Jascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

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.

In the winter of 1950–51 Morton Feldman composed a series of pieces titled Projections in a new notation of his own invention. The first-known graphically scored works of the postwar era, the Projections were immediately championed by Feldman's friend John Cage in the language of his budding philosophy of non-intention, a framework of thought largely alien to Feldman. In later years, Feldman instead explained the Projections through the discourse of abstract-expressionist painting, substituting its model of willful creative action for Cage's Zen-inspired doctrine of aesthetic indifference. Yet the story behind his graphic notation is more tangled still, for its sources included both Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe, composers whose spatialized vision of sound influenced Feldman's new conception of the creative act. An examination of the origin and reception of the Projections offers insight into the forces that catalyzed experimental notation in postwar New York and the rationales that were ultimately ascribed to it.