This chapter analyses Golden Age Automata exhibited in the International Expositions as fetish commodities and argues that consumers enjoyed the glamour of celebrity by purchasing them. French Golden Age automata are mimetic copies of popular performers of the day. An analysis of several key automata, such as those of Loïe Fuller, Little Tich, and Wild Buffalo Bill Cody, demonstrates how the automata display the fascination with performers in the era. The chapter also looks at the shift to electrical advertising automata at the turn of the twentieth century. In every case, the automata display the creators’ mimetic faculty at work.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.