This article addresses Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay as a developing form of collaborative, participatory rock music performance. Drawing on ethnomusicology, performance studies, popular music studies, gender and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary digital media scholarship, I investigate the games' models of rock heroism, media debates about their impact, and players' ideas about genuine musicality, rock authenticity, and gendered performance conventions. Grounded in ethnographic research—including interviews, a Web-based qualitative survey, and media reception analysis—this article enhances our understanding of performance at the intersection of the “virtual” and the “real,” while also documenting the changing nature of amateur musicianship in an increasingly technologically mediated world.

In 1906 Appleton's Magazine published John Philip Sousa's most celebrated—and vitriolic—article, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” In it Sousa predicts that piano rolls and recordings will end amateur music making in the United States. Modern writers have often condemned Sousa as a hypocrite (the Sousa Band was itself a major recording ensemble) and chastised him for failing to see the cultural and financial benefits of mechanical music. But, in fact, Sousa's article was part of a larger scheme to gain public support for the 1909 copyright revision. It was also just one step in Sousa's lifelong battle for composers' rights, a battle with five distinct phases: (1) the debate over the right of public performance precipitated by the success of Gilbert and Sullivan in the United States, (2) a test of the limits of contractual obligations between performers and managers, (3) the instigation of an international copyright law, (4) the battle over mechanical rights, and (5) the ability of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to collect royalties as related to public performance.

Anthony Philip Heinrich's two symphonies on avian themes— The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or The Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras (original version ca. 1835; final form 1857) and The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons (ca. 1857)—have not been generally considered among his nationalistic works. Placing these works into historical context, however, makes the nationalism of their programmatic content clear. These symphonies reveal surprising connections in the U.S. consciousness between birds and national identity in the nineteenth-century United States. Through the examination of this music in the contexts of naturalist writers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon, the last of whom was a close friend of Heinrich's, this article demonstrates the extent to which Heinrich's music tapped into the popularity of ornithology in the United States.