Beginning around the mid-1930s, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman engaged with classical music, adding standard solo pieces to his regular performance and record portfolio. He also stimulated the emergence of a modern clarinet repertoire by granting commissions to composers, such as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others. In this article, I explore why and how these projects evolved and how the collaborations unfolded. My focus is on the commissions to Hindemith (1941/47) and Milhaud (1941). The newly found correspondence of Eric Simon, a Viennese-born clarinetist who advised Goodman and initiated contact with Hindemith and Milhaud, reveal Goodman's “double life” as a multilayered sphere for various actors, each with their own specific background and agenda. My analysis follows three topics that decisively shaped the investigated projects: Goodman's relationship with classical music, which I discuss in light of the intersectionally biased structures of U.S. musical life; the situation of European émigré artists experienced by Hindemith, Milhaud, and Simon; and the promotion of new music, which linked the lives, networks, and agendas of the aforementioned protagonists and even defined their relationships. By highlighting Goodman taking center stage as a performer-commissioner, I argue for more serious attention to performers’ impact on musical production and repertoire formation, given that they represent the ultimate gatekeepers to the living repertoire.

The U.S. Supreme Court has for decades served as an unlikely venue for the performance of music. Between 1988 and 2020, more than 125 musicians, including some of the country's most prominent performers, appeared for intimate audiences in the Supreme Court's East Conference Room. The concerts were officially “off the record,” but details survive in records kept by the U.S. Supreme Court, papers of former justices and friends of the court involved in the creation of the programs, and in interviews with individuals who supported and participated in the events. This article reconstructs the history of this long running but little-known music series and contextualizes it within the court's culture and broader themes of access and power.

Ginger Smock (1920–95), an African American jazz and classical violinist, was a popular Los Angeles entertainer and one of the first African American women bandleaders on television. This article traces her career from Los Angeles’ Central Avenue to Las Vegas showroom orchestras, drawing on archival materials from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Through a close reading of a 1951 DownBeat profile of Smock, I interrogate racialized constructions of gender in that magazine and frame mid-century jazz reporting on women instrumentalists via a “narrative of perpetual discovery” that positions these women as waiting for a career break that never comes. As an antidote to the effacement implicit in such narratives, I propose close documentation of sustained artistic practice: That is, the day-to-day facts of a working musician's life. This article reads Smock's professional trajectory through an intersectional lens to offer a critical perspective on the ways in which social identities, especially race and gender, may shape both musical careers and our historicization of those careers.

Reissues of recordings are commonplace, yet rarely examined by scholars. This article considers how reissuing is a creative act akin to museum curation. Through this lens, reissuers emerge as crucial interpretive figures, making decisions that affect how music and music history are understood by listeners. I take as a case study the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), one of the most canonic and widely praised reissues. Created by record collector and avant-garde artist Harry Smith and distributed by Folkways, the Anthology comprises eighty-four commercially released recordings made between 1926 and 1932, accompanied by an idiosyncratic set of liner notes. At the time, folk music was beset by various mythologies, notably an idealization of racial purity and an antithetical stance toward commercialism and modernity. When reissuing the material, Smith carefully selected, sequenced, and annotated the recordings in ways that unsettled these mythologies. In 1994, the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on compact disc. Drawing on archival documents from the Smithsonian, I demonstrate how their decisions reframed the Anthology in various ways to fit their goals and concerns. Through marketing, reproduction, cover design, and the soliciting and editing of additional notes, the Smithsonian elevated Smith as a racially progressive auteur while navigating commercial concerns and historical preservation. In particular, the editing of notes avoided controversial statements during an era of politically contentious museum exhibitions. Nevertheless in doing so, the very myths that Smith unsettled in his reissuing were replaced by an idealized race-blindness, anti-commercialism, and historicism.