Civil War through the Second World War, often made substantial contributions to local musical life and institutions.Footnote ²⁵ Now, our current positioning in the twenty-first century, characterized among other things by enhanced awareness and expanded practice of global interconnections, transports, and encounters, might allow sketching an encompassing perspective on how the twentieth century unfolded in that respect. This is one of the aims of the present special issue, in which the articles are arranged mostly in chronological order, even though the temporalities they explore are broad and often intersecting.

The first essay, by Fanny Gribenski, situates us within the history of piano manufacturing through a close study of the marketing of ivory extracted from Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – particularly in enclaves such as Zanzibar – and its sale and distribution in Europe, which eventually extended to piano manufacturing in the United States. By highlighting the relationships among subjects, objects, and commodities, the author shows the complex material interconnections linking transatlantic spaces, traced through the ecological history of a commodity that became increasingly costly as the resource was depleted over time and global demand for pianos accelerated.

In the following article, Eduardo Muñoz explores the case of Chilean composer and musicologist Carlos Lavín (1883–1962), showing how transatlantic relationships emerge through the influence of Western European scientific knowledge on the representation of Indigenous Mapuche music. Lavín’s education in Germany and France shaped his anthropological construction of an Indigenous Other belonging to the same nation as himself, namely Chile, and provided him with the language to incorporate their sonic representations into his music. In fact, Muñoz describes Lavín’s encounter not only with his European colleagues, but also with the Mapuche, mediated by recordings housed in the Phonographic Archive of the Psychology Laboratory in Berlin. By attributing to the Mapuche a kind of ‘chromatic’ music, Lavín posited their ‘superiority’ over other forms of ‘pre-Columbian’ music (especially that of the Incas), thus positioning Chile as culturally pre-eminent within South America in the eyes of key figures in Europe’s artistic circles.

Violeta Nigro Giunta investigates how Latin America came to be understood and disseminated through a radio series produced by Orson Welles and sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs. Her text offers us a mediated vision of Latin American music and sounds under the guise of cultural diplomacy during the Second World War. The author reveals the dissonance between Welles’s portrayals of Latin America and the southern continent’s realities as an effort to instil a sense of Pan Americanism among U.S. citizens while also serving as counter-propaganda against the Axis in the ‘rest’ of the Americas. This dual function operated as a form of cultural diplomacy – or rather, as a mode of exerting soft power.

Kira Alvarez presents an evolving field of tensions among the United States, Europe, and the Middle East through the musico-political activities of violinist Bronislaw Huberman (1882–1947). After being a prominent voice in Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa movement during the interwar-period, Huberman embraced Zionism and became a key figure in the founding of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936 – later renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1948. The author demonstrates how economic realities – such as a booming United States contrasted with an impoverished Europe – affected the cultural consumption of classical music and favoured the American model within a new migratory context. This context transformed the Palestinian territory into a utopian or idealized space where Jewish migrants, suffering from antisemitism and persecuted by the Nazi regime, could find what Huberman, in a Eurocentric formulation, called a ‘European oasis in Asia’.

Ana María Ochoa traces a history of oceanic auralities and biopower relations spanning nearly a century, as audio surveillance of the sea began in the 1930s and intensified during the Second World War and the Cold War. The U.S. Navy’s SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) – a listening device or ‘passive sonar’ – and the subsequent SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) – a sound-producing device – were instruments of imperial domination that reshaped the ocean’s auralities, with ecological implications emerging at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thus, a space once conceived for maritime crossing was transformed into a site of confrontation – or, rather, of encounter – with radical consequences that persist to this day.

Hernán Vázquez explores the experimental music scene of Argentina in the late 1960s, a period marked by the country’s political dictatorship and U.S. surveillance. The latter managed to slip through the interstices of cultural practices, as evidenced by the Rockefeller Foundation’s patronage of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute – a place of encounter among artists from Latin America, Europe, and North America, who were brought to Buenos Aires. Vázquez focuses on the creation and activities of the Grupo de Experimentación Musical led by the composer Gerardo Gandini, and how Gandini and other members of the group found inspiration for other ways of musical experimentation through their encounters with European and North American musicians, thus producing a unique set of contributions and exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic.

Carolyne Sumner traces a bleak picture of twentieth-century Canadian art music composers, whose work remained practically unknown beyond the country’s borders, and describes how, in the 1970s, the Cultural Affairs Division of the federal government’s Department of External Affairs promoted Canadian contemporary music in Europe. After detailing musical events that took place in Rome, London, and Paris, Sumner explains that these failed to give Canadian composers a sense of equal status with their European counterparts, as European audiences grounded their listening in the expectation of a supposedly ‘Canadian’ sound that never materialized. However, despite the distrust of most artists and art institutions, Canadian diplomats saw their efforts as a success in terms of establishing cultural exchanges and sparking broader interest in Canadian culture in France and Great Britain, with special emphasis given to French–English bilingualism, and no attention paid to indigenous cultures.

From these texts, some tentative connections can be drawn based on differentiated forms of encounters. For instance, a comparable configuration of social imaginaries appears in the encounters analysed by Muñoz – where, through Carlos Lavín’s agency, European epistemologies are associated with Mapuche sonorities – and in the (de)formed imaginaries of twentieth-century art music that Sumner identifies in the absence of Canadian art musicians from the Western musical canon. In turn, Sumner and Vázquez address the subalternity of non-European academic modernist musicians in the Canadian and Argentinean contexts of the 1960s and 1970s – a subalternity not necessarily linked to ethnic or racial differences. It is no coincidence that some of their American actors encounter the same European counterparts, notably the Italian group Nuova Consonanza, among others.

The contexts examined by Gribenski, Alvarez, Vázquez, and Ochoa, are further characterized by political violence. In Alvarez’s study of Huberman’s trajectory, the migration of Jewish musicians to Palestine and the founding of the State of Israel have as a background antisemitic and Nazi persecution, up to the Holocaust. In turn, Vázquez’s article on Argentina’s musical avant-garde displays crossroads between Latin American and European musicians occurring under a dictatorship responsible for cultural policies of censorship and crude ideological persecution.

Alvarez and Nigro Giunta situate their stories during a long period of intensive cultural diplomacy, in which the United States dominated other cultural, political, and economic actors/spaces. In that context, perhaps unsurprisingly, cultural diplomacy proved successful for the United States, as Nigro Giunta reveals through the various cultural policies pursued by the Pan-American politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government during the Second World War, but less so for Canada, as shown by Sumner’s account of the mixed reception of Canadian composers in Europe in the 1970s. Their texts focus on real interactions between human actors evolving under unstable political conditions, which nevertheless allow for rapid and sometimes radical transformations of transnational music artworlds and patterns of consumption.

In Gribenski’s and Ochoa’s studies, the scope is extended to destructive encounters of humans with animals – namely, elephants killed for their ivory and whales lethally injured by military sonic technology. In both cases, human ears brought about irreversible consequences for the environment, far from the major cities and other populated areas where musical instruments were built, performed, and enjoyed – far from the imperial centres of political and military power. While Gribenski’s story unfolds across a long chain of trade operations originating in the plains of colonial African territories, Ochoa literally and metaphorically immerses us in sound waves moving through a transoceanic submarine space also marked by colonization and violence.

Altogether, the texts in this special issue open new perspectives for understanding transatlantic sonic and musical encounters in the twentieth century.