In 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned new musical settings of poems by Frank O'Hara for a concert honoring the late poet. Among pieces by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, the program featured a new work by Charles Mingus: his String Quartet No. 1. Mingus's piece was performed only once, at that concert, and was never recorded. It survives only in manuscript form.

String Quartet No. 1 thwarts nearly all expectations of a piece by Mingus. Scored for strings and voice, the work's modernist approach to rhythm and pitch is unprecedented for the composer. Mingus chafed at being categorized as a “jazz” composer, and String Quartet No. 1's style is both a bid for and an undermining of the prestige of the high art world. Faced with primitivist discourses that characterized jazz musicians as unschooled and nonverbal, Mingus deployed poetry as a mode of resistance. He worked with poetic texts throughout his life, often writing the poetry himself. Mingus's sensitive setting of O'Hara's text in String Quartet No. 1 points to the centrality of poetry to Mingus's artistic and political project, and suggests that the piece's anomalous style can be partially understood as his response to O'Hara's text.

In an environment of racial tension and conflict in Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century, the Ramona Pageant and the plays by the Padua Hills Mexican Players offered Mexican American performers a vital role in perpetuating cultural memory through music and dance. The Ramona Pageant, which began in Hemet, California in 1923 and is still in operation, remains one of the longest-running pageants, or historical dramas, in U.S. history. Similarly, the Mexican Players were founded during the Great Depression in 1931 in Claremont, California and performed continuously for more than forty years. This article argues that Hispanic musicians achieved a degree of cultural agency in these plays through the performance of Mexican folk music, especially canciones (love songs) and corridos (narrative ballads), which were essential elements in the “soundscape” of the Southwest. Although Anglos created and directed the plays, they did not create or perform the music. In spite of the plays’ largely romanticized portrayals of California's Spanish and Mexican past, they provided some of the few prominent forums in Southern California for Mexican American musicians and dancers during the first half of the twentieth century.

Manuscript sources for Edward MacDowell's Sonata Eroica (1895) divulge a radically different, notably more sinister program than the commentary that the composer imparted to Lawrence Gilman, his first biographer. Gilman's widely promulgated account, merely comprising four character sketches based on Tennyson's Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, maintains that the score's movements respectively depict the coming of Arthur, Doré's engraving of a knight surrounded by elves, MacDowell's idea of Guinevere, and the passing of Arthur.

Inscriptions in a continuity draft preserved at the Library of Congress, however, reveal that the first movement was initially conceived as an independent ballade (an intrinsically programmatic genre) and was originally inspired by Tennyson's portrayal of Vivien seducing Merlin. Another inscription discloses that MacDowell envisioned the third movement as Lancelot's adulterous serenade to Guinevere. Additional manuscript variants and close correlations between the score's vibrant musical topics and Tennyson's literary contexts demonstrate that the entire sonata, including the elfin scherzo and war-like finale, embodies a tale of seduction and its dire consequences.

Although the Eroica's vivid, newly discovered program remains compatible with MacDowell's professed aesthetics, he suppressed the inscriptions. Speculative reasons for his doing so include formal considerations, critical opinions on programmaticism, and his attitudes toward sex.