Although most auctioneers do not self-identify as musicians, the practice of auctioneering in the United States reveals a sophisticated musical approach to metric improvisation based on the establishment of musical expectation and the strategic thwarting of that expectation through flexible treatment of meter. Auctioneers establish a “referential” meter wherein a consistent organization of the pulse returns repeatedly, alternating with expansions or contractions of that primary meter. Listeners are entrained to expect musical consistency, but through disruptions of familiar musical patterns, the auctioneer focuses bidder attention on the chant rather than the realities of the economic transaction in progress. Thus, meter is employed as an improvisational tool that unites the listening and bidding audience within a musical space and plays with expectations just enough to keep bidders alert and engaged.

Charles Frederick (Freddie) Hedges (1886–1920), his brother Elven Everett Hedges (1889–1931), and Jesse Jacobson (1882–1959) converged as Hedges Brothers and Jacobson in 1910 in San Francisco. Elven played piano, saxophone, and guitar, and all three sang and danced. In 1910–11, critics in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and smaller cities greeted the act as something new and exceptionally good. Instead of pursuing more general fame in North America, the trio accepted a music-hall contract in England, where they became leaders in creating a craze for American ragtime singing, a craze that prepared the English public for the momentous arrival of jazz after the First World War. The trio recorded eight released songs for Columbia in 1912–13. In 1913, they also performed in Paris and South Africa. In 1914, after eight months back in the United States, they returned to English success but soon dissolved the act and performed separately until 1919, when they reunited to accept an unprecedented contract (£30,000 for six years). Early in 1920, Freddie killed himself. Forest Tell (b. 1888) replaced him in the trio, and the new group recorded six released songs for Zonophone in 1920. The trio disbanded at the end of the contract. Elven retired shortly afterward, but Jesse stayed in show business at least through World War II.

When the French military forces arrived in Newport in 1781, they brought with them not only music of a social nature, such as country-dances, but also music used in military ceremonies. Americans quickly adopted many French customs, melodies and traditions. A fife major's manuscript of 1781 is only one of many that evinces the importance of John Hiwell, the Continental Army Inspector of Music, in promoting this French influence on American military ceremonial music. This article also examines some aspects of fifes and drums in the Revolutionary War era.

The Casino Ballroom of Avalon, Catalina Island, is located about twenty miles off the coast of the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Completed in 1929 under the direction of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., the ballroom became a significant venue for dance bands of the 1930s and early 1940s. The Casino did not, however, feature any of the most familiar names of the era. Instead, it was designed as a state-of-the-art dance hall for the presentation of exclusively white dance bands playing “sweet” jazz, a style that avoided the most obvious musical signifiers of “hot” popular music.

Through a comparison of three commercial recordings of “Avalon,” I detail how the music of Jan Garber's sweet jazz orchestra—a group immensely popular at the Casino—differed from the music of hotter jazz dance bands, such as the Jimmie Lunceford and Casa Loma Orchestras. Garber's sweet “Avalon” established a sonic place characterized by specific musical relationships and values that were easily fused to the ideology of the island's promoters. For the owners and managers of the Casino Ballroom, jazz was to be the sound of modernity suffused with nostalgia for a threatened, racialized social order.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios released a series of backstage musicals starring Eleanor Powell, a dancer known for her tuxedoes as well as her virtuosic tapping. Powell's tap routines are in and of themselves commanding, with her male dress seeming to originate from her confidence and the masculine aura of tap dance. Yet it is the narratives of her films, inspired by the so-called Cinderella stage musicals of the 1920s, that hold the key to her tuxedoed performances. MGM's backstage stories feature a young dancer, who dreams of Broadway stardom, and her show business boyfriend, who expresses reservations about her desire to perform. This tension between the couple's burgeoning romance and her desire for a stage career shapes the costumes, choreography, music, and camerawork of the show-within-the-film production number; ultimately, Powell's character impersonates her boyfriend in order to achieve theatrical success, a performance that illuminates a Depression-era understanding of a woman's place in show business as well as the backstage musical's “doubled” approach to narrative and number.

This article argues that in the late 1920s, the German genre of Zeitoper paradoxically became an essential component of the search for a new kind of uniquely American opera, resulting in a transatlantic cycle of mutual influence. This influence was possible because Germans and Americans alike saw the United States as the embodiment of modern life and technology. American producers and composers thus adapted German Zeitoper to bring it more in line with Americans’ self-image. I examine this dynamic by juxtaposing two German and two American Zeitopern, looking specifically at their engagement with jazz, film, race, and American popular musical theater: Paul Hindemith's Hin und zurück, Marc Blitzstein's Triple-Sec (inspired by Hindemith's opera), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in the United States, and the unsuccessful effort to stage George Antheil's Transatlantic (modeled on Jonny and revised under the mentorship of Krenek) in New York. Both Germans’ image of America and Americans’ self-image were as much real as imagined, and although the similarities between them facilitated this cultural exchange, their differences also impeded it.

The American popular music tradition of “jazzing the classics” has long stood at the intersection of discourses on high and low culture, commercialism, and jazz authenticity. Dance band arrangers during the 1930s and 1940s frequently evoked, parodied, or straddled these cultural debates through their manipulations of European classical repertoire. This article examines Swing Era arranging strategies in the context of prevailing racial essentialisms, conceptions of modernism, and notions of technical virtuosity. The legacy of African American freelance arranger Chappie Willet, and his arrangement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) for the black dance band of Jimmie Lunceford, suggests that an account of the biography and artistic voice of the arranger is critical to understanding the motivations behind these hybrid musical works.

The transnational character of the literate musical community in the United States created an environment in which language barriers, ideological biases, and other potential sources of misunderstanding caused print items to change shape quickly as they were transferred from one reader to the next. The aesthetic controversy between William Henry Fry and Richard Storrs Willis surrounding the 1853 premiere of Fry's Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony provides a rich case in point. The controversy at times seemed to draw from a parallel debate in Europe, often called “The War of the Romantics,” which concerned the future of symphonic composition and music's capacity for representation. At others, the controversy seemed to diverge from its European counterpart as central concepts were articulated in new intellectual contexts. The vagaries of print culture help explain these discrepancies. This article outlines the central arguments of the debate, situates them within their transatlantic contexts, and examines how print culture played a significant role in the controversy's unfolding as early as 1839, fifteen years before it took place. More broadly, it constructs a new framework for examining the function and meaning of nineteenth-century music periodicals by illustrating how an antislavery newspaper became an unlikely voice in a debate over program music.

During the 1920s, in a bid to elevate musical taste in Houston, Texas, arts patron Ima Hogg anonymously underwrote a series of public lectures on music at the Rice Institute, now Rice University. A trained musician who had spent considerable time in New York and Europe, Hogg recommended potential lecturers for the series, and her collaborator, the music-loving president of the Institute, Edgar Odell Lovett, worked to engage them. Not all of Hogg's candidates were available, and Lovett used his own contacts to supplement them. The resulting slate of lecturers was a diverse mix of musicians and scholars: Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, John Powell, Harold Morris, George Birkhoff, and Henry Hadow. Their lectures survive in printed form in a scholarly journal published by Rice; they provide some of the most important statements about music by their authors. Hogg's patronage was made possible by an increase in her family's wealth, but her goal of public enlightenment was inspired by her family's tradition of public service (her father had been the governor of Texas) and by her longtime involvement in women's music clubs. Her model for the lectures may have been the didactic music club meeting; Lovett's was the university extension lecture directed toward a community audience. This article details and contextualizes Hogg's patronage in light of contemporary views of women's involvement in the support of music.

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.

In 1827, George Wilson Bridges, the outspoken proslavery rector of the parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, published a pamphlet of music that he had written to be used as the choral service at his church. The Bishop of Jamaica condemned Bridges's musical innovations on the grounds that they were not suitable to be heard by “a congregation chiefly composed by people of colour & negroes.” On the Bishop's orders, Bridges's music stopped, and by 1828 he reported that his pews were once more empty. The congregation of St. Ann parish church was almost entirely enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants who could choose their place of worship. However, in Bridges's own household, the people he claimed as property had little opportunity to escape his ministering. In 1829 Bridges came to the attention of British abolitionists for his brutal flogging of Kitty Hylton, a woman he claimed to own. This article uses Black feminist approaches to archival materials to explore the relationship between the music promoted by Bridges, conflicting views held by white religious leaders about what music was appropriate for African and African-descended people to listen to, and Bridges's violence towards enslaved people; in so doing exploring the inescapable entanglement of religious music, race, and violence in colonial Jamaica.

“The Irish came early and often to America,” quipped musicologist Charles Hamm in his landmark book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. Although the largest waves of immigration occurred during the years of the potato famines in the 1840s and 1850s, the process began long before then and continues to the present day, albeit with many ebbs and flows in the stream. Today nearly 36.5 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry.

During the mid-to-late 1960s, impoverished urban districts throughout the United States witnessed an influx of white middle-class youth who attempted to remake society and themselves against a backdrop of inner-city grit and decay. This article focuses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to explore the significance of slumming in the creation and reception of 1960s rock. Lower East Side rock musicians drew little overt influence from their neighborhood's longstanding ethnic communities, which included eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans. Rather, these musicians were fascinated with the concept of the “slum” itself as a more abstract signifier of authenticity, adventure, and nonconformity. I propose that a “slum aesthetic” emphasizing dirt, obscenity, and willful amateurism, exemplified by local band the Fugs, was crucial to the Lower East Side rock scene. Examining this “slum aesthetic” helps paint a more nuanced picture of both the political significance of rock and the connections between popular music and urban life. As the Lower East Side's musicians sought both radical social change and a large audience, they represented their neighborhood in ways that combined thoughtful engagement with broad caricature, a contradiction that inspired both musical creativity and social tension.

Upon accepting a commission for a solo guitar piece from the 2002 Open Minds Music Festival in San Francisco, Lou Harrison decided to write Scenes from Nek Chand for a unique instrument: a resonator guitar refretted in just intonation. Harrison's last completed work draws inspiration from the sound of Hawaiian music that the composer remembered hearing in his youth, as well as from the artwork populating Nek Chand's Rock Garden of Chandigarh, India.

Based on archival research, oral histories, and the author's insights as a performer of contemporary music, this article examines the piece's inception, outlining the organological evolution of resophonic guitars and their relationship to Hawaiian music. It addresses the practical and aesthetic implications of the composer's choice of tuning, and examines the work of additional artists, such as Terry Riley and Larry Polansky, who have contributed to the growing repertoire for the just intonation resophonic guitar.

In spite of the publicity generated at times by the politics of the mature Leonard Bernstein, the roots of his entanglement with political causes have been little-explored. As part of a larger collaborative project investigating Bernstein's ties to Boston, this article traces his role in the Harvard Student Union's theatrical productions. These shows were important because they represented some of Bernstein's earliest efforts at writing and directing for the theater. Bernstein worked on two shows sponsored by the Union: the production of Marc Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock in 1939, during Bernstein's senior year at Harvard, and that of Aristophanes' play Peace in 1941, two years after he graduated. Although the Harvard Student Union was a major progressive political force on campus, Bernstein's relationship with the group appears to have been surprisingly casual. Examination of archival materials surrounding the productions, as well as selected interviews from the larger collaborative Bernstein project of which this article is but one part, reveals Bernstein as a man who was primarily interested in the Harvard Student Union insofar as it was an organization amenable to supporting his musical activities. As the heat of Bernstein's celebrity cools with time, such findings are an important aid in avoiding drawing overly deterministic conclusions about the significance of Bernstein's affiliations while ignoring his own immediate aims, political or otherwise.

I was formally introduced to antiracist pedagogy in the spring of 2016, several months before I traveled for the first time to the Rosedale Freedom Project (RFP) in Rosedale, Mississippi, to teach a course on music and politics to high school students. Oft romanticized as the place where blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, Rosedale is a small town in the Delta region. The majority of its population is Black, and consistently, more than half of this population has lived below the poverty line. The RFP seeks to help send its students, the majority of whom are Black and profoundly underserved by the state of Mississippi, to and through college. In preparation for the summer (and at the request of the director of the RFP), I read a number of foundational texts on antiracism and critical pedagogy including Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Beverly Daniel Tatum's “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (1997). As a white woman with no prior experience in Mississippi, I also read Nan Elizabeth Woodruff's history of the Delta region, American Congo: The African American Struggle in the Delta (2003) and Jesmyn Ward's novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), among other texts, and reflected on how to design a course that would further the RFP's mission of “supporting the Mississippi Delta's young leaders in the development of critical consciousness and the practice of justice.”

In 1894 Syrian émigré Alexander Maloof arrived in the United States to join the thriving community in New York's “Syrian Quarter.” Working first as a music instructor and pianist, Maloof found success as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher, integrating Arabic and US popular music and light classical styles. He wrote and edited Arabic-language piano songbooks for the Arabophone communities in the United States, and ran the Maloof Records label, the “Oriental” division of the Gennett Company's “race records” enterprise. Drawing on Arabic-language discourse from around the Syrian mahjar (diaspora), this article uses Maloof's output to demonstrate music's role in the vibrant and contested political conversations taking place in Arabic around the world, from the homelands around Beirut and Damascus, to the initial Syrian settlements in Cairo and Paris, to the American colonies in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Concluding with a discussion of the 1919 “American Maid” (composed under a pseudonym), I argue that a thorough understanding of the history of Orientalist popular music in the Americas requires a decentering of European American audiences in order to examine those questions animating the New York mahjar, most centrally the political fate of greater Syria.

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer stages the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. This essay proposes that the representations of Palestinian hijackers in three different productions show the opera reinventing itself before and after 9/11, when Arab identity hovers ambiguously in the U.S. Imaginary. Analyses focus in particular on distinct forms of collaboration among artists and media. In 1991 thorny associations among media produce an ambiguous Arab subject that reflects, and encourages, a capability for dialogue around the topic of terrorism. By contrast, two productions in 2003 rely on film and photograph to situate rigidly delineated Palestinian characters—demonstrating a dependency on visual media and a consequent highlighting of race that may be emblematic of a post-9/11 era. The essay concludes that different forms of collaboration in The Death of Klinghoffer can be approached as a microcosm of social and political interactions taking place far beyond the opera proper.