George Rochberg often attributed his postmodern shift to the death of his son in 1964. Accordingly, the literature has described his practice of ars combinatoria (“art of combination”) as an “abrupt about-face”—a sudden rejection of modernist aesthetics. But the composer's unpublished essays, diaries, correspondence, and musical sketchbooks suggest that the road to ars combinatoria had well-laid roots in two of his least considered biographical periods: his service during World War II and his serial period. During these two decades, Rochberg actively sought positive models for humanistic composition, historical figures who rose to the level of musical heroes in that they served humanity through their art. But as the war had taught him, heroes are necessarily defined by their struggle against nemeses in ethical conflicts. Correspondingly, he constructed the other side of the artistic world as a realm of vain egoists who sought self-promotion and seemed unconcerned with humanistic modes of expression. As his ideas matured, Rochberg assigned different figures to these archetypes, but the guiding ethical criteria remained fairly consistent throughout. I therefore argue that ars combinatoria was less a sudden aesthetic reversal than it was the result of a longer cumulative process of self-assessment and compositional maturation.

In 1941, Paramount released There's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents position There's Magic in Music as a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power. There's Magic in Music thus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.

During the 1950s and ’60s, many composers began exploring the possibilities provided by commercially available magnetic tape recording and electronically produced sound. In Latin America, the most successful early electroacoustic studio was hosted at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), part of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This article chronicles the eight years of existence of CLAEM's Laboratorio de música electrónica (1964–1971), and its role in the training of composers hailing from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and the United States. This historical account of pioneering Latin American electroacoustic music provides insight into the aesthetic and technical developments that earned the laboratory at CLAEM a place in the regional and transnational world of contemporary music making and demonstrates the crucial role of locality in the adoption, consumption, and rearticulation of international musical models.