Making sound is characteristic of agency in the natural world. It is curious therefore that having separated pitched sound from nature as much as possible—disciplined it into scales, temperaments, etc.—Western music has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to imitate natural sounds and processes with this un-natured sound. Whereas music often depicts nature, “music” has become abstract and transparent, and musical sounds themselves have become little more than acoustic tokens of objects related by structure. Any metaphorical connections with extra-musical sounds are suppressed in discourse about music because they constitute “effects.” In this article, I interpret the first movement of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (1970) as an expression of agency in the soundscape, considering vocal sounds, especially those attributed to crickets, as acts in a vocal ecology rather than imitation of natural sounds for programmatic purposes. My analysis invites us to hear this music—and music in general—as acoustic expression in a soundscape and therefore in ecological terms.

This article explores composer David N. Baker's use of elements of jazz and vernacular music to articulate formal structures and suggest extramusical commentaries in his concert works, with particular focus on the Sonata for Cello and Piano and the Sonata I for Piano. Themes of homage to and respect for jazz saxophonist John Coltrane resonate through these works. Various features bring the jazz legend to mind, but Baker's compelling play with implication and quotation provides fertile ground for studying musical signification and the use of vernacular emblems within Western compositional structures and the concert music of African American composers. Conventional analytical methods are combined with readings of referential symbols to work toward interpretations that address both structural and expressive domains. This approach allows discussions of compositional techniques to intersect with cultural and philosophical considerations. By addressing issues of musical structure and expressivity, this article seeks to move beyond commonplace surface-level descriptions of black vernacular emblems in the concert music of African American composers.

Paul Robeson's celebrated comeback recitals at Carnegie Hall in 1958 marked the singer's return to the world's concert stages after his ban for much of the 1950s. The recitals, this article argues, can be understood as a presentation of cosmopolitan thinking and action, of a certain way of being in and interacting with the world, and also a mid-century critique of American nationalist politics. As such, the article is an elaboration of scholarship that has considered aspects of internationalism in Robeson's discourse and (musical) practice. Drawing on the insights of the new or critical cosmopolitanism, a diverse and loose body of theory that has gained currency since the 1990s, the essay thinks through Robeson's Carnegie Hall events in terms of the practices of the concert hall recital, specifically programming, suggesting what it might mean to be a cosmopolitan singer in a specific historical moment.