Scholars have largely ignored Aaron Copland's lengthy career as a cultural diplomat, although the documentation surrounding it sheds new light on his political views. Through a consideration of his work with the U.S. government during World War II and the Cold War this article argues that a brand of universalist internationalism, rooted in his earlier musical experiences in Europe and in his leftist politics, motivated many of Copland's political activities at home and overseas during this period. Copland remained committed to this perspective both before and after his McCarthy hearing in 1953, but the Cold War inevitably brought new challenges to a man with such an outlook. Copland's work with the U.S. Information Agency during this period shows that although his beliefs and attitudes remained unchanged, he felt the need to participate in a reconstruction of his image that better matched the new climate. His music written during the Cold War, furthermore, provides an artistic realization of this interaction between pragmatism and idealism.

In this article, I explore the ways territorial authority or sovereignty emerges from within a particular mode of Indigenous creativity—the creation and performance of Hopi taatawi (traditional songs)—despite the appropriation of Hopi traditional lands by the American settler-state. Hopi territories within Öngtupqa (Grand Canyon) are just a sample of the many places where Indigenous authority, as expressed through sound-based performances, continues to resonate despite the imposition of settler-colonial structures that have either silenced Indigenous performances of authority or severed these places from Indigenous territories. Drawing on the work of Hopi composers and intellectuals, I explore how Hopi musical composition and performance are deeply intertwined with Hopi political philosophy and governance, resulting in a form of sovereignty that is inherently sonic rather than strictly literary or textual in nature. Recognizing that this interconnection between territorial authority and sound production is common across many Indigenous communities, I propose listening to contemporary Indigenous creativity not just as an aesthetic form but as a source of sonic sovereignty.

In many histories of American film music, Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) marks a new era by establishing norms in original, symphonic underscoring that would dominate Hollywood for decades. Kong's reign, however, eclipses diverse approaches to underscoring practiced at studios before and after its release. In this study, I compare the methods of Max Steiner at RKO and Nathaniel Finston at Paramount to show how both influenced film music implementation and discourse in the years leading up to Kong. Steeped in the practices of silent cinema, Finston championed collaborative scoring and the use of preexistent music in films like Fighting Caravans (1931). Steiner preferred to compose alone and placed music strategically to delineate narrative space in films, as in Symphony of Six Million (1932), a technique he adapted for mediating exotic encounters in island adventure films preceding Kong. Although press accounts and production materials show that Steiner and Finston's methods proved resilient in subsequent years, Kong's canonic status has marginalized Finston's role and threatens to misdirect appraisals of Steiner's other work. Considering Finston's practices at Paramount alongside Steiner's pre-Kong scores at RKO illuminates the limitations of using only Kong as a model, and shows that Finston's perspective on film scoring in the early 1930s provides a corrective balance for understanding film musicians’ work before and after Kong.

This article traces Steve Reich through the Bay Area's cultural nexus during the period 1962–65, exploring intersections with Luciano Berio, Phil Lesh, Terry Riley, Robert Nelson, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The aim is to present a revised history of this era by drawing on personal interviews with Tom Constanten, R. G. Davis, Jon Gibson, Saul Landau, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. In addition, previously unused source materials and contemporaneous newspaper reception are employed to provide a more nuanced contextual framework. Reich's heterogeneous activities—ranging from “third stream” music and multimedia happenings to incidental scores and tape collage—deserve investigation on their own terms, rather than from within narratives concerned with the stylistic development of “minimalism.” More appropriate and viable aesthetic parallels are drawn between Reich's work for tape and Californian Funk art.

George Gershwin greatly admired Alban Berg and his opera Wozzeck. He visited Berg in Vienna; the score he owned of Wozzeck was reputedly one of his prize possessions; and he traveled to Philadelphia in 1931 to attend the American premiere. This study argues that Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is heavily indebted to Berg's Wozzeck. The debts primarily involve structural processes—understanding structure as patterns of discrete events shared by the two operas. Motives and chords play a small role in the discussion, taking their place alongside musical events that range from the large—a fugue or a lullaby—to the small—a pedal, an ostinato, or some detail of counterpoint. Beyond the presence in both operas of a lullaby, a fugue, a mock sermon, and an upright piano, the greater relevance of these parallels and others is to be found in the ways in which Gershwin situated them in comparable musical contexts. Evidence, in the form of an overlooked interview and a previously unknown recollection by one of Gershwin's friends, supports this argument and leads to questions about how we are to understand Gershwin's use of Wozzeck.

At the dawn of the twentieth century and the height of the Recording Age, Irish American musicians began to record Irish traditional music on both commercial and subcommercial recordings. Circulated within the diaspora during a changing sense of Irish identity and sent home to a nationalist revival, these recordings had a profound impact on both traditional performance practices and modes of transmission. Quickly accepted by many at the heart of the tradition, these recordings were used by practitioners to bridge vast geographic distances and solidify vital lines of communication, allowing the diaspora to engage actively with the larger tradition.

The original series of Star Trek (1966–69) documents the social tensions of the late 1960s, responding positively, on the one hand, to the progressive political and social movements of the Civil Rights era by supporting racial and gender equality, but resisting its own efforts on the other, remaining faithful to conservative power structures. As the representative musical statement of the series, Star Trek's title cue embodies and expresses this paradox. Using audio-visual analysis, as well as sketch scores, interviews, and correspondence from the archives of the series’ composers and producers, this article analyzes the cue's compositional history, its musical codes, its narrative structure, and its use as framing, referential, and leitmotivic material within the series’ underscore in order to demonstrate the ways in which it communicates Star Trek's conflicting ideologies.

During the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.

Making sound is characteristic of agency in the natural world. It is curious therefore that having separated pitched sound from nature as much as possible—disciplined it into scales, temperaments, etc.—Western music has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to imitate natural sounds and processes with this un-natured sound. Whereas music often depicts nature, “music” has become abstract and transparent, and musical sounds themselves have become little more than acoustic tokens of objects related by structure. Any metaphorical connections with extra-musical sounds are suppressed in discourse about music because they constitute “effects.” In this article, I interpret the first movement of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (1970) as an expression of agency in the soundscape, considering vocal sounds, especially those attributed to crickets, as acts in a vocal ecology rather than imitation of natural sounds for programmatic purposes. My analysis invites us to hear this music—and music in general—as acoustic expression in a soundscape and therefore in ecological terms.

This article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.

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.

In the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

During the Civil War, countless musical works were written about the conflict and marketed to amateur musicians, especially women. Among them were pieces composed in response to recent conflicts, often published within days or weeks of the relevant event. Popular genres included keyboard battle pieces, which depicted some of the most pivotal battles of the war in musical rhetoric, bringing them alive in the minds and imaginations of drawing room performers and audiences.

This essay is the first detailed study of American keyboard battle pieces from the Civil War. It investigates how they mirror many aspects of Civil War life, including the civilian demand for vivid war news, especially eyewitness accounts from the front, the advent of telegraphic reporting, and the fallibility of the media in reporting on the war. The pieces also reflect cultural trends of the mid-nineteenth century not related to war, particularly the popularity of theatrical melodrama on the stage and the prominence of virtuosity in piano repertoire. In investigating the performance of battle pieces as a site where women imagined and experienced the perils of war, this article contributes to scholarship that deepens our understanding of how women at home participated in mass culture.

In December 1943, an all–African American cast starred in the Broadway premiere of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of Georges Bizet's Carmen. When Hammerstein began work on Carmen Jones a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, Porgy and Bess was just being revived. Hammerstein's 1942 version of Carmen, set in a Southern town and among African Americans, shows the influence of the revised version of Porgy and Bess, with Catfish Row echoed in a cigarette factory in South Carolina and the Hoity Toity night club. It took Hammerstein more than eighteen months to find a producer, and when the show opened by the end of 1943, the setting in a parachute factory and urban Chicago reflected new priorities brought on by wartime changes. Commercially one of the most successful musical plays on Broadway during its run of 503 performances, Carmen Jones offers a window on the changing issues of culture, class, and race in the United States during World War II. New archival evidence reveals that these topics were part of the work's genesis and production as much as of its reception. This article contextualizes Carmen Jones by focusing on the complex issues of war, race, and identity in the United States in 1942 and 1943.

The automaker Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company Music Department in 1924 with the goal of reviving what he called “old-fashioned dancing and early American music.” Ford's interest in the Anglo-American social dances of his youth quickly grew from dances hosted by the Fords for company executives to a nationwide dance education program. This article traces the history of the Music Department's dance education program and examines the parallels between it and the company's earlier efforts in social engineering—namely the Ford Profit Sharing Plan (better known as the “Five Dollar Day”) and the Ford English School. The Music Department's activities offer an opportunity to explore how industry sought to shape music and dance through Americanization efforts and leisure reform as Detroit rapidly urbanized during the first decades of the twentieth century. Supporters of Ford's revival viewed the restrained musical accompaniment and dance movements as an antidote to jazz music and dances, but more importantly, music and dance served as an object lesson in the physical discipline necessary for assembly line labor. Ford's dance education campaign reveals the degree to which industry was once entwined with leisure reform in southeast Michigan.

In the mid-nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy entered the mainstream of antebellum popular culture by borrowing from a European musical repertory, drawing on the language of advertisements for legitimate entertainments, and engaging two themes of antebellum popular culture, sentimentality and nationalism. Minstrels' opera parodies used devices similar to the British burlesque tradition: opera in blackface relied on the recontextualization of the original and an unpredictable mingling of sources and subjects. Discussion of three popular blackface opera songs, “I Dreamed Dat I Libed in Hotel Halls,” “See! Sir, See!,” and “Stop Dat Knocking,” demonstrates these processes.

From January to May 1965 the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program. This tour serves as a case study through which we can see the far-reaching effects of cultural diplomacy. The State Department initially envisioned its cultural and informational programs as one-way communication that brought ideas from the United States to new places; yet the tours changed not only audiences, but also the musicians themselves and even the communities to which the musicians returned. Both archival and oral history evidence indicate that the Michigan jazz band's tour succeeded in building vital imagined connections across international borders. The nature of these connections demonstrates that the cold war practice of pushing culture across borders for political purposes furthered cultural globalization—even though the latter process is often regarded by scholars as a phenomenon that began only after the end of the cold war. The jazz band's tour highlights the essential role of music and musicians in fostering new transnational sensibilities in the politicized context of the cold war.

A historical overview of college football's participants exemplifies the diversification of mainstream American culture from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The same cannot be said for the sport's audience, which remains largely white American. Gerald Gems maintains that football culture reinforces the construction of American identity as “an aggressive, commercial, white, Protestant, male society.” Ken McLeod echoes this perspective in his description of college football's musical soundscape, “white-dominated hard rock, heavy metal, and country music—in addition to marching bands.” This article examines musical segregation in college football, drawing from case studies and interviews conducted in 2013 with university music coordinators from the five largest collegiate athletic conferences in the United States. These case studies reveal several trends in which music is used as a tool to manipulate and divide college football fans and players along racial lines, including special sections for music associated with blackness, musical selections targeted at recruits, and the continued position of the marching band—a European military ensemble—as the musical representative of the sport. These areas reinforce college football culture as a bastion of white strength despite the diversity among player demographics.

Throughout his career, John Williams has set the musical tone for the American presidency, most elaborately with his scores for Oliver Stone's controversial films JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). While invested in capturing the character of these commanders in chief through musical codes, Williams's soundtracks are equally engaged in the act of the evocation and telling of “history.” Specifically, they construct a tragic myth of 1960s America in which the promise represented by JFK is destroyed from without, and Nixon from within, both by the malevolent forces of the military-industrial complex. In considering the thematic and dramatic means by which Williams paints his orchestral portraits, I reveal the extent to which music supports Stone's paranoiac narratives, especially in cases where the director's collage-like visual aesthetic puts pressure on the otherwise nostalgic traits of Williams's default tonal style.

I offer a music-analytical approach to JFK and Nixon informed by interviews, studies of political mythology and paranoia, and musicological appraisals of Williams's music. Stone's 1960s-as-lapsarian-metanarrative positions Kennedy as a romanticized absence, an image of the fabular fallen King, and Williams renders him as a public recollection rather than a human being with interiority. Nixon, by contrast, is a tragic antihero, consumed by dark forces of history and an abundance of ambivalent thematic material. Particular attention is paid to the dismantling of Kennedy's noble leitmotif during JFK’s prologue and motorcade sequence and to the near-fascistic musical accompaniment of Nixon's speeches. Having demonstrated the active role these scores play, I conclude that Williams's music constitutes an authoring of history in a strong, albeit postmodern, sense, consistent with but independent from Stone's screenplay.

Taking an autoethnographic perspective that foregrounds the interplay between the author's artist-self and researcher-self, this article explores the relationship between agency and structure in the activities surrounding underground hip hop music making within a home studio recording space. It aims to demystify the aura of in-studio music creation by focusing on the nexus of oral/written, pre-composed/improvised, and pre-recorded/live creative practices as experienced within the context of performance. Utilizing Harris Berger's notion of stance, I discuss how hip hop recording artists transcend performative self-consciousness in the pursuit of creativity. Ultimately, this article presents hip hop home recording studios as spaces that facilitate particular kinds of musical innovation through a mix of collective and individual pursuits, as well as routinized and spontaneous activities.