This article attends to the musical afterlife of the late Bishop Gilbert Earl Patterson, a Pentecostal minister who, at the time of his death, served as presiding bishop of the largest African American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ. In it, I theorize the nexus of faith, media, and sound that lifted Bishop Patterson to the heights of ecclesial power during his lifetime, while laying the groundwork for a pervasive posthumous presence: broadcast religion. Placing Patterson's life-long preoccupation with various modes of technical mediation in conversation with his extremely musical approach to preaching, I will show that Bishop Patterson's technophilic Pentecostalism takes an enchanted view of devices like microphones, radios, televisions, and cameras, understanding each as a channel through which spiritual power can flow. As Patterson's voice and broadcasting infrastructure produce intimacy with countless scriptural scenes, they commingle mediation and immediacy, cultivating an enduring affect that I refer to as afterliveness. Transcending any single homiletic event, afterliveness depends on sermonic sound reproduction, effected by Patterson through both the practice of recording and through ecstatic acts of musical repetition, a set of recurring musical procedures that endow the bishop's ministry with an eternal pitch.

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a watershed moment in U.S. organ culture. Over the course of four months, twenty-one of the finest organists in the country, along with Alexandre Guilmant of Paris, performed sixty-two solo organ recitals on a large new organ built by Farrand and Votey, paving the way for the rise of the solo organ concert in the United States. Although this was a seminal event in the organ world, it has largely been overlooked in modern musicological scholarship. This article contextualizes the series within the wider program of the fair's Bureau of Music and compares the programming strategies between Bureau of Music director Theodore Thomas and organ series director Clarence Eddy. Thomas chose to promote a hierarchical programming model that ultimately failed, but the organists endeavored to offer programs that appealed to both the uninitiated and the connoisseur. A detailed analysis of organ concert programs at the fair using a new database reveals the way in which organists embraced a mixture of “popular” and “profound” elements in their programming that was later disseminated in magazines, pamphlets, and performing editions after the event.

This article argues that deaf musical knowledge became epistemically excluded from systems of musical thought in the United States as the result of a battle between two competing philosophies of deaf education in the nineteenth century: manualism and oralism. It reveals how oralist educators explicitly framed music as exclusively involving “normal hearing”—and thus as outside of deaf knowledge except through technological intervention—by drawing on ideas about eugenics, race, and authenticity. Ideas about morality and technology also colored views of deaf musicality in the United States, shaping the reception of deaf music-making throughout the twentieth century until today. This article tells the story of how deaf music-making came to be forgotten and discovered, again and again, in the U.S. consciousness. By way of conclusion, I suggest that in order to address the epistemic exclusion of deaf musical knowers, we must carefully attend to what deaf epistemologies bring to music studies.

In the folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights, the narrator Scheherazade escapes the Sultan's physical and sexual brutality through her storytelling; in the dramatic symphony Scheherazade.2, composed by John Adams (2014), the music and its programmatic commentary evoke modern images of women facing violence and oppression. Through a musical story of empowerment and a construction of gender and ethnic identity, Adams utilizes program music's narrative and representational components to challenge contemporary power dynamics on a global scale. Typically, a work like this might be viewed through one of two methodological lenses. A feminist critique of Scheherazade.2 might examine the ways in which the piece confronts misogyny and offers reparation. An orientalist critique might examine the ways in which the piece's invocation of Scheherazade combines with musical and programmatic exoticism to project a cultural “Other.” This article blends these two lenses, using the framework of feminist orientalism to examine the intertwined implications of both angles of critique in the context of transnational feminism. As a Western project alluding to the Arabian world of Scheherazade and the Sultan to tell a story about misogyny, Scheherazade.2 effectively construes such issues of misogyny as “Eastern.” The effect of displacing these problems of violence and oppression onto the East arguably provides a more palatable way for Western audiences to critique the West itself, but ultimately impedes transnational efforts. While seeking broad-scale reparation and advocacy, therefore, Scheherazade.2 nevertheless reinscribes orientalist stereotypes through the constructed narrative of a gendered and ethnic “Other.” A feminist orientalist critique draws out the paradoxical nuances of Scheherazade.2, parsing the dynamic network of musical and extra-musical factors that shape interpretations of the piece and its reparative potential. By considering the complex layers of agency, identity, and interaction that create new meanings in different contexts, this critique highlights the ways in which Scheherazade.2 works to redress issues of misogyny while also perpetuating discourses of essentialization and appropriation. This article argues overall that, by recognizing the feminist orientalist implications of Scheherazade.2, the reparative potential of the piece can be foregrounded and genuinely realized in a transnational context.