In September 1974 a group of musicians came together in Paris to perform at meetings to mark the first anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The group took the name ¡Karaxú! which is variously translated in performance as ‘to go forward’ or as ‘a war cry’. In fact ¡Karaxú! is a Quechuasied version of the spanish carajo which colloquially can be loosely translated as ‘bugger off’ but in fact means grito de couraje y de rebeldía (a cry of courage and rebellion). This analysis focuses specifically on a set of performances by ¡Karaxú! which took place in the United Kingdom some five years later during 1978 and 1979. It differs from other studies of the music of Chilean exiles and indeed other approaches to modern urban musical concerts by focusing on the concert performance as a whole entity. I analyse the music in performance, providing an analytical framework abstracted from participant observation work with the musicians, and focusing on the negotiation of meaning through the organisation of repertoire into a performance structure.

The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love's truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the designation of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, they nonetheless express worlds which exclude us and which the beloved will not and cannot make us know … Love's signs … are deceptive signs which can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts which give them a meaning. They do not excite superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved's lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love's signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies. His fate is expressed in the motto: to love without being loved. (Deleuze 1973)

When Joe S. James, a southern singing school teacher, brought out his edition of the long-lived shape-note hymnal The Sacred Harp in 1911, he stated rather forcefully that his readers would find ‘but few of the twisted rills and trills of the unnatural snaking of the voice’ which he had heard while in the company of those yet untutored in the art of singing by note – or ‘regular singing’, as it had been called (James 1911, p. iii). It was not the first time the ‘old way’ of singing and its ‘rills and trills’ had found a critic among champions of some form of the Western European music system, nor would it be the last. Indeed, the history of the quarrel has shown that if there is anything more intransigent than the old way of singing, it is the accompanying opprobrium spread by a musical élite convinced of the superiority of the diatonic system and all that is extrapolated from it.