Shortly after Japan's surrender to Allied forces, the Soviet Union occupied the northern part of Korea, and the United States moved into the south, where it established the US Army Military Government in Southern Korea (USAMGIK, 1945–1948). In the American zone, music played a unique role in forging US hegemony over Korea. Young American pianist Ely Haimowitz (1920–2010) was the central figure in shaping that policy. Associated with “highbrow” culture, Western orchestral music helped restore Koreans’ ethnic pride damaged by Japanese colonial rule, while countering the Soviet emphasis on indigenous music. By fostering Western orchestral music in Korea, and supporting many individual musicians, Haimowitz succeeded in gaining widespread admiration and trust among Korean musicians. Based on unique access to Haimowitz's private archival collection, as well as diverse historical records from Korea, this article develops a complex picture of Haimowitz not merely as a cold-blooded US military officer and propagandist but also as an individual musician who shared friendships with Korean musicians, suffered ethical dilemmas, and often supported Korean voices against the USAMGIK. The relationships he forged provide indispensable context in understanding USAMGIK music policy, Korean musicians’ responses to it, and the post–World War II Korean reception of Western orchestral music overall.

This article examines the racial politics of radio programming in the United States by focusing on the development of a new radio format in the late 1980s. This new format, which the radio industry referred to as Crossover, attracted a coalition audience of Black, white, and Latinx listeners by playing up-tempo dance, R&B, and pop music. In so doing, this format challenged the segregated structure of the radio industry, acknowledging the presence and tastes of Latinx audiences and commodifying young multicultural audiences. The success of this format influenced programming on Top 40 radio stations, bringing the sounds of multicultural publics into the US popular music mainstream. Among these sounds was hip hop, which Crossover programmers embraced for its ability to appeal across diverse audiences; these stations helped facilitate the growth of this burgeoning genre. But like many forms of liberal multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, the racial politics of these stations were complex, as they decentered individual minority groups’ interests in the name of colorblindness and inclusion.

Between 1908 and 1911, New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch engaged the modern dancer Isadora Duncan to perform with his orchestra in New York and on three tours of the Midwest. Posing considerable risk to his reputation as an elite conductor, this unusual alliance grew in part from his concert manager's wish to compete with the Salomé dance craze raging in vaudeville halls across the country. Damrosch's “pioneering spirit” allowed him a genuine appreciation of Duncan's expressive, transcendent dancing. Yet for his critics, the shockingly under-dressed dancer, just back from her conquest of Europe, represented yet another sensational Salomé eager to capitalize on the popular profanities of market-driven entertainment. Music critics and Protestant clergymen from St. Louis to Boston berated Damrosch for what they saw as an immoral capitulation to mass consumerism and a desecrating abuse of the sacred repertoire he guarded—a repertoire defined in part by its distance from dancing. This article draws on critiques in the daily press, Damrosch's personal papers, and scholarship in dance and religious studies to situate Damrosch's marketing experiment with Duncan in the wider context of Progressive-era devotional life, where similar concessions to mass entertainment arose in the urban revival movement of the Third Great Awakening. Damrosch's recourse to Duncan's “barefoot dancing”—oddly akin to the tactics of big tent revivalists espousing Muscular Christianity and epitomized by Billy Sunday's pulpit pantomimes—illuminates the collision of spiritual and economic concerns that shaped both musical and ecclesiastical arenas of the American “sacred.”

Ron Moore, creator and producer of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series, outlined his proposed show's aesthetic in a manifesto aptly titled “Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera.” The title of this essay took a stand against the science fiction subgenre of space opera, asserting that it was outdated, overdone, and unrealistic. Moore's vision for his series revolutionized iconic elements of classic television space operas. Though Moore resisted the stigma of space opera, his reimagined series holds an inherent “operaticness”—a term first coined by opera scholar Marcia Citron. Battlestar Galactica has many operatic qualities, particularly in its narrative structure, cinematography, characters, and music. After analyzing Galactica's explicit evocations of opera, this article will explore the operatic features of the soundtrack and evaluate the characters intimately tied to the opera by tracing the tropes of gendered opera as outlined by Susan McClary and Catherine Clément. Through a detailed analysis of three episodes, I will demonstrate how Moore successfully constructed a series that relied deeply upon operatic qualities and resonances.