In 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

Taking its theoretical orientation from Sherry Ortner's distinction between ‘power’ and ‘projects’, this article considers the relationship between local artistic projects and the cultures in which they participate. I focus on Pleasure Garden, a collaborative project that spans site-specific installations, concerts and an album. Exploring a wide range of issues at stake in the creative process, including collaboration, gender, aesthetics, colonialism, the work concept, and commodification, I trace how Pleasure Garden’s creators variously reproduced and reworked dominant conventions, while at the same time pursuing their own distinctive commitments. Through this, I argue that Pleasure Garden’s creators negotiated a space that was inside, yet sometimes out of alignment with what I call the ‘cultures of creativity’ associated with Western art music, the music industries, late capitalism, and neoliberalism. This highlights both the powerful forces affecting musicians today and the possibilities for making things otherwise.

Like all of Maurice Ravel's compositions, the virtuosic violin piece Tzigane, styled rapsodie de concert by the composer, rapidly became a mainstay of the concert repertory following its premiere with piano by the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi in April 1924 in London (her premiere of the orchestral version occurred in Paris on 30 November 1924 with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Colonne Orchestra). Yet, despite its popularity, no critic has included it among Ravel's major works. Reflections on Tzigane in the secondary musicological literature are very few indeed, which is somewhat surprising in the context of a new explosion of interest in Ravel. In his recent biography, Roger Nichols avers that ‘probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music’. Robert Orledge noted in 2000 that it ‘has never been among Ravel's most successful works’, a remark surely meant as a critique of the composition rather than a statement about its popularity with performers, which has been considerable. Alexis Roland-Manuel, a close friend of the composer, did not even discuss the piece in his biography of 1938. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, another close friend and consultant about the virtuoso figuration in Tzigane, confessed almost apologetically in her book on Ravel that ‘this rhapsodic piece is perhaps the only one in Ravel's oeuvre where I cannot locate – hidden in the intricacies of its tours de force – Ravel's characteristic flavour: in it, music has surrendered too much place to instrumental acrobatics’. In other words, she appears to suggest that Tzigane is a mere showpiece where Ravel's personal style has been eclipsed by fireworks, with an implicit criticism of pandering to market. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti spoke of the ‘resistance I always felt towards this brilliant and (to my mind) synthetically produced pastiche of Ravel's’. At the time of the premiere, the young Henri Sauguet told Francis Poulenc that ‘the aesthetic informing these pages is so antiquated that I am astonished anyone can still believe in it’.

This article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogotá-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works on the topic, this article traces how this collaboration has circulated on local, national, and transnational scales and theorizes the different discourses of music, race, and nation that emerge from it. Using recent critiques by thinkers of colour to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the idea of the racial assemblage and put it in dialogue with contributions to critical geography by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as well as current music scholarship from Latin America and the global north to build a interdisciplinary study that thinks embodied musicking in place.