Since the 1980s, the Nonesuch label, a longstanding subsidiary of the Warner Music Group (WMG), has become noteworthy for its steady market performance during a period of volatility for media multinationals. Nonesuch Records, having once been an adventurous boutique classical label under Teresa Sterne, has developed over the last three decades as a creatively idiosyncratic and commercially successful “adult” imprint under Robert Hurwitz, the erstwhile director of the Munich-based Edition of Contemporary Music jazz label.

Nonesuch has not historically been understood as a jazz label, though it has served as a home for a few jazz acts, including Bill Frisell, Fred Hersch, and the World Saxophone Quartet. By the early years of the new millennium, though, Nonesuch had become one of the few major label subsidiaries willing to maintain an active roster of jazz instrumentalists, harnessing its diversified roster as a source of strength.

This paper examines the Nonesuch label's cultivation of a distinctive jazz niche and situates this development against the backdrop of a period of structural turbulence for the WMG. The leveraged buyout of WMG in 2004, which precipitated the dissolution of the Warner Jazz subsidiary and the transfer of much of its jazz roster to Nonesuch, reflects a contemporary logic of financialization, where value extraction has become the overriding goal of corporate restructuring. Mergers and acquisitions enacted at the uppermost reaches of major label corporate hierarchies pass along significant costs to the label subsidiaries and their artist rosters, installing precarity at the core of the music industry's creative ecologies.

Florence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

In this article, I analyze a rhythmic device in musical theater performance that is often used but rarely discussed: The sudden break into halftime. Breaking into halftime—a rhythmic shift that is performed and perceived as occurring at half the tempo (or speed) of the groove in preceding and subsequent sections—has the effect of abruptly stretching out and slowing down musical temporality. With a break into halftime, a song's groove is suddenly broader, more open, and expansive. When accompanied by lyrics, the move suggests deliberateness, calls attention to the lyrical address, and invites a considered response from the listener. It is a musical device akin to drastically slowing down a spoken cadence to ensure that the listener is fully grasping the significance of one's words. With or without lyrics, this temporal disruption has a powerful effect on listeners’ bodies as, suddenly, the established timing of one's musical experience is disrupted and immediately set to half the speed of the previous pace. By analyzing the use of halftime in three filmed musicals—Newsies, Rent, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show—I show how the rhythmic device carries with it social coding of solidarity and collective power among queer, marginalized, and/or otherwise outcast individuals and ultimately alters the broader narrative of the shows. Ultimately, I articulate how halftime serves to queer time and forge collective action, allowing us to reimagine what sort of politics, formations, collectives, and futures are possible.

The discussion of narrative in mashups typically involves how a preexisting message is reinterpreted by the incorporation of new musical material. However, many scholars note how DJ Earworm's technique of creating new lyrics through the combination of samples from up to fifty different tracks conveys an original message that is distinct from its borrowed sources. In his various interviews, DJ Earworm elaborates that his mashups are original compositions that act as musical time capsules that capture the zeitgeist of the age. Nevertheless, DJ Earworm only provides brief commentary on the meaning of his mashups and there is no close examination of these narratives in the literature. This raises the question: To what degree do DJ Earworm's mashups reflect cultural issues in American society? By merging Zbikowski's concept of conceptual integration with Almén's theory of musical narrative, this paper will demonstrate how DJ Earworm's mashups show a consistent pattern of having complex narratives with cultural messages that resonate with contemporary issues in American society, including fossil fuel dependence, income inequality, and political and racial division.