Between 1903 and 1904, the two-step “Hiawatha” spread rapidly throughout much of the colonial world. The travels of “Hiawatha” reveal both what Stuart Hall calls the “double-stake” of popular culture as well as what Amy Kaplan describes as the “anarchic” nature of empire: through its circulation and repeated hearings, “Hiawatha” became both a kind of colonizing force and also a medium that disturbed ideas about racial hierarchies and nationhood that served to justify colonial rule. By charting the global movement of “Hiawatha,” I show how the song became both a colonial force and also a medium for expressions that challenged imperial logic. The tune exhibited imperial tendencies: it saturated soundscapes and, as part of an emerging form of new musical commodities, coaxed listeners into recognizing their shifting status from auditors to consumers. Through its Native American subject matter, the song also helped to perpetuate ideas of evolutionary racial science that served to justify the violence of imperialism. The very qualities that made “Hiawatha” a colonizing song, though, especially its repetitious ubiquity, also increased the complexity of its meaning as it circuited the globe, leading some listeners to hear an accumulation of meanings that seemed to exceed the forms of US imperial pop.

Liberace entered the sprawling scene of US pop culture in 1952 emceeing a TV show that initially garnered higher ratings than I Love Lucy. The Liberace Show presented staples of the classical piano repertoire in abridged versions that cut the “dull parts” and liberally added orchestrations. Liberace's heterodox practices outraged prominent music critics, who soon deemed him the very incarnation of kitsch. Turning from aesthetic criticism to an archaeological analysis of media, I discuss the show's presentation of classical music, taking as its main case study Liberace's iconoclastic rendition of Beethoven's “Tempest” sonata, and examine it through the theory of remediation advanced by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Analyzing archival videos, I show how the alterations exerted on the musical text were inextricably tied to the telegenic mise-en-scènes staged for each episode while situating them in the new media landscape that emerged in the 1950s. The show remediated not only the pieces Liberace performed but also his own TV persona to nurture an intimate bond with home viewers who became captivated by the host's enchanting presence. I contend that Liberace's remediations drastically collapsed the specificity of performance medium that modern critics construed to be immanent to the musical work. This collapse entailed a proliferation of musical and audiovisual media that afforded Liberace's devoted viewers an alluring experience of immediacy and ultimately retrieved the domestic intimacy that had been integral to the genealogy of the piano sonata.

This study explores piano advertising strategies after 1940 by examining ads printed in Etude, the Music Magazine between then and 1957, when it discontinued publication. Aware of the emerging US consumer culture, piano companies experimented throughout this period with more aggressive marketing techniques than they had previously used. Because Etude’s intended audience included musicians and enthusiasts of every skill and experience level, it was approached accordingly by advertisers. Thus, we can trace in its pages the development of methodologies that, owing to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contemporary range of consumers and their interests, came to target distinct and different market segments. Examination of strategies aimed at the respective groups illuminates an important chapter in the development of twentieth-century advertising while highlighting the piano's special status among consumer products and its cultural associations. Analysis of the industry's strategies in dealing with the mid-twentieth-century US economy reveals contemporary understandings of such associations and their effect on the implications of piano acquisition.

Motown Records churned out hit singles with remarkable efficiency, thanks largely to a stable of skilled professional session musicians. However, exactly who played on their most iconic recordings remains a mystery because, as was standard within the music industry, no Motown release in the 1960s credited these musicians for their work. These practices have led to conflicting accounts, the most famous of which concerns bassists James Jamerson and Carol Kaye. To this day, Kaye alleges that she played on numerous classic Motown recordings but has been purposefully omitted from Motown history. Conversely, Jamerson—who died more than thirty years ago—continues to be vehemently defended by acolytes such as biographer Allan Slutsky, who see Kaye's claims as blasphemous. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article reconstructs Kaye's involvement with Motown and, in so doing, reevaluates the merits of the Kaye/Jamerson controversy. Building on the work of Andrew Flory, I explore the role of session musicians in Motown's creative process and argue that critics and fans have propagated a problematic discourse in which Jamerson has been valorized and Kaye has been dismissed. Ultimately, Kaye's story not only provides a useful corrective to the historical record, it also demonstrates the need for further research into session musicians’ contributions to popular music.