The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

Lovers of opera and classical music will not find it hard to think of scores strongly associated with their authors’ national identity, such as Chopin’s mazurkas (c. 1825–1849), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (1868), Smetana’s Vltava (The Moldau, 1874), or Sibelius’s Finlandia (1899). The connections between the traditions of art music and nationalism are manifold, and the nineteenth century, the age of musical Romanticism, in particular produced a substantial output of “national works,” the most successful of which are still in the repertory today. As a result, scholars of music have been debating the theme of “music and the nation” since the nineteenth century itself, when the discipline of music historiography first emerged.

The essay first focusses on the role of music Sebald’s writings in general. It explores the influence of music on his critical and literary writings in terms of style and thematic considerations. The focus of the essay is on pop music, discussing the connections between music and key themes such as memory and trauma. Next, the essay analyses Sebald’s impact on pop music and popular culture. His books, especially The Rings of Saturn, inspired many musical artists working in Avantgarde contexts (e.g. The Caretaker, Mabe Fratti, Christoph Heemann) and influenced many pop musicians who often are writers, too (e.g. Nick Cave, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Dirk von Lowtzow). These connections leads to a closer consideration of the similarities between Sebald’s literary techniques and the format of the pop music album.

Latin America’s Black newspapers and magazines were sites for both dissemination and extensive discussion of literature and the arts.Culture was no less important to Black editors and writers than politics or social commentary. The papers published numerous stories, poems, and serializations of novels. They included profiles of important Black artists, writers, and musicians and debated the quality of their work.Their efforts to alert readers to the existence and the achievements of Black cultural creators simultaneously created space for the development of Black cultural theory and arts criticism. This chapter includes several creative works, an extended review of a long-form poem, reporting on the lives and deaths of individual authors, and an account of a female cook whose aspirations to become a writer were never realized.Other articles provide probing reflections on the relationship of Blackness to artistic expression, and on what it meant to be a Black artist.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.

The drum kit is most commonly considered an instrument rooted in popular music traditions and is a defining element of most popular music styles. In recent years the drum kit has emerged in the unlikely context of contemporary classical music. As a result, there is an expanding repertoire of fully notated music by composers operating within the framework of Western classical music notational traditions. This chapter illuminates the influence that the drum kit has had on classical music since the early twentieth century and presents an overview of composed works starting with Darius Milhuad’s La Créations du Monde from 1923 and ending with Nicole Lizée’s Ringer from 2009. The chapter shows that early approaches to drum kit composition began as an assimilation of existing popular music styles with little progression in performance techniques and expression for the instrument. More recently composers have found a balance between contemporary classical music techniques and the drum kit’s rich traditions, grooves, and styles to make something progressive and new. Through the author, Ben Reimer’s, own commissioning, performances, and research the chapter contemplates the elements that lead to this confluence in contemporary classical drum kit music