Twenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.

In the 1950s, Omnibus, a US television variety show sponsored by the Ford Foundation, provided US viewers with their first encounters with classical music and dance from Japan and India and folk traditions from Yugoslavia. Omnibus was an important part of a popularization of world music and dance as part of a greater arts and cultural literacy campaign in the 1950s, aimed at educating and entertaining the average American. As the US government sought to “promote world peace” through the multifaceted economic interventions of endeavors like the Marshall Plan, private organizations such as the Ford Foundation also spent massive sums in the US and abroad. This article contributes to a broader understanding of US postwar cultural diplomacy by examining how international musical guests on Omnibus helped develop an American self-concept that was culturally and politically internationalist.

From 1947 to 1948 the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra with Chano Pozo produced some of the most important recordings that contributed to the development of Afro-Cuban jazz. Pozo had already led a successful career as a professional musician in Havana before he moved to New York City, where he met Gillespie and joined his bebop big band. The integration of a black Cuban percussionist into Gillespie's all-black band raises important questions about the racial politics enveloping the popularization of bebop, Afro-Cuban jazz, and the work of others in contemporaneous political, cultural, and intellectual arenas. This article provides new documentation of Pozo's performances with the Gillespie band in the United States and Europe and shows the ideological concerns that Pozo and Gillespie shared with West African political and cultural activists, Melville Herskovists and his students, and early jazz historians in the 1940s. The article suggests an alternative methodology for scholarship on jazz in the United States that approaches jazz's extensive engagements with Cuban and other Afro-Atlantic musicians as embodying the crux of jazz's place in the Afro-Atlantic.

This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

Although literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied, music so inspired has received far less scholarly attention, and film music even less so. Musical ideologies of the 1930s, including the utopian thinking of many artists and intellectuals, emerge in some surprising ways when we consider two films of the era. Both The Spanish Earth (1937), an independent documentary, and Blockade (1938), produced in Hollywood, were intended to awaken Loyalist sympathies. The music for the former, consisting of recorded excerpts chosen by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson and widely understood as folkloric, embodies leftist composers' idealization of folk music. Werner Janssen's score for Blockade relies on many stock Hollywood gestures, granting it the status of a commodity. This article explores both films in light of Michael Denning's reflections of the relationship between the “cultural front” and the “culture industry,” along with Fredric Jameson's advocacy of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic tool. It argues that the music for The Spanish Earth unwittingly subverts the Loyalist cause, whereas the score of Blockade, with its manipulation of Hollywood codes, is far more persuasive than the political whitewashing of its plot would seem to suggest.

After the Obama administration (2009–17) began authorizing musical exchanges with Cuba in 2009, Havana's music festivals became a primary site for transnational interactions and a public face for US-Cuban engagement while politicians worked towards normalization in secret. This article uses field research from the Havana International Jazz Festival, interviews with festival participants, and media coverage to explore Cuban music festivals as politically liminal spaces where musical and political life commingled to reflect the changing US-Cuban relationship. While diverse lineups attracted international tourists, artists faced bureaucratic challenges to legally traverse the Florida Straits and create music in the context of intercultural dialogue. Despite these difficulties, Havana as a festival space encouraged musicians to defy genre conventions, explore cultural commonalities, and negotiate social differences on stage during the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival. These transnational interactions culminated in Arturo O'Farrill's album Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded by US and Cuban musicians in Havana during the 2014 jazz festival and is characteristic of festival exchanges in its representation of a more harmonious international relationship.

Women composers' concerts, arranged by Phyllis Fergus, were held for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1934 and 1936. They featured music by members of the National League of American Pen Women—an organization for writers, artists, and composers—and were part of a substantial agenda proposed by Fergus, its music director and later president, to achieve national recognition for its composer members. Drawing on Fergus's scrapbooks and documentation in the FDR Library and Pen Women's archives, this article explores the events that Fergus helped to organize, including concerts in Miami, Chautauqua, and Chicago, the latter played by members of the Women's Symphony Orchestra. White House appearances by Amy Beach helped emphasize the League's professional status, and the nationalistic tone of its publicity, urging audiences to “Buy American” during the Depression, worked to distract from age-old assertions of women's lack of creativity. However, the musicales for Roosevelt, who received the composers socially rather than as paid professionals, reinforced women's domestic position, and financial restraints limited most League programming to the genres typically associated with female composers. Despite its separation from a male mainstream, the NLAPW was nonetheless a significant force in promoting women's music in the 1930s.

A small basement in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood, an area known for its bohemian values, is home to what is now one of jazz's oldest and most significant venues, the Village Vanguard. Although its very name, geography, and twentieth-century countercultural context define the Village Vanguard, a haven for experiment, its unequaled historical significance and current status as a major landmark within worldwide jazz culture have led to a twenty-first-century reality in which the club not only features but also plays an important role in defining the music that constitutes the most widely accepted subgenre of contemporary jazz, an improvisatory, small-group tradition rooted in the philosophical and musical heritage of bebop. Through an examination of performances both at the Vanguard and in other contexts by pianist Fred Hersch, a performer regularly featured at the club, this article argues that the cultural role of the Village Vanguard, both in spite of and because of the way its longtime owner Lorraine Gordon retained mid-twentieth-century appearances and practices, has shifted from its former purpose as a space for avant-garde experiments to become a powerful force in defining mainstream jazz. Hersch tailors his performances to suit the culture of the Vanguard at multiple levels, including his choice of personnel and ensemble type, the repertoire he does and does not play there, and the musical details of his improvisatory practices. Due to the venue's fame and prevalence as a recording space, choices like these by Hersch and other musicians shape the music widely understood to be at the center of the “jazz tradition,” marking a shift in the nature of the Vanguard that parallels changes in both its local and global context over the past half century as Greenwich Village has undergone substantial gentrification and jazz has gained an ever-stronger foothold as an institutionally recognized art music.

Upon its publication in 1759, Voltaire's Candide, or The Optimist scandalized Europe. Banned for its blasphemous and politically seditious content, it became a succès de scandale and one of the most widely read books of its time. Leonard Bernstein adapted Voltaire's work for the stage in the 1950s. With its emphasis on the improbable, the artificial, and the insouciant, Candide practically begs for a camp (re)interpretation, and it is just such an analysis I offer here. After outlining camp as social critique, I turn to Cunégonde's aria “Glitter and Be Gay” and trace its path through camp's causeways in two different decades: first, in the United States of the 1950s, a period marked by McCarthy's witch-hunts, Cold War anxieties, intense homophobia, and the composer's personal struggle to accept his homosexuality, and second, in the late 1980s, when singer, songwriter, and AIDS activist Michael Callen (1955–1993) recorded his own camped-up version of “Glitter and Be Gay” for what would become his last musical project, a posthumous double album entitled Legacy (1996). By following Cunégonde's sparkling trail of glitter and gemstones through two historical moments, I demonstrate how camp functions as a tool of queer resistance across the last half of the twentieth century.

Composer-conductor Henry Kimball Hadley (1871–1937) is widely viewed as a conservative musical figure, one who resisted radical changes as American musical modernism began to flourish. His compositional style remained firmly rooted in late-Romantic European idioms; and although Hadley advocated for American composition through programming choices as a conductor, he mostly ignored the music of younger, adventurous composers. In one respect, however, Hadley was part of the cutting edge of musical production: that of musical dissemination through new media. This essay explores Hadley's work conducting and composing film music during the transition from silent to synchronized sound film, specifically his involvement with Warner Bros. and their new sound synchronization technology, Vitaphone, in 1926–27. Drawing on archival evidence, I examine Hadley's approach to film composition for the 1927 film When a Man Loves. I argue that Hadley's high-art associations conferred legitimacy upon the new technology, and in his involvement with Vitaphone he aimed to establish sound film composition as a viable outlet for serious composers. Hadley's example prompts us to reconsider the parameters through which we distinguish experimental and conservative musical practices, reconfiguring the definitions to include not just musical proclivities but also the contexts and modes through which they circulate.

This article analyzes the revisions producer Cheryl Crawford and her team made to Porgy and Bess for a revival that opened in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1941 and moved to Broadway in early 1942. Crawford's revisions addressed criticisms of the opera that had first been issued at its premiere in 1935, especially complaints about its dramatic viability and the appropriateness of African American performers in opera. The revisions distanced Porgy and Bess from the practices of the Metropolitan Opera House, which the press routinely criticized as antiquated and dull. They also reduced the amount of operatic recitative, which Crawford saw as “out of keeping with the black milieu,” strategically reserving the device for specific moments that played into the stereotype of African Americans as naturally musical. In her marketing of the show, Crawford reframed the critical discussion of Porgy and Bess by deflecting attention away from disputes over genre and race and toward the structural and formal qualities of the work. These strategies, which were aimed at attracting a broad audience with divergent values and aesthetic preferences, proved successful. Whereas the 1935 production was a commercial failure, Crawford's Porgy and Bess became a hit, marking a crucial step toward the establishment of the work in the American operatic repertoire.

In a letter dated to 1960, Harry Partch describes living two lives simultaneously—one in modern America and another in ancient Greece. Furthermore, throughout his life, Partch exhibited striking dualities in both his music and personal life. Partch's affinity for Greek themes and modalities in his music and music theory is well known, but less known is his feeling of bilocation between Greek and modern life. Using writings by Vonnegut, Woolf, and Stephen Hawking, I examine methods of constructing history that support Partch's temporal irregularity and, in so doing, foster new ways of understanding Partch and his music. With a particular focus on corporeality within his late work Revelation in the Courthouse Park, I explore how Partch leaned on his sense of bilocation to cope with his decidedly outsider status, how that in turn helped him deal with reality, and how biographers might tackle this most perplexing issue.

Scholarship on American composer Harry Partch (1901–74) has long focused on the composer's use of Greek musical ideals as the basis of his aesthetic, but little attention has been paid to China, a nation with which Partch had familial ties and with which he claimed an affinity. Using Partch's published writings, along with unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, this article repositions China's role in the development of Harry Partch's music and aesthetic. By surveying his early experiences with Cantonese opera, his early expositions of his theoretical thinking, and his first full-scale composition, a setting of seventeen poems by Li Po, it demonstrates that China symbolized an alternative path. China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. Through the Chinese musical quotations that reside in several of his works, the article also shows that, despite his later protests to the contrary, Chinese music both informed and shaped his music. Finally, it suggests that only by exploring the implications of China in his music can we fully understand Partch's compositional aesthetic.

This essay will place Leonard Bernstein within the context of the Boston Jewish community in which he was raised. It was at Boston's Congregation Mishkan Tefila, the family's synagogue, where Bernstein first encountered serious music. The essay places special emphasis on the role of Prof. Solomon Gregory Braslavsky, the music director and organist of Mishkan Tefila, whose influence on the young Bernstein was far greater than scholars have imagined. In 1973 Bernstein wrote to Braslavsky “[I] never forget the tremendous influence you and your music made on me when I was a youngster.” Bernstein, I contend, meant what he said.

Using ethnographic and archival data, this article explores aspects of global superstar James Brown's participation in the black gospel music community of Augusta, Georgia, from the 1980s until his death in 2006. Using rare footage of Brown performing sacred music on a local gospel music television program, the article builds on scholars’ longtime recognition of Brown's engagement with black sacred song by engaging the singer's negotiation of sacred and secular musical and cultural boundaries from the perspective of his gospel performances. The article also examines Brown's personal relationships with local gospel musicians, ultimately arguing that his involvement with Augusta's gospel tradition near the end of his life provided Brown with an alternative social space for articulating a musical and personal identity somewhat separate from his mainstream media image.

Three case studies, on Guatemalan, Mexican, and Native American music performed at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, illustrate the complex and varied ways that music can both reflect and challenge dominant and local ideologies of cultural value. The Guatemalan Commission made a claim for cultural significance through the Hurtado Royal Marimba Band's residency in their pavilion. This claim, however, was made through a Euro-American framework of cultural progress; the band's performances thus obscured the important role of Afro-Guatemalans and indigenous groups in the nation's marimba tradition. Although the “Mexican Village” depicted Mexico as exotic and primitive, the daily performances of the Orquesta Típica Torreblanca in the village showcased the country's cosmopolitan side. Native Americans were frequently subjected to exoticizing and racist musical ventriloquism at the PPIE, yet on at least one occasion a group of Blackfoot people refused this imposition and used music to push for control over their representation. The presence of these musics and musicians, largely ignored in the exposition's official administrative record, demonstrates the shifting power dynamics that shaped the performance and reception of music on the fairgrounds, and reveals that even in environments heavily shaped by dominant ideologies of race, gender, and class, multiple discourses of power and value can circulate.

In this essay, I explore the ways in which kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitarists) articulated Native Hawaiian aspirations for self-determination and reterritorialization during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. I argue that Hawaiian music speaks to a liberatory politics that is embedded within an aesthetic of nahenahe (soft, sweet, melodious). Nahenahe invests slack key guitarists with the mana (power, authority) to invoke a Native Hawaiian perspective that empowers and sustains Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) efforts for self-determination and political autonomy. The connections between music and political activism were highlighted and strengthened throughout the period. Indeed, although numerous political groups organized throughout the period, providing the modern foundations to the struggles for sovereignty today, at the forefront of it all were the musicians.

In the late 1960s, the prominent psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that music-making was an inherently bodily activity, which like sex, could induce what Maslow called “peak experiences”—moments of mystical transcendence and personal insight. Amass enough such peak experiences, Maslow suggested, and one could achieve “self-actualization”—the full realization of one's potential as a human being. This article argues that though many musicians would heed Maslow's words, few embodied Maslow's program more than composer John Coolidge Adams did in the late 1970s. The article shows how Maslowian ideas shaped some of Adams's formative musical experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. The article further demonstrates how these same concepts inspired the development of Adams's idiosyncratic postminimalist idiom, with particular attention to Adams's 1978 string septet Shaker Loops. By considering the influence of Adams's countercultural milieu, the article reveals strains of primitivism, eroticism, and exoticism in Adams's work more closely associated with Adams's minimalist predecessors. It also presents an alternative view of postmodernism in music, arguing that for Adams, at least, to make music “after” modernism was to make music a medium of self-actualization.

Muhal Richard Abrams's ground-breaking work as a composer, improviser, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is far reaching and multifaceted. Russian composer, theorist, and polymath Joseph Schillinger appears repeatedly in discussions of Abrams and the AACM, suggesting that music theory played a generative role in Abrams's creative practice and pedagogy. This article focuses on Abrams's engagement with The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. It theorizes Abrams's incorporation of Schillinger's work into his broader creative pallette, analyzes Abrams's compositional application of Schillinger's theory, and suggests conceptual resonances between Abrams's creative practice and the text. Ultimately, this article suggests a larger network of African American theorists, which I conceptualize as “fugitive music theory.”