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The Ivy‐League pedigrees of many of the Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) composers seems to contradict their anarchic‐Marxist musical activities in Rome during the late 1960s. Influenced by the live‐electronic improvisations of John Cage and David Tudor, the Italian network of avant‐garde composers, and the intense collective work of The Living Theater, these self‐exiled Americans (including Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and Jon Phetteplace) developed a radical approach to free improvisation during a time of political and social turmoil in Europe. Joining forces in Rome in 1966, they performed throughout Europe during the late 1960s and gained influence as an intensely politicized underground model for musical action. MEV soon made the journey from performing compositions to provoking free sonic rituals where artists and audiences made music with any means available.

This chapter tracks the further demise of Pan Americanism via nueva canción, a folkloric, often anti-U.S. genre popular in cold war Latin America. It also attracted the U.S. composer and Marxist sympathizer Frederic Rzewski, whose fifty-minute virtuosic piano piece, 36 Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” reflects the values of nueva canción despite having been premiered under the auspices of the U.S. Bicentennial. Unlike Copland’s El salón México or Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, The People United commemorates one of the bleakest moments in U.S.–Latin American relations: the CIA-assisted coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. Applying theories of Freud and Paul Ricoeur reveals that the work’s unusual formal structure explicates processes of memory and forgetting, both central concerns in Latin America today. Memory and forgetting are also germane to the historiography of Latin American music in the United States, which has largely forgotten sameness-embracing in favor of fetishizing difference.

In 1969, saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins were Paris-bound, joining an exodus of Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians members. While in Paris, friendships developed with Ornette Coleman who welcomed them to his New York loft Artists House upon their return to the United States. Braxton’s shared affinities with the improvisational collective Musica Elettronica Viva-- from John Cage to John Coltrane--led to a joint American tour. Braxton subsequently accompanied Miles Davis’s drummer Jack DeJohnette to hear Davis band members Chick Corea and Dave Holland with Barry Altschul at the Village Vanguard. This followed a concert in New York by Braxton, Jenkins and friends. After Braxton Braxton sat in the trio expanded to form Circle.