The powerful concept of orientalism has undergone considerable refinement since Edward Said popularized the term with his eponymous book in 1978. Orientalism typically is presented as a totalizing process that creates polar oppositions between a dominating West and a subordinate East. U.S. orientalisms, however, reflect uniquely North American approaches to identity formation that include assimilating characteristics usually associated with the Other. This article explores the complex relationship among three individuals—U.S. composer Charles T. Griffes, Canadian singer Eva Gauthier, and German-trained Dutch East Indies composer Paul J. Seelig—and how they exploited the same Javanese songs to lend legitimacy to their individual artistic projects. A comparison of Griffes's and Seelig's settings of a West Javanese tune (“Kinanti”) provides an especially clear example of how contrasting approaches manifest different orientalisms. Whereas Griffes accompanied the melody with stock orientalist gestures to express his own fascination with the exotic, Seelig used chromatic harmonies and a chorale-like texture to ground the melody in the familiar, translating rather than representing its Otherness. The tunes that bind Griffes, Gauthier, and Seelig are only the raw materials from which they created their own unique orientalisms, each with its own sense of self and its own Javanese others.

This essay addresses the unlikely but profound synergy between Arnold Schoenberg and Lou Harrison. Despite their personal rapport and mutual interests in visual art, they held antithetical beliefs about the nature of musical composition. Schoenberg maintained that a composition was the presentation of a metaphysical “Idea.” Harrison saw composition as the process of systematically gathering and assembling resources and techniques.

After studying with Henry Cowell and Schoenberg, Harrison displayed a fascination with musical resources that led him to compose twelve-tone works using disparate compositional tools. A 1937 piano piece combines Schoenberg's methods of variation with Cowell's and Seeger's techniques of “dissonation.” The “Conductus” from the 1942 Suite for Piano, a work inspired by Schoenberg's Suite für Klavier, op. 25, explores all twelve prime forms of the row in light of Cage's square-root form. A nontonal 1944 string quartet ends on a triad like Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, op. 41.

In the 1950s Harrison rejected the aims of the total-serialist movement and found his own voice in just intonation instead. By the 1980s all vestiges of twelve-tone technique disappeared from his pieces; however, analogous serial techniques resurfaced in his paintings. Thus Harrison retained deep respect for Schoenberg as a composer, teacher, and friend.

This article explores the story and agency of conjunto master musician Jesse Ponce from his early life in San Antonio to his migration to northwest Ohio as an “authentic” Tejano (Texas-Mexican) musician. Although Ponce used this status as a form of cultural capital to construct his identity, integrate into local Latino communities, and interface with Latino cultural institutions, three outside agents, including the author, worked to publicize his expertise in Ohio, which, in turn, led to new acknowledgment and self-identification. The recent history of the “traditional” conjunto style is revealed as paralleling Ponce's career and aesthetic preferences. Both are in slight decline: Ponce, because of his failing health and resulting fewer performance opportunities; traditional conjunto, because of the rise of a more virtuosic “progressive” style

Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital and Loza's concept of enculturation are utilized to explicate Ponce's experience and self-construction in urbanizing northwest Ohio. The author's experiences with Ponce (as promoter and musician) are included to demonstrate the constant negotiations between Ponce, his musical identity and authority, and the outside world

How does the music of Bruce Springsteen interrogate prevailing constructs of the U.S.-Mexico border region? In his folk masterpiece The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and other works that feature Spanish-speaking protagonists, Springsteen implicitly reconceptualizes the Americas as an unbordered and fluid space. His performances enact Mexico and the United States as transamerican ideations rather than discrete nations. Although the booming academic field of border studies reframes static images of both Latin America and the United States in favor of malleable transnational paradigms, it still tends to privilege cultural production emanating from the borders themselves. This propensity does not leave much space for an engagement with canonical figures of U.S. culture such as Springsteen, a singer/songwriter who theorizes the borderlands in ways that at first may seem at odds with his career-long, conscious associations with red, white, and blue semiotics. This article examines the Hispanic presences in Springsteen's oeuvre from his debut 1973 albums onward and contrasts them with the relatively fixed representations of the borderlands in the lifework of Bob Dylan.