This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.

Orchestral colour can be read as an important part, both literally and metaphorically, of Theodor W. Adorno's approach to Mahler. Adorno's examples of ‘breakthrough’, ‘suspension’ and ‘fulfilment’ show that timbre, traditionally considered largely irrelevant to music's deep structure, plays a significant role in his conception of Mahlerian form. For Adorno, these musical relationships resonated strongly with his post-Second World War concern for the plight of the outsider within the homogenizing bounds of modern society.

Taking into account the sources now available at the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice, this article first looks at Nono's serial masterpiece Il canto sospeso (1955–6) in its historical context, both in Germany and in Italy. Having outlined the political circumstances and aesthetic premisses, the article goes on to provide a detailed analysis of the serial technique employed. Particular attention is paid to a technique of pitch permutation that explains the pitch structures of several movements, hitherto not fully understood. Each of the nine movements is examined in view of a better understanding of the work's expressive qualities and in order to show the underlying formal and compositional relationships.