William Levi Dawson (1899–1990) is remembered chiefly for his masterful choral arrangements of Negro spirituals and for his multi-decade leadership of the Tuskegee Institute Choir. In 1934, however, his career seemed to be headed in a very different direction: Leopold Stokowski programmed Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony on four Philadelphia Orchestra concerts that met with acclaim from critics and audiences alike. The broadcast of one of these concerts on the Columbia Broadcasting System had a particularly powerful impact on the many African Americans in the radio audience. Materials in the William Levi Dawson Collection at Emory University illuminate both the momentousness of the symphony's debut and its provocatively minor impact on the trajectory of its composer's career. This article examines the premiere of the Negro Folk Symphony as a groundbreaking event both public and personal, offers an explanation for the symphony's startlingly rapid descent into obscurity, and argues that this effective and fascinating work merits renewed attention from conductors and scholars today.

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.

During the mid-to-late 1960s, impoverished urban districts throughout the United States witnessed an influx of white middle-class youth who attempted to remake society and themselves against a backdrop of inner-city grit and decay. This article focuses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to explore the significance of slumming in the creation and reception of 1960s rock. Lower East Side rock musicians drew little overt influence from their neighborhood's longstanding ethnic communities, which included eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans. Rather, these musicians were fascinated with the concept of the “slum” itself as a more abstract signifier of authenticity, adventure, and nonconformity. I propose that a “slum aesthetic” emphasizing dirt, obscenity, and willful amateurism, exemplified by local band the Fugs, was crucial to the Lower East Side rock scene. Examining this “slum aesthetic” helps paint a more nuanced picture of both the political significance of rock and the connections between popular music and urban life. As the Lower East Side's musicians sought both radical social change and a large audience, they represented their neighborhood in ways that combined thoughtful engagement with broad caricature, a contradiction that inspired both musical creativity and social tension.

This article illuminates an underexplored moment in the formation of the well-known archive of recordings of incarcerated people collected by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. In 1934, John Lomax wrote to 350 correctional institutions across the country, asking officials to transcribe the texts of songs “current and popular among prisoners or ‘made up’ by them.” Despite contacting institutions incarcerating people of many races, ethnicities, genders, and ages, however, the Lomaxes ultimately continued to center on music performed by Black men in Southern prisons. Because of this, I position the letter as a critical juncture in the formation of the Lomaxes’ prison work. Choices made by prison officials (whether to respond to the letter and in what manner to respond) and by the Lomaxes themselves (whether to express interest in songs addressed by correspondents) were influenced by perceptions of the role of music in relation to criminality, imprisonment, reform, and race. These perceptions in turn defined the boundaries of the Lomax prison project. The correspondence considered in this article therefore offers a counternarrative to popular representations of music and incarceration and suggests the limits of the well-known Lomax prison song collection.

It is with great pleasure that the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press jointly launch a new journal devoted to the study of American music. Only a few decades ago, American music topics were ignored, or if acknowledged, appeared as the unexpected article in more mainline journals or were relegated to the corners of conference programs. Within the past three decades, American music's status has changed dramatically. It has grown in size and its presence is secure and stable; what had been activity on the periphery is now squarely in the center. As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I have been able to share in the challenge and the excitement of this burgeoning field. Today it is especially gratifying to witness sophisticated American music scholarship emerging from many continents. Dissertations, books, articles, and papers are being written on American music by scholars throughout the world.

This study explores piano advertising strategies after 1940 by examining ads printed in Etude, the Music Magazine between then and 1957, when it discontinued publication. Aware of the emerging US consumer culture, piano companies experimented throughout this period with more aggressive marketing techniques than they had previously used. Because Etude’s intended audience included musicians and enthusiasts of every skill and experience level, it was approached accordingly by advertisers. Thus, we can trace in its pages the development of methodologies that, owing to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contemporary range of consumers and their interests, came to target distinct and different market segments. Examination of strategies aimed at the respective groups illuminates an important chapter in the development of twentieth-century advertising while highlighting the piano's special status among consumer products and its cultural associations. Analysis of the industry's strategies in dealing with the mid-twentieth-century US economy reveals contemporary understandings of such associations and their effect on the implications of piano acquisition.

Considering the aesthetic and social value of music making among Issei, first generation Japanese in California, opens a line of inquiry into how this immigrant population negotiated their cultural and political identities in a nation that racially marginalized them. As an integral aspect of Japanese culture, music was a medium through which Issei leaders chose to claim a cultural space in the United States. Their efforts to establish themselves within the social fabric of mainstream American society reveal the social and political forces that prevented their acceptance and assimilation. Issei responded by showcasing traditional Japanese music to educate white Americans about their revered heritage, singing songs for comfort and familiarity, and encouraging their children to perform Western music as an acculturative strategy. Caught between two nations, Issei emerged with alternative identities that ultimately failed due to the racist ideology governing American citizenship.

Since the 1980s, the Nonesuch label, a longstanding subsidiary of the Warner Music Group (WMG), has become noteworthy for its steady market performance during a period of volatility for media multinationals. Nonesuch Records, having once been an adventurous boutique classical label under Teresa Sterne, has developed over the last three decades as a creatively idiosyncratic and commercially successful “adult” imprint under Robert Hurwitz, the erstwhile director of the Munich-based Edition of Contemporary Music jazz label.

Nonesuch has not historically been understood as a jazz label, though it has served as a home for a few jazz acts, including Bill Frisell, Fred Hersch, and the World Saxophone Quartet. By the early years of the new millennium, though, Nonesuch had become one of the few major label subsidiaries willing to maintain an active roster of jazz instrumentalists, harnessing its diversified roster as a source of strength.

This paper examines the Nonesuch label's cultivation of a distinctive jazz niche and situates this development against the backdrop of a period of structural turbulence for the WMG. The leveraged buyout of WMG in 2004, which precipitated the dissolution of the Warner Jazz subsidiary and the transfer of much of its jazz roster to Nonesuch, reflects a contemporary logic of financialization, where value extraction has become the overriding goal of corporate restructuring. Mergers and acquisitions enacted at the uppermost reaches of major label corporate hierarchies pass along significant costs to the label subsidiaries and their artist rosters, installing precarity at the core of the music industry's creative ecologies.

According to the New York Times, white rapper Macklemore and his DJ partner Ryan Lewis's “Same Love” was “the first song to explicitly embrace and promote gay marriage that has made it into the Top 40.”1 In 2013, as the Supreme Court of the United States prepared to rule on challenges to the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, the track quickly climbed the charts and became a nationally recognized anthem for marriage equality. Despite this generally positive reception, however, the song does not reflect all queer-identified listeners. Macklemore raps, “If I were gay, I would think hip hop hates me,” an assertion that positions black communities as a significant threat to (white) LGBTQ rights. Much like the backlash against black voters following the 2008 passing of Proposition 8, this claim relies on an invented black pathology that locates homophobia in black American culture specifically rather than American culture at large. This article offers a close reading and contextualization of “Same Love” and demonstrates that, rather than combating homophobia in hip hop, Macklemore's lyrical claims actually bolster his strategic performance as a socially and politically aware white rapper, while erasing queer and trans hip hop artists of color from the discourse.

In 1941, Paramount released There's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents position There's Magic in Music as a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power. There's Magic in Music thus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.

The 50-year anniversary of the Beach Boys’ seminal album Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson's corresponding world concert tour have once again brought attention to Wilson and his creative work with the Beach Boys. These events have brought about new recording releases and publications about the band and Wilson, including the first feature-length biopic on Wilson, Love & Mercy. The following essay investigates Atticus Ross's reimaginative approach to Brian Wilson's music for the soundtrack of this film, directed by Bill Pohlad and released in 2014. The film expands recent trends in music biopics of the last couple of decades regarding the mobilization and activation of music to afford new interpretations of their subjects and new ways to hear their work. Ross's approach is distinct for its extensive recomposition of Brian Wilson's music in the film's original score, which allows director Bill Pohlad to show Wilson in a new light.

Ross incorporates Beach Boys recordings (studio sessions and released tracks) into new pieces that highlight processes of manipulation, layering, and repetition, which point to the studio as a major site of Wilson's creativity. These processes furthermore portray the psychic life of the film's characters. Ross's compositions dramatize the subjectivity of hearing and rogue behaviors of auditory recollection and hallucination that characterize both Wilson's creativity and mental illness. In the context of the story of Brian Wilson and Melinda Ledbetter, Ross's compositions take on palliative associations that have direct implications for the reception of the film's original soundtrack.

This article examines the music criticism of Nora Douglas Holt, an African American woman who wrote a classical music column for the Chicago Defender (1917–1923) and published a monthly magazine, Music and Poetry (1921–1922). I make two claims regarding the force and impact of Holt's ideas. First, by writing about classical music in the black press, Holt advanced a model of embodied listening that rejected racist attempts to keep African Americans out of the concert hall and embraced a communal approach to knowledge production. Second, Holt was a black feminist intellectual who refuted dominant notions of classical music's putative race- and gender-transcending universalism; instead, she acknowledged the generative possibilities of racial difference in general and blackness in particular. I analyze Holt's intellectual commitments by situating her ideas within the context of early twentieth-century black feminist thought; analyzing the principal themes of her writing in the Chicago Defender and Music and Poetry; and assessing her engagement with a single musical work, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, op. 36. Ultimately, Holt's criticism offers new insight into how race, gender, and musical activity intersected in the Jim Crow era and invites a more nuanced and capacious understanding of black women's manifold contributions to US musical culture.

Nuns in New Spain were celebrated with music and elaborate rituals when they took the habit and professed in a convent. These grandiose profession ceremonies drew in a host of urban citizens to the convent churches. Indeed, “more girls are smitten by the ceremony, than anything else,” remarked Fanny Calderón, wife of a Spanish ambassador who lived in Mexico City in the early 1840s, confirming that the iconic festivity endured well into the nineteenth century after Mexico's independence.

This article on nuns’ professions is framed within the Order of the Immaculate Conception (Conceptionists). One of the largest extant collections of Novohispanic convent music comes from the Conceptionist community of the Santísima Trinidad, founded in seventeenth-century Puebla. The manuscripts are preserved at Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical “Carlos Chávez” in Mexico City, and they contain profession villancicos. My research on Conceptionist ritual books and biographies of noteworthy nuns allows me to place the villancicos within the wider context of Conceptionist devotion, convent race relations, and artistic patronage. The texts for the villancicos present women as the main subject of the compositions, which adorned a spectacular ritual also centered on women. The profession ceremony is, therefore, a valuable source to begin understanding Novohispanic women's contribution to music making.

After her performances in Shuffle Along (1921) on Broadway and in Dover Street to Dixie (1923) in London, Florence Mills became one of the most famous jazz and vaudeville singers. Known as the Harlem Jazz Queen, Mills was revered by Black Americans for her international breakthrough and because she used her commercial success as a platform to speak out against racial inequality. Extensive descriptions of her performance style and voice exist in writing, but there are no recordings of her singing. I respond to this archival loss by considering the sound of Mills's voice in two compositions written for her: William Grant Still's Levee Land (1925) and Edmund Thornton Jenkins's Afram (1924). In my analysis, I show that Still and Jenkins imagined a much more musically complicated and politically powerful voice than that found in the racialized and gendered stereotypes permeating both her vaudeville and Broadway repertory and the language of her reception. While scholars have written about how Mills's outspokenness regarding issues of race and omission of sexually explicit roles made her central to 1920s Black political and artistic life, I consider how the sonic properties of her voice positioned her as a leading figure in the New Negro Renaissance.

Hidden in plain sight, the five songs in the middle of, Gosford Park (2001) prepare the audience for the untangling of sordid relationships and the resolution of a murder mystery at the end of the film. This article presents a detailed analysis of the film's central musical sequence using video captures, reception history, transcriptions, and other approaches from music history and film studies. As is shown, the close relationship between music and image reflects the fascination of US audiences with British-themed films and the equally complicated appeal of Hollywood films to British audiences. Additionally, the songs provide a surfeit of narrative information crucial to the resolution of the multiple story lines. Lastly, the songs complicate and expand the work's seemingly straightforward murder-mystery genre to include such incompatible models as the British heritage film, Hollywood musicals, melodramas, and the double feature. Informing this musical sequence, and the entire film, is a complex, reciprocal transatlantic exchange founded on mutually inaccurate, yet often irresistible, myths of history and identity.

Composed in 1888 by Juventino Rosas, the waltz “Sobre las olas” (“Over the Waves”) soon made its way to North America and beyond, reverberating in the great spaces of the circus, fairground, skating rink, dance hall, and park. Recycled in cartoons and films, in television, and in various cover versions, Rosas's waltz has become a kind of popular liminal music. The complex, circuitous routes it has traveled have led to a present-day musical convention. This essay attempts to lay bare the mechanisms at work in the dissemination of such a widely known piece of music in three ways: 1) by accounting for the multiple themes related to “Sobre las olas”; 2) by considering the range of technologies through which Rosas's waltz has been disseminated; and 3) by theorizing public knowledge of the waltz as a musical “quote,” a snippet recognizable after a few notes.

Ryan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.