Jimi Hendrix's 18 August 1969 performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair has been characterized as an expression of transcendent political resistance as well as crude anti-U.S. drivel. Drawing on Hendrix's own archive of recordings, writings, interviews, stage banter, and especially live performances, this article analyzes Hendrix's artistic engagement with the United States national anthem by locating his Woodstock Banner as a central moment in a two-year fascination with the song, brought to a close only by Hendrix's untimely death. It presents the anthem as an artistic vehicle for Hendrix's political musings, a thoughtful engagement with current events, and as commentary responsive to Hendrix's immediate environment and expressive of his aspirations for the nation of his birth. Insights offered here include the roots of Hendrix's Banner performances as ornaments to the Civil War eulogy “Taps,” the plural construction of the Hendrix Banner and an account of the aesthetic development of his anthem arrangement, the value of his recorded stage banter for understanding Hendrix's Banner politics, the impact of the film Woodstock on Hendrix's renditions, and the use of the Banner during Hendrix's final 1970 “The Cry of Love Tour” as part of a closing anti-war set and call to action for the psychedelic citizen.

Taking an autoethnographic perspective that foregrounds the interplay between the author's artist-self and researcher-self, this article explores the relationship between agency and structure in the activities surrounding underground hip hop music making within a home studio recording space. It aims to demystify the aura of in-studio music creation by focusing on the nexus of oral/written, pre-composed/improvised, and pre-recorded/live creative practices as experienced within the context of performance. Utilizing Harris Berger's notion of stance, I discuss how hip hop recording artists transcend performative self-consciousness in the pursuit of creativity. Ultimately, this article presents hip hop home recording studios as spaces that facilitate particular kinds of musical innovation through a mix of collective and individual pursuits, as well as routinized and spontaneous activities.

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.

The Journal of the Society for American Music is the official organ of the Society; as such, the articles published in its pages deal with a wide range of topics that both reflect its mission and illustrate the incredible diversity of music and musical styles composed, performed, and heard in the Americas. A glance at the tables of contents for issues published in the last three volumes of the journal (February 2011 through February 2014) provides an illuminating snapshot of the wondrous multiplicity that characterizes American music history. The thirteen issues published during that time include articles on popular music (hip hop, ragtime, swing, jazz, rock, country, soul), musical theatre, teachers, conductors, works by composers ranging from Ives and Copland to Feldman, Harrison, and Reich (and many in between), performers (Heifetz, Robeson, Zappa), jam sessions, ethnomusicological topics; in other words, the journal reflects in a truly impressive manner the rich and varied musical culture of the Americas. What is seriously underrepresented in this panoply of musical multiplicity, however, is the rich, diverse, and similarly wondrous American musical culture of any time before the twentieth century. Of the forty-two articles published over this three-year period, only two (5 percent) deal with American music or musical life before 1900, both of them on nineteenth-century topics.

The daily musical activities of poet Emily Dickinson (1830–86)—home performances at the piano, collecting sheet music, and attending concerts—provided a vital and necessary backdrop for her emerging artistic persona. Dickinson's active musical life reveals a great deal about the cultural offerings available to a woman of her time, place, and class. Moreover, her encounters with the music-making of the Dickinson family servants and the New England hymn tradition encouraged artistic borrowings and boundary crossings that had a deep and continuing influence on her writing. Through her engagement with music, Dickinson was able to fashion an identity served by musical longings, one that would ultimately serve a vital role in the formation of her unique poetic voice.

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.

In many histories of American film music, Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) marks a new era by establishing norms in original, symphonic underscoring that would dominate Hollywood for decades. Kong's reign, however, eclipses diverse approaches to underscoring practiced at studios before and after its release. In this study, I compare the methods of Max Steiner at RKO and Nathaniel Finston at Paramount to show how both influenced film music implementation and discourse in the years leading up to Kong. Steeped in the practices of silent cinema, Finston championed collaborative scoring and the use of preexistent music in films like Fighting Caravans (1931). Steiner preferred to compose alone and placed music strategically to delineate narrative space in films, as in Symphony of Six Million (1932), a technique he adapted for mediating exotic encounters in island adventure films preceding Kong. Although press accounts and production materials show that Steiner and Finston's methods proved resilient in subsequent years, Kong's canonic status has marginalized Finston's role and threatens to misdirect appraisals of Steiner's other work. Considering Finston's practices at Paramount alongside Steiner's pre-Kong scores at RKO illuminates the limitations of using only Kong as a model, and shows that Finston's perspective on film scoring in the early 1930s provides a corrective balance for understanding film musicians’ work before and after Kong.

The Beastie Boys’ Paul's Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet (1990) often draw comparisons because of their profuse and eclectic use of digital sampling. These two hip hop albums, however, use sampling in markedly different ways, a fact that is obscured because no well-developed language exists to differentiate how and why their sampling styles differ. To account for these differences, this article proposes a typology for sample-based hip hop, a systematic terminological and conceptual approach to this repertory. Using these two classic albums by the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy as case studies, this typology offers a way to describe and distinguish in concrete terms the richly varied musical styles that make up sample-based hip hop.

The concepts of “place,” “space,” and “home” are integral to the study of country music, a genre conventionally associated with geographic regions, rural landscapes, and domestic values. Place-songs have emerged as an important way in which country musicians communicate life experiences and define elements of their identity, emphasizing the influence of family and community on their character, beliefs, and values. However, just as place can signify belonging, it can also represent a constricting environment from which artists struggle to escape. Such narratives enable us to see vital parts of regional identity that would otherwise be hidden, obscured, or overshadowed.

The Dixie Chicks’ song “Lubbock or Leave It” (2006) is an interesting case study for an inquiry into how artists struggle to define themselves within the country genre. The song spurred immediate uproar insofar as the lyrics portray lead singer Natalie Maines's hometown of Lubbock, Texas as small and narrow-minded. Many listeners and critics interpreted the song as a rejection of both Lubbock and country values. Drawing from the fields of cultural geography and musicology, this study examines how the Dixie Chicks draw on musical codes and conventions in an act of defiance and genre subversion, as they struggle with parochialism and conservative thinking.

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.

In an arduous, twenty-year international career, Dutch opera soprano Rosa de Vries née van Os (1824–89) performed both French and Italian opera repertory with leading companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Experiencing triumphs and disappointments while managing both career and family, de Vries represents a class of mid-century opera singers, celebrated in their time but little remembered today. This article tells the story of de Vries's life and career, and in doing so aims to contribute to an understanding of transatlantic operatic life at the time. This reconstruction of Rosa de Vries offers a gateway for further studies of the cultural heritage of an important period in the history of opera and the strenuous demands of an international operatic marketplace.

Closely related to both film noir and the woman's film, 1940s female gothic pictures combine suspense and mystery with a focus on the subjective experience of the female protagonist. This article discusses the use of music and sound in the cinematic female gothic tradition, focusing upon two historically located films that form part of its “gaslight” subgenre: Experiment Perilous (dir. Tourneur; comp. Webb, 1944) and The Spiral Staircase (dir. Siodmak; comp. Webb, 1946). In both films, the positioning of the female lead is mediated by the presence of a medical discourse revolving around her professional and romantic relationship with a male doctor, whose knowledge and authority also allows him to function as an unofficial investigator into the woman's persecution at the hands of a serial murderer. The female gothic soundtrack is a crucial element in the creation and communication of this gendered discourse, articulating the shifting position of characters in relation to issues of crime, criminality, and romance. Musical and vocal control reinforce the doctor's dominance whilst allying his presentation with that of an emasculated killer, and create and contain agency within complex constructions of female victimhood.

Augusta Browne Garrett composed at least two hundred piano pieces, songs, duets, hymns, and sacred settings between her birth in Dublin, Ireland, around 1820, and her death in Washington, D.C., in 1882. Judith Tick celebrated Browne as the “most prolific woman composer in America before 1870” in her landmark study American Women Composers before 1870. Browne, however, cast an enduring shadow as an author as well, publishing two books, a dozen poems, several Protestant morality tracts, and more than sixty music essays, nonfiction pieces, and short stories. By means of her prose publications, Augusta Browne “put herself into the text—as into the world, into history—by her own movement,” as feminist writer Hélène Cixous urged of women a century later. Browne maintained a presence in the periodical press for four decades in a literary career that spanned music journalism, memoir, humor, fiction, poetry, and Christian devotional literature, but one essay, “The Music of America” (1845), generated attention through the twentieth century. With much of her work now easily available in digitized sources, Browne's life can be recovered, her music experienced, and her prose reassessed, which taken together yield a rich picture of the struggles, successes, and opinions of a singular participant and witness in American music of her era.

As the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.

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.

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.

Soprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.