From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, American experimental musicians like Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma employed complex and idiosyncratic technological systems to produce and capture acoustic resonance for aesthetic appreciation. Although this shared exploration exhibited many of the hallmarks of a genuine research project, scholars of experimental music have long been wary of claims that there is anything particularly scientific about this music, frequently comparing its informality unfavorably with the rigor and empiricism of the individual scientific experiment. However, historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has long held that the fundamental working unit of scientific research is not the individual experiment, but what he terms the experimental system: The loose coherence of objects, instruments, and technologies through which research questions are materialized over time. I argue that Rheinberger's framework of the experimental system offers a compelling way of understanding the experimentation that catalyzed the emergence of what has come to be known as “resonance aesthetics” in American experimental music. By focusing on the material links of musicians’ activities, the experimental system illuminates how knowledge was produced and circulated within and between vastly different musical performances. Rheinberger's characterization of successful research also informs a more nuanced conception of virtuosity in experimental music. Finally, this framework is an opportunity to re-evaluate the status of sound as an object of epistemological inquiry, akin to what Rheinberger describes as an “epistemic thing.” In theorizing epistemic sound as both contextual and emergent, I re-evaluate musicians’ approaches to spontaneity and improvisation in musical performance.

On May 12, 1983, New York City Ballet became the first major ballet company to perform a work to minimalist music: Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces, titled after its score by Philip Glass. The premiere came at a turning point for both minimalism and ballet. The dance world was reeling in the wake of the death of choreographer George Balanchine. Simultaneously, minimalist music was in the process of moving from countercultural avant-garde venues to wealthy, high-status institutions. Although previously minimalist music had helped postmodern choreographers create works that celebrated everyday movement and equality among dancers, for Robbins minimalist music conjured a sense of urban propulsion. In each of the ballet's first two sections, Robbins choreographed to Glass's music in two ways simultaneously: A group from the corps de ballet used the egalitarian techniques from postmodern dance to create a modern urban backdrop, while another group of soloists used virtuosic techniques from modernist ballet. This allowed audiences to shift their focus at any given moment between the anonymity of the corps and the heroic subjectivity of the soloists. In the third section of Glass Pieces, Robbins staged a virtuosic group dance for the corps de ballet, using Glass's exoticist music for Akhnaten to create an escape from the relentless modernity of the first two sections. Altogether, I argue that Glass Pieces is one of the earliest works of contemporary ballet and an important step in minimalist music's transition from its earlier heyday as a music representing countercultural egalitarianism to one representing the modern city.

Latin American and Latinx composers continue to contribute to music by bringing a subtle universe of sounds shaped by their agency and cultural history. Composer Max Lifchitz (b. 1948) bridges his artistic output with entrepreneurship and pedagogy. Since migrating from Mexico to the United States, Lifchitz has constructed a multifaceted persona as a cultural broker. As a composer, Lifchitz's self-defined eclecticism forms the basis of his musical voice, which reconciles opposites and flows between contrasting compositional aesthetics, cultures, and techniques. In 1980, he created the North/South Consonance organization, which has been an open and anti-canonical space for composers from different aesthetics, traditions, and ethnic and gender identities to share their works with new music audiences. In Lifchitz's role as a pedagogue, he positions music as a pluriversal tool to generate epistemological equity and inclusion and a more intercultural educational experience. Despite his contributions to contemporary Western art music, his impact on new music has not yet been studied. Therefore, the article's purpose is to examine Lifchitz's extensive and complex contributions from a transmodern theoretical perspective as postulated by philosopher Enrique Dussel (b. 1934) to demonstrate how the composer's music and persona represent qualities of this philosophical theory and promote the redefinition of art music and the musician's role in the twenty-first century.

The 1746 Ephrata Codex, a 972-page music manuscript in the Library of Congress, is the central document of this study, which locates and identifies several eighteenth-century composers who were solitary sisters and brothers of the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Ephrata was an insular, mainly celibate, Pietist, Sabbatarian, ascetic community, which, at its height in the 1740s and 1750s, was home to approximately 300 individuals. Like many German diaspora societies in colonial Pennsylvania, it produced devotional prints and manuscripts. Ephrata is unique because most of its spiritual texts and music were written by and for its inhabitants. More than 130 extant Ephrata music manuscripts in libraries, archives, and collections in the United States and United Kingdom comprise a corpus of over 1,500 hymns, composed according to rules mandated in an original music theory treatise. The concept of authorship at Ephrata was complicated: Communal creative activity frequently existed alongside calls for individual recognition, evidenced by name attributions found in printed hymnals and music manuscripts. The solitary sisters’ agency and creative activity at Ephrata brings an added nuance to the discussion of authorship and credit, drawing attention to the contributions of women as creators, a notable exception to the male-dominated sieve of music history. The 2020 release of Voices in the Wilderness, an album of new Ephrata hymn transcriptions, is connected to this article. Recorded in the Ephrata Meetinghouse, or “Saal,” the room for which the music was composed, it provides a new perspective on Ephrata's composers, compositional methods, and performance practice.