This article examines Joan La Barbara's role in New York's Downtown scene, where her career was nurtured. By ‘La Barbara's Downtown’ I mean her perspective on Downtown as reflected in where she performed, who she collaborated with and what she wrote. Beginning with her involvement in the Steve Reich and Philip Glass ensembles in the early 1970s, I follow her through explorations in improvisation with Frederick Rzewski, Garrett List and Charlie Morrow. At the centre is La Barbara's development as an experimentalist composer in various Downtown venues, reinforced by her important collaborations with Alvin Lucier and John Cage. She wrote about the Downtown scene in the SoHo Weekly News in the mid-1970s and after leaving New York continued to write about it in Musical America until the mid-1980s. In all these contexts, I explore the different elements of her experimentalism, which is the overriding thematic of her aesthetic.

Eight ‘listening sketches’ form the basis of an interview with experimental vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara. The conversation, a retrospective of La Barbara's compositions, is divided into four sections: Early experiments; Multi-track works; Words; New and recent works – pandemic times.

Joan La Barbara's involvement in the New Wilderness Preservation Band is an often cited but virtually unknown period of her history. And yet it may have been one of the most generative periods of her early career. Drawing upon archival documents, unreleased recordings and interviews, I narrate the history of the band, including La Barbara's early use of extended vocal techniques. I argue that her work in the band reflected a mode of collaborative authorship that is often lost in retellings of her history, and that her emergence in 1974 as a composer reflected a broader tension around authorship in bands and ensembles during these years.

This article explores Joan La Barbara's appearance on Sesame Street with ‘The Signing Alphabet’ (1977) to engage her artistic commitments to accessibility and collaboration. The piece is an alphabet song rendered through vocal improvisation against an animation of the American Manual Alphabet by Steve Finkin. It plays with the relationships between sound, alphabets, learning and literacy, reaching new listening publics: children and their caregivers. Through the visibility it offers Deaf culture, the work generates frames through which to hear La Barbara's voice and see the limitations of her vocal extensions. The piece reveals other paths for new music in the 1970s, placing La Barbara's creativity in the context of educational programing aimed at normalising difference, especially in the context of disability, race and class. Sesame Street and Joan La Barbara, I suggest, imbue vocal extension and exploration with an ethos of care.

This article explores Joan La Barbara's music-making in West Berlin in 1979 during her year as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm (the Artists’ Programme of the German Academic Exchange Service). It maps significant locations and describes the creative work she did at each site, arguing for inclusion of her musicking in the sonic imaginary of Cold War Berlin. It also posits the role of the Künstlerprogramm as akin to that of a sound designer, locating, distributing and spatialising her voice in the soundscape of the city.

A considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.