The fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–91) had a profound impact on economic, socio-political, and cultural conditions in Cuba during the 1990s. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’. Increasing dire economic conditions on the island led to many changes that impoverished cultural life, including the relocation of composers in Europe, the United States, and other countries in the Americas. The situations encountered by composers who migrated to Europe varied, depending on generational differences and on the dynamics of the socio-political and cultural powers to which each of them were exposed in their new reception contexts. Whether adopting an uncontested identification with the new cultural milieu or resorting to discursive strategies of appropriation and de/re-territorialized negotiation, this text centres on the compositional journeys of four Cuban composers who settled in different European cities: Leo Brouwer (Córdoba, Spain); Eduardo Morales-Caso (Madrid); Keyla Orozco (Amsterdam); and Louis Aguirre (Aalborg, Denmark). Each case represents an invaluable experience of aesthetic reconstruction in a new creative territory that, by its own transterritoriality, has in turn enriched the sonic map of the Caribbean island.

This article studies a group of nineteen Argentinean composers who settled in Paris between 1970 and 2000. In addition to social and political factors of Argentine history – including the last military dictatorship (1976–83) and the 1989 period of ‘hyperinflation’ (1989) – these composers wanted to develop their careers in a professional field with the history, size, and diversity of Paris. Since the 1970s, France began a strong state policy supporting the arts; this action promoted a process of internationalization of Paris's artistic life. Contemporary music was viewed by participants and creators as an open and cosmopolitan space. Although the paradigm of autonomy suggests that nationality is less relevant than the individuality of each composer, the latter continues to function as an identity marker and, therefore, as a classification strategy both in France and in Argentina.

Between 1971 and 1989, fifteen editions of the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea (Latin American Contemporary Music Courses) took place alternatively in five countries of the continent. These were intensive meetings concentrated in two weeks, consisting of classes, workshops, seminars, conferences, and concerts. One of the central concerns was contemporary art music composition, although an important space was also given to performance, technologies, innovative pedagogies, popular music, and musicology. Around 150 lecturers from different countries took part in the courses, among them, about forty-five were European. On the one hand, the courses aimed at providing updated information on contemporary international musical life. On the other hand, they encouraged its critical evaluation in relation to the history, culture, and concrete practices of Latin American musicians. This article analyses exchanges between Latin American and European musicians regarding compositional techniques, theoretical perspectives, repertoires, aesthetics, and ideological positions during the 1974 and 1977 editions of the Cursos.

After the Second World War, cultural politics has become a central medium for international relations. Owing to the particular conditions of their development, the relations between Latin America and Europe constituted an interesting case study in which the positioning of different nations in the realm of two competing political systems and the politics of memory concerning the recent war are intertwined. This article highlights five ‘moments’ in West Germany with respect to the relationship between Europe and Latin America in the field of music: the papers of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Berlin Festival week, the Darmstadt summer courses, the DAAD Berlin Artists Program, and the Horizonte Festival in Berlin. These sources invite an observation as to how – from the perspective of cultural politics – contrasting notions of the ‘international’ have tended to ‘fade out’ after the end of Cold War polarizations, leading to a more or less common acceptance of a notion of the ‘global’ as a privileged concept in contemporary cultural debates.

Created in 1984, the Anacrusa Music Association organized concerts, workshops, and festivals of contemporary music in Chile during the last years of Pinochet's military dictatorship. Crucial for these events was the collaboration with the Goethe-Institute Santiago, which enabled a space for free expression within the repressive context of the dictatorship. This article explores the circulation and reception of musical works by Chilean composers living in exile performed in the 1985, 1987, and 1989 Anacrusa festivals. The trajectories of the pieces by three main figures of the politically engaged avant-garde of the 1960s – Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Sergio Ortega, and Fernando García – can be seen as a transfer process that involved the goals of West German cultural diplomacy in Chile, as well as the interaction between Anacrusa organizers, Latin American colleagues, and performers who returned from exile.

Despite the attention given to the transnational circulation of Andean music, its reception and adoption by European musicians have been rarely researched. This article focuses on the specific case of Italy, where the Andean music boom blended with that of the New Chilean Song in exile (1973–89) and where, in addition, repertoires and practices of both musics were adopted by dozens of local groups formed by young Italians. Those Italian groups – with their performative strategies and their choices of repertoires – provide a privileged lookout about how different representations of the andeaneity (the Nueva Canción Chilena with its ethical and political connotations, the musique des Andes of the French matrix, the autóctonas indigenist currents) interacted in creating an Italian imagery of the Andes. They also suggest how the adoption of ‘someone else's music’ can act, with its transcultural complexity, in the elaboration of personal narratives of identity.

Latin American folkloric-popular music had an impact on the music scenes of both Germanies, where singer-songwriters emerged and became interested in Chilean Nueva Canción, the Argentinian Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero, and Cuban Nueva Trova in the 1970s. Particularly interesting in this context is the contact of some Latin American countries with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on translation theory and articles on Nueva Canción in Europe, this article examines the Latin American presence at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin and analyses some publications that focus on this annual event. The article focuses on the singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne, who during the 1980s, took Nicaragua as a political example, as is shown in songs, and who also composed German lyrics to melodies by Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Silvio Rodríguez, transferring the songs into a new context.

This article focuses on one of the earliest truly international Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals: the Eclipse Rave in Arica, in the Chilean Atacama Desert in November 1994. As a collaboration of mainly German and Chilean individuals, the event was confronted with a multitude of organizational obstacles and problems of intercultural understanding. Nevertheless, the event has now achieved a kind of cult status and is mythologized as the breakthrough moment of EDM culture in South America. Drawing on German and Chilean sources, the article sheds light on the background and impact of the festival and discusses the important role of Chilean-German exiles as interpreters and cultural mediators within EDM scenes. This contribution questions the types of sources that festivals and similar events generate, and consequently asks how an international history of the event-based and present- and history-obsessed EDM culture could be written at all.