This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities of performing in ruins from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Haiti. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, this forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of post-catastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance.

The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los Angeles shortly after the earthquake. One performance of this work takes place far from the site of ruin, voiced by distant observers. The other performance happens in Haiti, sung by its survivors. Both performances transform rubble into ruin.

This article explores how Marshallese radiation songs, written during and after the nuclear testing period as nuclear survivors tried to make sense of their sufferings, yield insight into processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by resounding the powerful impress of radioactive decay in Marshallese lives. In assessing the parameters through which radiation becomes sensible, how, and to whom, it becomes all the clearer how the US nuclear project can be considered in terms of ‘imperial ruination’. US geopolitical accrual has depended on the structural dispossession of Marshallese from their Indigenous agency rooted in and routed through their matrilineal culture. Focusing on women's performances from the Rongelapese community, the presence of radiation – lyrically and affectively – can be traced through vocalized moments of decay that intimate how rubble is embodied and shared in the aftermath of nuclear destruction.

The dual theatre complex of the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart sustained serious damage during the Second World War. While the larger theatre was eventually able to be repaired, the smaller theatre was destroyed, leading to a multi-phased and controversial process to determine how best to replace it. Many of Stuttgart's citizens publicly pleaded that the smaller theatre should be reconstructed according to its original design, in order to restore its historical beauty and its integrity with the complex. The company's Intendant and numerous architects, however, took a more modern approach that manifested in a variety of proposed designs, including that by Hans Volkart, which opened in 1962. Countering the binary represented by ‘faithful reconstruction’ on one end (Vienna, Munich) and by completely modern designs on the other (West Berlin, Cologne), the case of Stuttgart perhaps serves as a better metaphor for the compromises of continuity and change in post-war culture.

During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.

The transformation of rubble into aestheticized ruins turns on the relation of aesthetics, politics, and power alongside questions of memory, imagination, and embodiment. Working outward from this suggestive confluence, I investigate contemporary practices of commemorative composition that resituate elements of the historical archive, and so turn sonic rubble into ruin. Using Mary Kouyoumdjian's 2014 composition Bombs of Beirut as an example, I consider how the composer uses witness testimony and archival recordings of wartime sounds from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) to first construct, and then destroy, a version of the city of Beirut. In so doing, she engages in what Marianne Hirsch would call a ‘postmemorial act’ that reconfigures the relationships between physical, mental, and social spaces. The resulting palimpsest of meanings not only offers an important contemplative space for approaching the past but also suggests intriguing futures for the musical art of the ruin.

A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios.

Einojuhani Rautavaara's international fame rests largely on pieces celebrated for their apparently non-modernist accessibility. Cantus Arcticus – Concerto for Birds and Orchestra (1972) is greeted with suspicion on account of its wide appeal. This article reconsiders this piece in the context of his complicated and original stylistic development and re-evaluates its relation to Finnish nature and culture. By examining the intersections of nationalism, landscape, and modernism in a late twentieth-century piece, this discussion builds upon established research on early twentieth-century Nordic repertoire, applying it to this contemporary context. It also finds a new perspective by supplementing that approach to include more recent scholarship on post-war tonality. As a result, new insights into musical form and a post-serial renewal of tonal thinking emerge, and through its unique synthesis of seemingly diverse elements, Cantus Arcticus can be seen as a milestone work within Rautavaara's stylistic evolution.

The 2014 film Whiplash depicts successful jazz drumming as an athletic exhibition of speed and endurance, in a manner that reflects its protagonist's idolization of Buddy Rich (1917–87). The crowd-pleasing virtuosity of Rich and Whiplash has drawn critics’ ire, but this article interrogates the ideas of musical authenticity that underpin their complaints, and offers a more productive analysis of the film's drum kit performances and their inspiration, informed by a range of jazz, film, and performance scholarship. Specific attention is drawn to the performances’ visual attractions. Whiplash's fast editing style and shots of exertion – grimacing, sweat, blood – give non-expert viewers a sense of drumming's physical and mental demands, and much the same is true of Rich's exaggerated movements and expressions, whether seen live or (as is commonly the case) amplified by a screen's mediation.

Part of the United Kingdom's national reconstruction following the Second World War was reforming its self-image as a global power in light of imperial decline. This recasting took place across political and cultural spheres and emphasized the Commonwealth, idealized as a friendly collection of current and former colonies linked by British culture. In this article, I demonstrate how music broadcasting functioned as a site of diplomacy, using white, middle-class taste for light entertainment to reinforce British values at the Empire's twilight. I focus on musical depictions of the Commonwealth on the BBC radio programme Commonwealth of Song. Using archival records, I reconstruct debates concerning Commonwealth representation and its importance to British citizens. I argue that Commonwealth of Song was a site of testing and reformulating new sonic constructions of globally minded ‘Britishness’ in the 1950s, yet conflicting messaging about what musics and people should represent the Commonwealth led to a lukewarm reception.