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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 presents an interview with Michelangelo Zurletti. It covers topics such as the split that took place between music theory and practice; whether the Italian conditions, the rare opportunities for work, force potential researchers to take what they can find; and the discovery of live electronics. He says that tape is no longer used, and, therefore, nothing is predetermined. The starting point is the study of sound in relation to the sound space, conducted analytically in Freiburg. The genuinely new factor is the musical component of the space. One works for days with the space to understand what can be done. No longer is there a predetermined distribution of the orchestral sound, but rather a sound that is newly created time after time.

This chapter discusses the evolution of instruments and the orchestra in the theater — onstage, offstage, in the pit, and in the theatrical space — along with issues of musical form in theatrical music. It ends with a discussion of the breakdown of the stage/audience barrier, the use of live electronics, and the introduction of digital technology to transmit, transform, and create sound.

This chapter examines how new American music became entangled in an ideological search for music that reflected and encouraged social interaction and global concerns during the volatile years of the Vietnam War. It explains that this period witnessed the explosion of multimedia and boundary-crossing festivals that contributed to the breakdown in stylistic purity in new composition. In addition, free jazz, rock music, live electronics, minimalism and world music cultures, intermingled and attracted an untapped audience base.