This edited book aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the intersections between the coining of the <> concept and the institutionalised and entrepreneurial management of culture. It studies the emergence of the trademark <> in relation to the commodification of leisure, the institutionalisation of academic discourses, and the transnational imperial politics of culture. This collective work devotes particular attention to the ways events, such as the virtuosi concert tours, song contests, diplomatic acts, or mass broadcastings have created possibilities for homogenisation and globalisation of a corpus of musical practices, repertoires, and ways of thinking, ambiguously labelled, as <> along the long 20th Century.