Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T06:13:59.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Inclusive Publics and Modern Technologies: An Introduction to Three Essays on Early Twentieth-Century American Opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2019

Extract

The three essays brought together in this cluster are immersed in themes that characterize “Americanness” in the twentieth century. They provide a microcosm of critical issues that define opera in the United States during these first decades when the nation helped shape the creation of opera rather than principally being a site for importing European works. Although most of the composers discussed in these articles were born in Europe (Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek) and only a few in the United States (Marc Blitzstein and George Antheil), all of them spent significant time in the United States, and all of the works discussed are either set in the United States, utilize American characters, or tied to important American themes.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This cluster of articles originated as a session entitled “Opera, Media, and the Nation” held at the National Meeting of the Society for American Music in 2016 in Boston. As the assigned moderator of this panel I was impressed with how these three papers spoke so well to new ways of thinking about Americanness and opera in the United States during a critical and formative period. I am very honored to have worked with the three wonderful contributors, Kunio Hara, John Gabriel, and Danielle Ward-Griffin, and I thank them for their insightful scholarship, hard work, and warm collegiality in making this collaboration productive and enjoyable.

References

André, Naomi. Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salerno, Salvatore, eds. Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Kirk, Elise K. American Opera. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Norris, Renee Lapp. “Opera and the Mainstreaming of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Journal of the Society for American Music 1, no. 3 (2007): 341–65.Google Scholar
Randall, Annie J. Puccini and the Girl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic Books, 2005.Google Scholar
Wipplinger, Jonathan O. “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf.” In Blackness in Opera, edited by Naomi André, Karen Bryan, and Eric Saylor, 236–59. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.Google Scholar