In his influential Music in Latin America, Gerard Béhague divided its musics into the dominant ‘folkloristic nationalism’ and ‘counter-currents’ (Reference BéhagueBéhague 1979). Dodecaphony and serialism, the subjects of this chapter, form but one of the many and disparate ‘counter-currents’ in Béhague’s account. This somewhat reductive binarism can be and has been critiqued (cf. Lorenz n.d.; Reference MadridMadrid 2008), but it is largely true that serialism’s adherents tended to view themselves as an avant-garde in opposition to the nationalist establishment which dominated musical life throughout Latin America at virtually every level. This state of affairs lasted roughly until the 1960s, when the serial avant-garde achieved modest mainstream and institutional acceptance, although by that point the link between serialism and the avant-garde had become tenuous. As will be seen, the history of dodecaphony and serialism in Latin America thus to an extent mirrors that of its counterparts in Europe and North America, but with some notable peculiarities. This history not only provides an important facet of the region’s music history, but it also touches on crucial issues beyond that, such as the way artistic innovations are disseminated; the role of migration and national, regional, and international networks, among them the importance of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); the varying connections between aesthetic ideas and ideological and political principles; and debates about progress and tradition, national culture and universalism. As in other regional contexts, the focus on dodecaphony and serialism requires looking beyond genius composers and canonical masterworks, since many of the key figures feature at best as footnotes in general histories of twentieth-century music, and seminal works may have been heard by only a handful of people.

It goes without saying that this short account cannot provide comprehensive coverage of any and all approaches to dodecaphony and serialism in such a large and diverse area. The adoption of dodecaphony has varied widely across the region: while it gained a foothold in a Europeanised metropolis such as Buenos Aires as early as the 1930s, it failed to make a significant impact in other areas before the 1950s or 1960s, if at all. There were two regional dodecaphonic networks that seemed to have been largely independent, if not oblivious, of one another: one in the south, centred on Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, and another in the north, centred on Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico.

The history of serialism in Latin America starts in 1934 with, appropriately enough, Primera composición dodecafónica by Juan Carlos Paz. Paz was largely self-taught, and, with the exception of a period of study in Paris during which he did not focus on composition, rarely left Buenos Aires. In 1929, Paz joined forces with Jacobo Ficher, Juan José Castro, José María Castro, and Gilardo Gilardi, the leading, broadly nationalist and neoclassical composers of the day, to found the Grupo Renovación, which, in 1932, became the Argentine section of the ISCM. Paz’s early work was in a similar style to the other composers within the Grupo, characterised by (extended) tonal and bitonal composition, but this changed drastically when he adopted twelve-note technique without an intervening period of free atonality (or any other method, for that matter). The immediacy of this switch may be a reason why, for him, dodecaphony seemed to be allied to atonality, and both were opposed to nationalist and neoclassical approaches and aesthetics.

According to Daniela Fugellie’s account, Paz reported in a letter from January 1934 to his friend, the German-Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange, that he was working on a ‘Composition on the Twelve Notes’. In his memoirs, Paz reported that he had become aware of dodecaphony through the four-part article that Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz had published in the Parisian journal La revue musicale in 1926, a general article devoid of technical issues; in addition, he had a score of Schoenberg’s Woodwind Quintet op. 26 (1923–4), one of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-note compositions (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 149). What proved decisive for his further development was his work as secretary for the Grupo Renovación, through which, in its capacity as Argentine section of the ISCM, he entered into correspondence with many European composers, many of whom pursued similar ideas. Fugellie lists Paul Pisk (Austrian section), Alois Hába and Karel Reiner (Czechoslovak section), Józef Koffler (Polish section), Slavko Osterc (Yugoslav section), Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero (Italian section), Paul Sanders (Dutch section), and Edward Dent (President), in addition to further individual composers. Many, although not all, of these were twelve-note composers or closely allied with Schoenberg: Pisk, for example, was, like Wellesz, a Schoenberg pupil, and he became one of the most important contacts for Paz and his circle.

The most immediate support for Paz, however, came from Koffler. When Paz sent his first twelve-note composition for consideration for the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1935 in Prague, Koffler, a member of the jury, wrote back to Paz correcting his technical and stylistic mistakes. For his part, Koffler, who was not from Schoenberg’s immediate circle, had himself received a similar letter from Schoenberg, to whom he had sent his 15 Variations on a Twelve-Note Series op. 9a (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 152). Paz’s composition was rejected, although his Passacaglia for Orchestra op. 28 would be performed during the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1937 in Paris, as his pre-dodecaphonic Sonatina for Flute and Piano had been in Amsterdam in 1933 (his post-dodecaphonic Galaxias for organ would follow, shortly after his death, in Graz in 1972) (Reference HaefeliHaefeli 1982: 493, 495, and 532). Paz seems to have lacked the means to attend these, or any other, international events; he never held any official position and had little success more generally in acquiring concert performances of his music.

In addition to the European composers listed above, Paz would over time also enter into exchanges with North American correspondents, including Ernst Krenek, Lazare Sanimsky, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Aaron Copland (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 147). Owing to this impressive network, he was well informed about international developments, despite the difficulties of finding scores or secondary literature in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s (a problem common in most of the rest of the world). Paz seems to have completed his book Arnold Schönberg o el fin de la era tonal (Arnold Schoenberg or the End of the Tonal Era) in 1949, although the work would not appear in print until almost a decade thereafter (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 282–3; Reference PazPaz 1958). The work demonstrates a good grasp of Schoenberg’s work as well as of the relevant dodecaphonic theory of the time, including seminal work by Krenek and René Leibowitz (Reference KrenekKrenek 1940; Reference LeibowitzLeibowitz 1947). As Fugellie points out, however, Paz had only received many of the scores shortly before, so his initial knowledge of dodecaphonic composition during the period from 1934 to 1949 was partial at best. As will be seen (below, p. 270), he largely lost interest in twelve-note composition thereafter.

A curious aspect of Paz’s twelve-note compositions is that, with one important exception, he only used one series in its prime form and retrograde without transpositions, inversions, or retrograde inversions. For anyone schooled in the mature works of the Second Viennese School – or most other canonic serial composition – this represents an almost inconceivable limitation. Nor did he use dodecaphony freely by restricting it to thematic or, more widely, melodic invention. On the contrary, what he valued was the method’s strictness, and in most cases, every single note is directly derived from the prime form or its retrograde. In his Introducción a la música de nuestro tiempo, which he wrote after his Schoenberg book, but which was published before it, he argued for ‘a strict mental hygiene in music, which strips it of all literary and sentimental tricks and lends it aesthetic autonomy, defined limits and spatial concretion’. These can be found primarily in ‘impersonal forms like the suite, the invention, the passacaglia, the canon or the polymelody’ (Reference PazPaz 1958: 112).

In general, his early dodecaphonic works feature the kind of dense counterpoint and motoric rhythms characteristic of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-note works, such as the Suite for Piano op. 25 or indeed the Woodwind Quintet that Paz knew. Although Paz clearly identified with an avant-gardist position both within Argentina and Latin America and in his international alliances, some of his rhetoric is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s Rappel à l’ordre (Reference CocteauCocteau 1926), just as his music recalls neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit, more even than Schoenberg’s work from the 1920s and 1930s did.

According to Fugellie, the apex of Paz’s dodecaphonic phase is formed by Música 1946 op. 45 (1945–7) and Dédalus, 1950 op. 46 (1950–1), which reveal Paz’s greater familiarity with the work of Schoenberg and Webern (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 278–89). Here, Paz employed what he called ‘symmetry’, a term which Fugellie adopts, despite the fact that neither of the fundamental rows is in fact symmetrical as stated, even if Paz’s concern for self-similar cells, specifically trichords, and a correspondingly reduced number of interval classes is evident. Paz had by that time performed Webern’s Variations for Piano op. 27 (1936), which provides many examples of both horizontal and vertical (palindromic) symmetry, although its fundamental row itself is not symmetrical either (in contradistinction to the palindromic row employed in his Symphony op. 21, for instance, which Paz may not have known) (cf. Reference BaileyBailey 1991: 61–2 and 109–12). In Dédalus, Paz employed all principal row transformations for the first time. In general, it is a remarkable work, on a completely different scale and level than some of his earlier dodecaphonic efforts and arguably on a par with anything else composed at the time. It therefore seems ironic that Paz abandoned dodecaphony after the work, at the very moment when he gained mastery of the technique. He did not, however, discard serialism as such and indeed explored multiple serialism through a serial ordering of rhythm and dynamics in addition to pitch in his Transformaciones canónicas op. 49 (1955) (cf. Reference Ibáñez-RichterIbáñez-Richter 2014: 237), but he seems to have regarded this as a new, and separate, direction.

Paz’s influence was not restricted to his compositions, however. It was his tireless activities as an organiser, critic, author, and teacher that inspired successive generations of composers in Argentina and beyond. Paradoxically, it may have been the break, in 1936, with his previous institutional base, the Grupo Renovación, that enabled him to find new followers and allies. This conflict seems not to have been caused by aesthetic differences, but by Paz’s affair with Sofía Knoll, an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, which caused a scandal in what was a predominantly conservative country. Significantly, Paz’s wife was none other than Eloísa García Castro, the cousin of Juan José and José Maria Castro, the leading lights of the Grupo and stalwarts of the musical establishment (Juan José was the Director of the Teatro Colón and José Maria of the Buenos Aires Municipal Band, among many other positions and honours) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 156–). Left to his own devices, Paz founded the Conciertos de la Nueva Música (CNM) in 1937, which became the Agrupación Nueva Música (ANM) in 1944. Under this umbrella, Paz assembled a circle of like-minded composers and musicians, many of them his students. In the early years, the Hungarian émigré Estéban (István) Eitler and the writer and composer Daniel Devoto were important supporters, succeeded in later periods by Francisco Kröpfl, Mauricio Kagel, and Michael Gielen, who would become one of the leading conductors specialising in new music.

The CNM and ANM performed compositions by their members as well as the international avant-garde, focusing, if not exclusively, on the Second Viennese School. The organisation’s fortunes varied considerably, but it was always run on a shoestring budget and in semi-informal ways. The same is true of its performance venues, although it saw something of a golden age during a period of left-wing government when it was able to hold concerts in the Teatro del Pueblo, a home for progressive art, culture, and politics in the centre of the city. In a letter to Lange, Paz spoke of enthusiastic audiences of at least 550 people during the 1938 season (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 213). Only the absence of a piano caused practical difficulties. This period came to an end with the military coup of 1943, a moment which is more generally indicative of the specific problems faced by modernist composers in Latin America.

Throughout this period, Paz and his circle were mostly ignored if not rejected by the largely conservative, nationalist critics. The antagonistic relations with the Grupo Renovación came to a head when Paz attacked the (later-withdrawn) Sinfonia porteña (1942) by one of the most promising figures in the nationalist camp, Alberto Ginastera, in a review. For many years, the scene would be split between the internationalist, serial avant-garde around Paz and the nationalist, conservative, largely neoclassical movement headed by Ginastera (Reference BuchBuch 2007: 11).

The story of the development of dodecaphony in Brazil mostly parallels that in neighbouring Argentina, but there are some differences. The leading figure here was Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German immigrant who arrived in Brazil, via Switzerland, in 1937. His studies in Berlin coincided with the ‘Hindemith affair’ (cf. Reference JanikJanik 2005: 71–2), as a consequence of which Hindemith took indefinite leave from his teaching position and emigrated soon after. Koellreutter seems to have only studied with him privately but signed a petition in support of Hindemith (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 168–9). Unlike Paz and many other immigrants, he established himself fairly quickly, teaching at the Brazilian Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro (from 1937) and the São Paulo Institute of Music (1942–4). In 1939, he set up Música Viva, which became a counterpart to the CNM and ANM in Buenos Aires and was closely aligned with it; the mercurial Estéban Eitler played a role in both (as well as in the Chilean Tonus, as will be detailed below, pp. 273–4). In addition, Koellreutter regularly corresponded with Paz; another connection was their common friend Lange, who acted as a nexus and supporter of composers across Latin America. Although Koellreutter claimed to have come across the technique in Switzerland, he always stressed that what drove him to explore dodecaphony was the inquisitiveness of his pupil Cláudio Santoro (1919–89) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 312). Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the first dodecaphonic composition in Brazil was composed by Koellreutter, namely his Inventions for woodwind trio (1940), followed by the piano piece Música 1941 (1941) and the Variations 1941 for String Quartet (1941). Santoro was not far behind, though: his Sonatas for violin and violin and piano are both from 1940, and his Pequena Toccata for piano from 1942.

In contrast to Paz, Koellreutter explored all primary dodecaphonic transformations from the start, but, again unlike Paz, he was never interested in strict adherence and only used the technique as far as he found it useful. The same can be said of his students, with the result that Brazilian twelve-note compositions can often only be identified as such through their composers’ declared intention, and it can be difficult to recognise serial structures. This difference may be a consequence of Paz and Koellreutter’s divergent personalities, but it is also possible that the essentially self-taught Paz looked to serialism as a guarantor of rigour and order for which Koellreutter, steeped as he was in traditional technique, saw less need.

Under the influence of both nationalist and Marxist ideologies, some of Koellreutter’s students – including Santoro, César Guerra-Peixe, and Eunice Katunda – also explored combinations of serialism with elements of Brazilian traditional and popular music. Not all these experiments were successful, not least in the eyes of their composers, who went on to abandon serialism altogether, even if Santoro and Katunda were to return to it in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the independence and vitality of Brazilian serialism is striking. Another specificity, in comparison with Argentina and, as will be seen (below, pp. 273–4), Chile, is the number and prominence of Koellreutter’s female students: Katunda is a key figure. Her Hommage à Schoenberg (1949) was the only Latin American composition included in the ISCM Festival in Brussels (1950), and she was an important influence on Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, with whom she was in regular correspondence, leading, among other things, to Nono’s use of a Brazilian song in his Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951) (Reference IddonIddon 2013: 43–4; Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 394–5). At the very next ISCM Festival (1951, in Frankfurt), another composition by one of Koellreutter’s students was performed: Nininha Gregori’s Quatro líricas grecas (1950) (Reference HaefeliHaefeli 1982: 505–6; Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 358 and 396). Fugellie also lists Lavinia Viotti, Sonia Born, and Maria Lucia Mazurek among those who accompanied Koellreutter to Darmstadt in 1951 alone (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 358).

Unlike Paz, Koellreutter travelled extensively to Europe between 1948 and 1951, visiting, among others, the first and second dodecaphonic congresses in Milan (1948) and Darmstadt (1951), the ISCM Festival 1949, and the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1949 and 1951, giving at the latter a lecture on ‘Twelve-Tone Music in Brazil’ (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 342–64). Indeed, during his first journey in 1948, he gave a course on dodecaphony in Milan which was attended by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, among others (the occasion on which Katunda, Nono, and Maderna first met) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 348).

His international success contrasted with the situation he was confronted with back in Brazil, as is apparent from the epigraph at the head of this chapter. His relation to Brazil’s compositional establishment in many ways mirrors that of Paz in Argentina. In his early years, he was friends with most of his colleagues, including Camargo Guarnieri, one of the leading figures in the country’s musical life and, like virtually all his peers, a committed nationalist (second only to Heitor Villa-Lobos, who preferred to stay above the fray, however). Whether the relative unity among composers was broken by the factionalism of the avant-garde or whether nationalism had changed from a progressive and modernist position to a reactionary one probably depends on perspective. In 1950, Guarnieri published ‘An Open Letter’, a vicious attack on the unnamed Koellreutter, quoted in the epigraph (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 318). Where the affair surrounding the ‘Open Letter’ differs from the conflict between the nationalist-conservative and serialist-progressive factions elsewhere, as exemplified by the Ginastera affair in Argentina, is that Guarnieri’s ‘Open Letter’ can be understood both from a reactionary/nationalist and a Zhdanovite Communist position. It was accordingly embraced by both the right and the extreme left (Reference EggEgg 2006; Reference SilvaSilva 1999: 184). The prevalence of the latter and the influence of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) is a peculiarity of the Brazilian situation. Among Koellreutter’s students, Santoro and Katunda were members of the PCB, and both visited the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics 1948 in Prague, where the Zhdanov doctrine of socialist realism was proclaimed (Reference CarrollCarroll 2006: 37–49). Santoro adopted the party line wholesale, denounced his teacher, and supported Guarnieri’s letter. Katunda was more ambivalent, but she too toed the line in support of Guarnieri, although she apologised publicly to Koellreutter in 1979. Others, notably his student Edino Krieger, continued to support Koellreutter publicly (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 401).

Meanwhile, dodecaphony also took hold in Chile, where the organisation Tonus was set up largely on the model of the ANM and was active from 1947 to 1959. One of the links to Buenos Aires was none other than Estéban Eitler, Paz’s student, who moved between Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, but whose centre of activities for many years was Santiago de Chile. Eitler is a particularly fascinating figure who epitomises the immigrant experience. He was enthralled by the traditional music of the Quechua and Paraná, adopted impressionism, post-impressionism, pentatonicism, neoclassicism, and dodecaphony in short order, and, among many other activities as composer and flautist in virtually all spheres of musical life, was the leader of a popular dance band called Don Esteban y sus Trotamundos (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 178–94). But the leading figure in Tonus was the Dutch immigrant Fré Focke (1910–89). Focke was a student of Willem Pijper, the leading Dutch composer of his generation, and, uniquely among Latin America-based composers, Anton Webern, if apparently only for a brief period in the 1940s. What singles him out from the many other European, often Jewish, immigrants, is that, apparently unbeknownst to the generally left-leaning avant-garde and his fellow immigrants, he came ‘from the other side’. Although there is no evidence that Focke was an active Nazi, his European career took place largely in Germany and German-occupied Vienna. The chief reason for this was the operatic career of his wife, the contralto Ria Focke, who went to Germany in 1936 and who, among other activities, performed Erda at the Bayreuth Festival from 1939 (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 194–8; Reference Kutsch and RiemensKutsch and Riemens 2012: 1500). After the war, the Fockes briefly returned to the Netherlands, where they would have been less than welcome, before moving to Sweden, where the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau suggested they move to Chile, which they did in 1947 (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 198). Like Koellreutter in Brazil, Focke was able to establish himself relatively quickly, and Tonus had a less antagonistic relationship to the country’s musical establishment than its Argentine and Brazilian counterparts.

As already mentioned (above, p. 267), serialism seems to have developed in the north of Latin America independently of the south, and it tended to arrive not directly from Europe but from the United States. Pride of place has to go to the Black Panamanian composer Roque Cordero (1917–2008). Cordero won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in 1943, attracting the attention of Ernst Krenek, with whom he studied before returning to Panama and becoming a leading figure in its musical life. In addition, he continued to have a distinguished parallel career in the United States (Reference StallingsStallings 2015). He embraced dodecaphony from the 1940s and left his mark on the musical lives of neighbouring countries, notably at the regular Festival de Música in Caracas, which, from 1954, attempted to put Venezuela on the musical map. According to Reference AstorMiguel Astor (2008), the Festival was marked by the ‘conflict between nationalism and modernism’. In Manuel Laufer’s account, while the supremacy of nationalism was not openly questioned at the first Festival in 1954, conflict broke out into the open at its second iteration in 1957, which featured, among other things, a talk by René Leibowitz. During the Festival, Cordero emerged as ‘the most militant defender of twelve-tone technique’ with an article entitled ‘Nationalism versus Dodecaphonism?’. In it he responded to a question posed by the critic Edgardo Martín, who, in a review of Cordero’s Second Symphony, had asked ‘to what extent is it logical, convenient, and healthy (artistically speaking) for composers from America to compose in this [dodecaphonic] manner?’. Cordero retorted that ‘that question is unnecessary. Must it be considered illogical for a man of today to express himself in the language of his times?’ He went on to critique the dichotomy between the two concepts: ‘nationalism and dodecaphonism are two different things, but they are not antagonistic’, thereby criticising what he saw as a conflation between technical means and aesthetic principles (Reference LauferLaufer 2015: 61–3). Although Cordero was a strict serial composer (Reference OroszOrosz 2018), there is certainly nothing cerebral or esoteric in his compositions, even if explicitly nationalist elements are harder to detect.

One prominent ally was the great Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, then exiled in Venezuela. Although temperamentally more drawn to musical nationalism, he argued that there was no reason to reject new techniques:

It is in this climate that Venezuelan composers, such as Alejandro Planchart, better known as a musicologist, and Rhazés Hernández López experimented with dodecaphony. Other important figures at the Caracas Festival were Rodolfo Halffter, the first Mexican composer to adopt dodecaphony with his Tres hojas de album for piano (1953), and Ginastera, who, by that time, had left his early ‘objective nationalism’ behind. Even more conservative composers were drawn to serialism at times, such as the Peruvian Enrique Iturriaga, another stalwart of the Caracas Festival, as in his Vivencias I–IV (1965) (Reference EstenssoroEstenssoro 2001).

Thus, in the 1960s, serialism could no longer be considered a ‘counter-current’ to the mainstream of ‘folkloristic nationalism’, as Béhague would have it. In many cases, old hostilities crumbled. In 1958, Ginastera composed his Second String Quartet, his first fully dodecaphonic work. This was no sudden volte-face, but the result of a long process (Reference KussKuss 2013). Nor was he alone: many composers from the nationalist or conservative camp experimented with the method at the time; even Guarnieri tasted the fruits of the ‘wild fig tree of cosmopolitanism’ in his Fifth Piano Concerto (1970) (Reference BéhagueBéhague 2001).

Of particular significance for Latin-American music was the founding in 1962 of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) under the auspices of the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires. Ginastera became the Director, and he showed little trace of his earlier nationalist, conservative affiliation, although much of the day-to-day teaching was in any case carried out by his assistant and former student, Gerardo Gandini. The Centre hosted leading international lights such as Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Aaron Copland, and Earle Brown, but it had an even greater impact in bringing together and energising the Latin American avant-garde. In 1967, Ginastera even installed Kröpfl, the then-Director of the Agrupación Nueva Música, his former nemesis, to direct the CLAEM’s electronic studio. According to Edgardo Herrera, ‘strict twelve-tone compositions were rare among CLAEM composers, other than required classroom exercises. A more common compositional practice consisted of employing serial procedures to generate mainly pitch and rhythmic materials and use them freely in a composition’. He mentions Marco Aurelio Vanegas’s Sonata for viola and piano and Mesías Maiguashca’s Variations for wind quartet from the student concert in 1963 as examples. His conclusion that, ‘overall, serialism was perhaps the point of entry for many composers to the world of avant-garde musical practices, but for most, it was certainly not an ending point’ is convincing. By that point, serialism, both in its dodecaphonic and multiple incarnations, was one modernist technique among others and no longer the shibboleth for entry into the avant-garde camp (if it ever was) (Reference HerreraHerrera 2020: 109–10).

Unfortunately, the Centre was forced to close in 1971, owing to a combination of the increasing political instability during the ‘Argentine Revolution’ and related economic developments that bankrupted the businesses of the di Tella family and decimated their fortune. Despite its brief existence, the Centre profoundly shaped many composers from across the continent, many of whom went on to play leading roles in their respective countries.

The influence of multiple serialism is more difficult to trace than that of dodecaphony. Paz explored it in 1955, and it is certainly a reference point for later generations of composers. As mentioned above, it also played an, albeit apparently minor, role at CLAEM. It may therefore not come as a surprise that a CLAEM graduate, the Peruvian Mesías Maiguashca, would become the assistant of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was most intimately associated with the technique, from 1968 to 1972. That said, the Mexican Julio Estrada, Stockhausen’s student in 1968 to 1969, also has to be mentioned in this context, even if, for Estrada, too, multiple serialism served more as a starting point. More often than not, the specificities of the technique are submerged in combinations with, variously, aleatory technique, music theatre, (live) electronics, experimentalism, microtonality, or spectralism, to form a generalised avant-gardism. In many cases, these techniques and principles were introduced in quick succession if not at the same time (the same can be said about dodecaphony in some instances), so that careful distinctions are often difficult to undertake. This is not to minimise, however, the pivotal role that serialism played in shaping modernist and avant-garde composition in Latin America.