As the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.

In April 1993 the Knitting Factory, a small nightclub in Lower Manhattan, hosted a five-day music festival titled “Radical New Jewish Culture.” This event was part of a multifaceted creative endeavor undertaken during the 1990s by composer/improvisers on New York City's downtown music scene and dubbed “Radical Jewish Culture” by its main protagonist, saxophonist John Zorn. RJC brought Jewish music and heritage into the purview of a polycultural experimentalist scene shaped by jazz, rock, free improvisation, and avant-garde concert music. Artists downtown also engaged in an animated “conversational community” that spilled over into interviews, program notes, liner notes, and essays. RJC was especially productive as a conceptual framework from which to interrogate the relationship between musical language and the semiotics of sound. Two pieces serve here as case studies: “¡Bnai!” an Israeli “pioneer song” as interpreted by the No Wave band G-d Is My Co-Pilot, and “The Mooche,” a Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition as interpreted by pianist Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters Orchestra.

Bill Finegan's arrangements of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1942 and of Concerto in F for the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1952 provide a basis for interpreting Gershwin's compositions. Finegan's treatments suggest that techniques central to popular forms were foundational to Gershwin's style in these pieces. Furthermore, Gershwin's and Finegan's works shed light on the concept of hybridity in the United States, especially as it concerns the label of “symphonic jazz” or “concert jazz” and ideas about race. Hybrid terms such as “symphonic jazz” manage to challenge musical and social categories while simultaneously reinforcing them.

This essay explores the thematic use of music in the science-fiction writings of two African American authors, Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany. Each author visited this theme in more than one work, and in at least one work centered the Afro-technological focus upon a special musical instrument: the “afro horn” in Dumas's story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and a machete/flute in Samuel R. Delany's novel The Einstein Intersection. Both writers treat music itself, without regard to a material instrument, as a technology. Dumas depicted black music as a tool that enabled black people to kill their enemies, and Delany represented music as a technology capable of avenging the wrongs committed against the politically and socially marginalized. Whereas Dumas's protagonists were more likely to be social pariahs because of their class or their sexual orientation than because of race, his descriptions specifically reference black music and its attendant rituals. Both writers portray music as a technology capable of creating and healing as well as avenging and destroying.

This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at the New York Herald Tribune, with that of music journalists based at the New York Times and other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from the Tribune in 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.

Binder's volumes are among the primary artifacts of antebellum women's musical culture, and they serve as more than records of popular genres, composers, and styles. They can be interpreted as a type of commonplace book compiled by young women between the ages of about ten and fifteen. This study examines the books of three young women from different social positions (Eliza Harwell of Williamsburg, VA; Mary Stedman of Fayetteville, NC; and Kate Berry of Nashville, TN) in order to understand the cultural values that they transmitted to them: they contain items that serve not only as pieces of music and means to achieve and demonstrate musical accomplishment, but also as visual aids to guide them in deportment, sentiment, and behavior. It also considers the personal notations made by the owners in each collection. These evince how one is to be viewed, how one is to present herself for the gratification of others, how one is to think or behave, how one moves within desired social circles. They demonstrate how one is to Perform—whether or not music occurs.

Storytelling has proved to be a useful metaphor in jazz commentary and analysis. Within such literature it is invariably solos, portrayed as discrete cultural articles, that “tell a story” through their adherence to internal coherence and logic. This prized autonomy is modeled on that which we find in the modern European tradition. Pathbreaking studies by scholars such as Ingrid Monson, Paul Berliner, and Keith Sawyer have redressed this hegemony in highlighting the importance of collaborative work in jazz. This essay needs to be considered a contribution to this focus. Yet approaches that emphasize interaction among band members tend toward dialogical metaphors and analytical frameworks that marginalize forms of creative “collaboration” that can occur retrospectively between musicians and vocalists who may not have even met. Drawing from Walter Benjamin's essay “The Storyteller: Nikolai Leskov,” this essay argues that storytelling in jazz is an intergenerational, accumulative effort in which we see a story continue to unfold with each new telling. It shows that there is generative tension between a musician holding on to his or her distinctive characteristics and approach, and their commitment to sharing (in) the story. Storytelling in jazz involves musicians adding “transparent layers” to the tradition, contributing to musical material, and collaborating with others (both contemporary and temporally distant) in a manner in which personal distinction is actively maintained. Through a consideration of John Coltrane's ideas concerning the centrality of community to the practice, storytelling in jazz is shown to be of extramusical social significance also.

During the 1950s and ’60s, many composers began exploring the possibilities provided by commercially available magnetic tape recording and electronically produced sound. In Latin America, the most successful early electroacoustic studio was hosted at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), part of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This article chronicles the eight years of existence of CLAEM's Laboratorio de música electrónica (1964–1971), and its role in the training of composers hailing from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and the United States. This historical account of pioneering Latin American electroacoustic music provides insight into the aesthetic and technical developments that earned the laboratory at CLAEM a place in the regional and transnational world of contemporary music making and demonstrates the crucial role of locality in the adoption, consumption, and rearticulation of international musical models.

The concepts of “place,” “space,” and “home” are integral to the study of country music, a genre conventionally associated with geographic regions, rural landscapes, and domestic values. Place-songs have emerged as an important way in which country musicians communicate life experiences and define elements of their identity, emphasizing the influence of family and community on their character, beliefs, and values. However, just as place can signify belonging, it can also represent a constricting environment from which artists struggle to escape. Such narratives enable us to see vital parts of regional identity that would otherwise be hidden, obscured, or overshadowed.

The Dixie Chicks’ song “Lubbock or Leave It” (2006) is an interesting case study for an inquiry into how artists struggle to define themselves within the country genre. The song spurred immediate uproar insofar as the lyrics portray lead singer Natalie Maines's hometown of Lubbock, Texas as small and narrow-minded. Many listeners and critics interpreted the song as a rejection of both Lubbock and country values. Drawing from the fields of cultural geography and musicology, this study examines how the Dixie Chicks draw on musical codes and conventions in an act of defiance and genre subversion, as they struggle with parochialism and conservative thinking.

Benny Goodman and Chick Webb's 1937 battle of music has become a mythic event in jazz historical narratives, enshrined as the unique spectacle that defines Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and its legacy. While this battle has been marked as exceptional and unique, as an event it was a relatively typical instantiation of the “battle of music” format, a presentational genre common in black venues during the 1920s and 1930s. Within African American communities, battles of music re-staged ballrooms as symbolically loaded representational spaces where dueling bands regularly served as oppositional totems that indexed differences of locality (Chicago vs. New York), gender (men vs. women), ethnicity (Anglo- or African American vs. Latin), or race (black vs. white). This article details the ten-year history of battles of music that preceded the Webb/Goodman battle and that made its signifying rhetoric legible within African American communities. It then argues that the disconnect between the battle's relatively typical signifying rhetoric and its subsequent enshrinement as an exceptional event occurred due to a specific confluence of circumstances in the mid-1930s that shaped its immediate reception and subsequent legacy: Goodman's emergence as the “King of Swing” during a new period of massive mainstream popularity for swing music, a coterminous vigilance among both white and black jazz writers to credit black artists as jazz's originators and best practitioners, and the emergence of athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as popular black champions symbolically conquering white supremacy at home and abroad.

For three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company staged Porgy and Bess in Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.

In 1987, Tony Melendez—a guitarist born without arms who plays the instrument with his feet—played at a youth rally for Pope John Paul II. Immediately after his performance, the Pope kissed Melendez and instructed him to continue “giving hope” through his music. Although the guitar accompaniment of confessional, singer-songwriter music is rarely considered virtuosic, Tony Melendez's bodily difference makes his ability to sonically pass as what he calls a “common player” an impactful display of skill for his audiences. Because Melendez's body is treated as simultaneously virtuosic and disabled, his example foregrounds the social construction of both categories and challenges the tendency to isolate either in the individual body. Rather than suggesting a sort of qualified approach to “disabled” virtuosity, this article argues that there is no such thing as unqualified virtuosity. The presumed limitations and possibilities of bodies, instruments, and repertoires always inform our understandings of skill, but we are not always explicitly aware of them. Through interviews and analysis of his performances and their media representations, I show how bodily difference and the complex subject positions of both performers and audiences contribute to what counts as skill, creative labor, and agency within a particular context.

Even with the widespread adoption of rock-styled “praise and worship” music in American churches, bluegrass and gospel musics still serve as potent musical signifiers, especially among the white southern evangelicals comprising praise and worship's primary demographic. Drawing repertoire and influence from Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and Bill Gaither, evangelical artist David Crowder uses strategic musical references to establish his own sense of “hillbilly” religiosity but often deploys these references in ways that align him with a “hipster” community of young musicians and music fans. In this paper, I demonstrate the ways that strategic references to bluegrass and gospel music allow Crowder to situate himself within these multiple discourses of evangelical authenticity.

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.

In its inaugural 2007 press release, New York–based New Amsterdam Records announced its mission to “foster a sense of connection among musicians and fans in this ‘indie classical’ scene.” New Amsterdam's publicity apparatus brought “indie classical” into widespread media circulation, but by 2013 the label had ceased using the term. In the intervening years, the meaning of indie classical had been hotly contested by the community of musicians it was meant to champion. Drawing on more than fifty interviews, archival research, and reception history from traditional publications and new online sources, I recreate the rise and fall of indie classical as it transpired over a decade. Tracing the background of the composers and performers who first labeled themselves as indie classical, unveiling the origins of the term and how it was disseminated, and examining the debates that surrounded it and its subsequent decline reveals how the aesthetic discourse of new music is constructed in the twenty-first century.

Central among Lou Harrison's pioneering East-West fusions, the works for gamelan and Western instruments are frequently cited either as exemplars of the composer's Californian, postmodern musical sensibility or as noteworthy instances of cultural hybridity. Close examination of Main Bersama-sama (1978) and Bubaran Robert (1976, rev. 1981), however, shows that these pieces can and should be understood for what they tell us about Harrison's deep engagement with melody. A self-proclaimed “melode,” Harrison has mistakenly been regarded as a West Coast musical dabbler, writing tuneful pieces that lack the complexity that characterizes the work of his East Coast contemporaries. Yet analysis of the pitch structure of Main Bersama-sama and Bubaran Robert reveals intricate compositional “games” similar to the pre-compositional strategies of composers more typically associated with algorithmic compositional methods. Because these intricacies lie beneath the melodic surface of the music they have largely been unheard and unappreciated in Harrison's work. The melodic nature of these games not only challenges the widely accepted depiction of Harrison as a mere “tunesmith,” but also shows that Harrison explored the ability of melody (as opposed to large-scale tonal or harmonic schemes) to create form and serve a central generative function in his music.

From 1947 to 1948 the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra with Chano Pozo produced some of the most important recordings that contributed to the development of Afro-Cuban jazz. Pozo had already led a successful career as a professional musician in Havana before he moved to New York City, where he met Gillespie and joined his bebop big band. The integration of a black Cuban percussionist into Gillespie's all-black band raises important questions about the racial politics enveloping the popularization of bebop, Afro-Cuban jazz, and the work of others in contemporaneous political, cultural, and intellectual arenas. This article provides new documentation of Pozo's performances with the Gillespie band in the United States and Europe and shows the ideological concerns that Pozo and Gillespie shared with West African political and cultural activists, Melville Herskovists and his students, and early jazz historians in the 1940s. The article suggests an alternative methodology for scholarship on jazz in the United States that approaches jazz's extensive engagements with Cuban and other Afro-Atlantic musicians as embodying the crux of jazz's place in the Afro-Atlantic.

This paper examines Bernstein's early relationship with Rhapsody in Blue, including his first encounter with the sheet music at age thirteen; a recently discovered whimsical arrangement of the work (scored for accordion, ukulele, and voice, among other instruments), written in response to Gershwin's death in the summer of 1937; and Bernstein's performances of the piece with the Works Progress Administration's State Symphony Orchestra in Boston in 1938 and 1939. From an early age, not only did Bernstein have a particular vision of how the Rhapsody should operate; he also identified deeply with it. These findings provide important new insights into Bernstein's later, more polemical interpretations of the work in both recordings and the concert hall—interpretations that have had profound implications on the reception of the Rhapsody on the global stage.