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.

Making sound is characteristic of agency in the natural world. It is curious therefore that having separated pitched sound from nature as much as possible—disciplined it into scales, temperaments, etc.—Western music has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to imitate natural sounds and processes with this un-natured sound. Whereas music often depicts nature, “music” has become abstract and transparent, and musical sounds themselves have become little more than acoustic tokens of objects related by structure. Any metaphorical connections with extra-musical sounds are suppressed in discourse about music because they constitute “effects.” In this article, I interpret the first movement of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (1970) as an expression of agency in the soundscape, considering vocal sounds, especially those attributed to crickets, as acts in a vocal ecology rather than imitation of natural sounds for programmatic purposes. My analysis invites us to hear this music—and music in general—as acoustic expression in a soundscape and therefore in ecological terms.

American composer David Mahler (b. 1944) has nurtured a career that is independent, diverse, and hard to classify. Democratic, inclusive, and community oriented, Mahler thinks deeply about sound in specific environments, and how music gets made, both by amateurs and professionals. Mahler's work is thus integrally connected to places, to the people in them, and to the songs those people sing. He is influenced and inspired by U.S. traditions of band music arrangements, the ragtime of Joseph Lamb, the songs of Stephen Foster, the bitonality of Charles Ives, the simple harmonic motion of classic minimalism, and the indeterminacy of John Cage. His teachers included Harold Budd, Morton Subotnick, and James Tenney, and he has been an important influence on many composers of his generation, including Michael Byron, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Thom Miller, and Stuart Dempster. Defining himself as a “Listener-in-Residence,” he has composed, performed, taught, organized, and directed, all while remaining almost completely unaffiliated with academic institutions. This article provides a portrait of Mahler's career in the context of the communities that have shaped his work and explores how his music responds to the world around him.

From December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.

Central among Lou Harrison's pioneering East-West fusions, the works for gamelan and Western instruments are frequently cited either as exemplars of the composer's Californian, postmodern musical sensibility or as noteworthy instances of cultural hybridity. Close examination of Main Bersama-sama (1978) and Bubaran Robert (1976, rev. 1981), however, shows that these pieces can and should be understood for what they tell us about Harrison's deep engagement with melody. A self-proclaimed “melode,” Harrison has mistakenly been regarded as a West Coast musical dabbler, writing tuneful pieces that lack the complexity that characterizes the work of his East Coast contemporaries. Yet analysis of the pitch structure of Main Bersama-sama and Bubaran Robert reveals intricate compositional “games” similar to the pre-compositional strategies of composers more typically associated with algorithmic compositional methods. Because these intricacies lie beneath the melodic surface of the music they have largely been unheard and unappreciated in Harrison's work. The melodic nature of these games not only challenges the widely accepted depiction of Harrison as a mere “tunesmith,” but also shows that Harrison explored the ability of melody (as opposed to large-scale tonal or harmonic schemes) to create form and serve a central generative function in his music.

This article explores composer David N. Baker's use of elements of jazz and vernacular music to articulate formal structures and suggest extramusical commentaries in his concert works, with particular focus on the Sonata for Cello and Piano and the Sonata I for Piano. Themes of homage to and respect for jazz saxophonist John Coltrane resonate through these works. Various features bring the jazz legend to mind, but Baker's compelling play with implication and quotation provides fertile ground for studying musical signification and the use of vernacular emblems within Western compositional structures and the concert music of African American composers. Conventional analytical methods are combined with readings of referential symbols to work toward interpretations that address both structural and expressive domains. This approach allows discussions of compositional techniques to intersect with cultural and philosophical considerations. By addressing issues of musical structure and expressivity, this article seeks to move beyond commonplace surface-level descriptions of black vernacular emblems in the concert music of African American composers.

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.

Although responses to 9/11 have often called for unity, the process of memorializing it has proven extremely contentious. This article examines the role of disunity in modern memorialization, focusing specifically on John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a work commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2002 to commemorate the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Drawing on critical theories of memorialization and on audience surveys I conducted at several performances of On the Transmigration of Souls, I suggest that disunity serves the process of memorializing by mirroring the experience of traumatic memory, by acknowledging loss and absence, and by negotiating regional, racial, gendered, religious, and political differences. Disunity thus encourages reflection on how multiple perspectives recast the act of memorialization. Such reflection, I argue, can inform both performance and scholarship of musical memorials toward what Judith Butler calls the “ethical responsibility” of mourning.

The literature on the Hungarian-Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt (1919–2012) has centered on Anhalt's immigrant status and on the connections between his life story and his creative work—deservedly so, as his compositions reflect an interest in issues of displacement, memory, and the relationship between the present and the past. These biographical and geographical themes, however, have yet to be explored as they have been expressed temporally in his music. An examination of his historically based operas, La Tourangelle (1975) and Winthrop (1986) through literary theorist Steven Connor's lens of contemporality reveals the ways in which these works reflect a postmodern conception of temporality and experience. Through their temporal flexibility, these operas demonstrate the genre's ability to express historical processes and experience in a way that literary accounts cannot. The models of subjectivity and contemporality expressed in these works moreover reflect the composer's own complex identity as one that celebrates the continued life of the past in the present.

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.

Paul Robeson's celebrated comeback recitals at Carnegie Hall in 1958 marked the singer's return to the world's concert stages after his ban for much of the 1950s. The recitals, this article argues, can be understood as a presentation of cosmopolitan thinking and action, of a certain way of being in and interacting with the world, and also a mid-century critique of American nationalist politics. As such, the article is an elaboration of scholarship that has considered aspects of internationalism in Robeson's discourse and (musical) practice. Drawing on the insights of the new or critical cosmopolitanism, a diverse and loose body of theory that has gained currency since the 1990s, the essay thinks through Robeson's Carnegie Hall events in terms of the practices of the concert hall recital, specifically programming, suggesting what it might mean to be a cosmopolitan singer in a specific historical moment.

Since the early 1900s, song-poem entrepreneurs, often referred to as “song sharks,” have fueled a diffuse and largely hidden American industry that produces music to accompany the poems and lyrics of amateur writers. These entrepreneurs have long been demonized in the popular media for preying on the naiveté of their clientele. Yet despite charges of exploitation, this musical equivalent of the vanity press has survived for over a century. Although the vast majority of song-poets and their song-poems have remained in obscurity, in the 1990s, song-poems developed a cult following among record collectors; as “anonymous collaborations,” these recordings highlighted tensions between poignant personal expression and impersonal commercial rendering that appealed to listeners with a penchant for the obscure. This article draws on advertisements, sheet music, media coverage, and personal interviews to piece together a history of the song-poem industry, with particular focus on the gendered dimensions of the practice, the role of technology in the production process, and the multiplicity of meanings embedded in song-poems for both song-poets and collectors.