In the eleventh episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Among the Ruins: The Rebirth of Europe’s Avant-Garde,” host Matthew Friedman explores how European composers built a new avant-garde, virtually out of nothing after the Second World War. Growing out of the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, this transnational community of composers sought to build a new music for a new, united Europe, although they could never escape the shadow of Europe’s traumatic past This episode features music by Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Hans Werner Henze, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Wolfgang Rihm, and J.S. Bach.

No Sounds Are Forbidden is back with its tenth episode. Musicologist Jill Rogers (University College Cork) joins host Matthew Friedman for a holiday special exploring how modernist and avant-garde composers have marked Christmas in their music since the early 20th century. Whether mobilizing patriotic sentiment in 1914, or trying to find a space for the sacred in the rubble of war, and the shadow of the Holocaust, modernist and avant-garde composers of the 20th century reflected the often dark, always complicated spirit of their times, while marking a season of contemplation and the promise of redemption.

In the ninth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “The Death of Europa: The Rise and Fall of the Inter-War Avant-Garde,” host Matthew Friedman explores the adventurous, and often chaotic street-level avant garde of Central Europe between the World Wars. In Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, radical composers, writers, and critics promoted a new vision of European culture that rejected the "immutable truths" of the Anciens Regimes. For a brief moment in the 1920s and 1930s, Central Europe's opera houses and cabarets swung to the pulsing rhythms of unrestrained experimentation, revolution, and jazz. But the rise of the Third Reich, and the Nazis' campaign to cleanse Europe of "Bolshevism, modernism, and Judaism," snuffed out avant-garde music and art -- and the artists who created it -- in exile, and in the camps. This episode features music by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Viktor Ullmann, and Erwin Schulhoff.

In the eighth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “In Phase/Out of Phase: The Radical Simplicity of Minimalism,” host Matthew Friedman explores the American avant-garde's turn to minimalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Launched as a critique of modernist intentionality, and the complexity of 20th century music, minimalist pioneers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich drew on diverse sources, from Asian and African music, and earlier experiments by the European avant-garde, to the ideas of the hippie counterculture, in order to craft a musical aesthetic that was, itself, the process of making music. And in the process, they innovated the inevitable soundtrack of post-industrial, networked society. This episode features music by Riley, Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, John Adams, Ravi Shankar, Erik Satie, and Gabriel Faure.

In the seventh episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Music of Changes: Cage, Chance Operations, and Indeterminacy,” host Matthew Friedman explores the profound impact of the work and ideas of John Cage on the American avant-garde. Seeking to liberate sound from the restraints of conventional music, Cage introduced new compositional practice based on chance, and nurtured a generation of composers whose music was in a state of continual change. This episode features an interview with the composer Christain Wolff, and music by Cage, Wolff, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, and Sonic Youth.

In the sixth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Synthetic Sound: The Second Electronic Music Revolution,” host Matthew Friedman explores sound synthesis, and how the invention of the electronic synthesizer inspired avant-garde composers, and transformed how listeners listened to music. This episode features music by Milton Babbitt, Morton Subotnick, Charles Wuorinen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Raymond Scott, Gershon Kingsley, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

In the fifth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Space Explorations: Avant-Garde Music in Three Dimensions,” host Matthew Friedman explores how avant-garde composers rediscovered the spatial nature of sound in the 20th century, and explored the three-dimensional implications of their music. This episode features music by Charles Ives, Erik Satie, Edgard Varese, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Tudor, and Henry Brant, as well as Giovanni Gabrielli, and Georg Philipp Telemann.

In the fourth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “The Tale of the Tape: The First Electronic Music Revolution,” host Matthew Friedman explores the impact of magnetic tape recording technologies on avant-garde composers, and on the birth of electronic music. This episode features an interbiew with composer Pauline Oliveros, music by Oliveros, Pierre Schaeffer, Halim El-Dabh, Otto Luening, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Alice Shields, Lejaren Hiller, Steve Reich, and Jacob Druckman.

In the third episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Listening in the Dark: The Avant-Garde at the Movies,” host Matthew Friedman explores the intimate connections between avant-garde music and cinema in the 20th, and 21st centuries. This episode features music by Gyorgy Ligeti, George Antheil, Norman McLaren, John Cage, Bebe and Louis Baron, Toru Takemitsu, Leonard Rosenman, Bernard Herman, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Adams.

No Sounds Are Forbidden explores the complex and fascinating history of the avant-garde art music of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the second episode, “Order From Chaos: Modernism and Rationality in 12 Tones,” host Matthew Friedman explores the radical conservatism of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone composition method, and its impact on western avant-garde music before, and after the Second World War. This episode features music by Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Hanns Eisler, Luigi Dallapiccola, Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, and Donald Martino.