During their partnership between 1955 and 1968, composer James Tenney (1934–2006) and artist Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) engaged in what initially appear to be opposing modes of practice. Tenney developed theories concerning the perception of musical form and composed rationalized works based on carefully calculated algorithms. Schneemann, by contrast, was driven by spontaneity and sensuality, and her provocative artworks vehemently address sexual, gender, and political issues. This duality was especially evident in the mid-1960s, when Tenney was conducting psychoacoustic research at Yale University and Schneemann was producing her first theater events in downtown New York. Although his compositional productivity declined during this period, he participated in several of Schneemann's projects, scripted a few theater pieces of his own, and wrote extensive notes on artistic form as a perceptual model of physiological processes. Drawing from unpublished archival documents and personal interviews, this article provides an overview of Tenney's relationship with Schneemann and demonstrates how his simultaneous involvement in theoretical research and theatrical performance transformed his creative work. A close examination of Tenney's scores, journals, and correspondence reveals that he was deliberately exploring the distinctions between abstraction and collage and seeking to reconcile the apparent dualism of theory and theater.

Current scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

The academic assessment of the products of the Walt Disney Company is usually highly negative, drawing out their sexist, racist, and mercenary factors. Although such views are not easily denied, their strong ideology often hides how Disney texts actually operate and how their audiences interact with them. This article explores how recorded music is used in the Disney theme parks to condition audience response, finding a middle ground between an ideological view, exploring the part music plays in social control, and a hermeneutic view, seeing how music functions in articulating and enhancing the experiences in which Disney's guests participate. Disney's Imagineers draw on the language of film music to create a wide variety of narrative musical spaces that give guests the impression that they navigate through these carefully staged narratives as protagonists. Film-musicological models show that guests are encouraged to feel that they control the respective spaces, although filtering the model through critical theory will demonstrate that the spaces can actually be seen as controlling them. While critical theory and structuralist hermeneutics might seem at first like strange bedfellows, analyses of both the narratives themselves and of their social effects can usefully reflect each other, together providing a more nuanced view of Walt Disney World's experiential texts than has been presented either in the academy or by Disney itself.

Storytelling has proved to be a useful metaphor in jazz commentary and analysis. Within such literature it is invariably solos, portrayed as discrete cultural articles, that “tell a story” through their adherence to internal coherence and logic. This prized autonomy is modeled on that which we find in the modern European tradition. Pathbreaking studies by scholars such as Ingrid Monson, Paul Berliner, and Keith Sawyer have redressed this hegemony in highlighting the importance of collaborative work in jazz. This essay needs to be considered a contribution to this focus. Yet approaches that emphasize interaction among band members tend toward dialogical metaphors and analytical frameworks that marginalize forms of creative “collaboration” that can occur retrospectively between musicians and vocalists who may not have even met. Drawing from Walter Benjamin's essay “The Storyteller: Nikolai Leskov,” this essay argues that storytelling in jazz is an intergenerational, accumulative effort in which we see a story continue to unfold with each new telling. It shows that there is generative tension between a musician holding on to his or her distinctive characteristics and approach, and their commitment to sharing (in) the story. Storytelling in jazz involves musicians adding “transparent layers” to the tradition, contributing to musical material, and collaborating with others (both contemporary and temporally distant) in a manner in which personal distinction is actively maintained. Through a consideration of John Coltrane's ideas concerning the centrality of community to the practice, storytelling in jazz is shown to be of extramusical social significance also.