After her performances in Shuffle Along (1921) on Broadway and in Dover Street to Dixie (1923) in London, Florence Mills became one of the most famous jazz and vaudeville singers. Known as the Harlem Jazz Queen, Mills was revered by Black Americans for her international breakthrough and because she used her commercial success as a platform to speak out against racial inequality. Extensive descriptions of her performance style and voice exist in writing, but there are no recordings of her singing. I respond to this archival loss by considering the sound of Mills's voice in two compositions written for her: William Grant Still's Levee Land (1925) and Edmund Thornton Jenkins's Afram (1924). In my analysis, I show that Still and Jenkins imagined a much more musically complicated and politically powerful voice than that found in the racialized and gendered stereotypes permeating both her vaudeville and Broadway repertory and the language of her reception. While scholars have written about how Mills's outspokenness regarding issues of race and omission of sexually explicit roles made her central to 1920s Black political and artistic life, I consider how the sonic properties of her voice positioned her as a leading figure in the New Negro Renaissance.

Closely related to both film noir and the woman's film, 1940s female gothic pictures combine suspense and mystery with a focus on the subjective experience of the female protagonist. This article discusses the use of music and sound in the cinematic female gothic tradition, focusing upon two historically located films that form part of its “gaslight” subgenre: Experiment Perilous (dir. Tourneur; comp. Webb, 1944) and The Spiral Staircase (dir. Siodmak; comp. Webb, 1946). In both films, the positioning of the female lead is mediated by the presence of a medical discourse revolving around her professional and romantic relationship with a male doctor, whose knowledge and authority also allows him to function as an unofficial investigator into the woman's persecution at the hands of a serial murderer. The female gothic soundtrack is a crucial element in the creation and communication of this gendered discourse, articulating the shifting position of characters in relation to issues of crime, criminality, and romance. Musical and vocal control reinforce the doctor's dominance whilst allying his presentation with that of an emasculated killer, and create and contain agency within complex constructions of female victimhood.

This article examines early pedagogical experiments in opera on television that were meant to attract new audiences in the 1950s. The aesthetics of early television have often been thought to run contrary to opera, particularly in its grander iterations, but I argue that television producers capitalized upon the traits of early television to personalize opera, both on and off screen. Comparing two NBC pedagogical initiatives—a 1958 Omnibus program starring Leonard Bernstein and the 1956–57 visits of the NBC Opera Company to Saint Mary's College (South Bend, Indiana)—I explore how these efforts were meant to approximate the opera fan's experience as well as prepare audience members to enter the opera house. Ultimately, although opera on television failed to secure a strong foothold in the 1950s, it helped to re-envision the ways in which American audiences could relate to the art form and set the terms for the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD broadcasts today.

Constantly fearful about the fragility of the young republic in the decades following the Revolutionary War, Americans assiduously organized commemorative rituals. While historians have examined these commemorations, music's place in them has yet to be fully understood. By highlighting key themes in cross-regional, cross-racial discourse on commemoration and drawing on rich records preserved from Bennington, Vermont, this article exposes the varied purposes for which Americans used music in commemorations from the 1780s to the 1810s. In early postwar commemorations, Benningtonians used music to emphasize gratitude and virtue and educate local youth about proper behavior. As political rifts developed in the 1790s, community members also used music to articulate contemporary politics in terms of the revolutionary past and exhort their neighbors to take political action. To sustain these practices as new generations matured without firsthand experience of the war, locals used music to cultivate stronger ties to the battle. As Bennington illustrates, music provided a powerful means of shaping Americans’ perceptions of the past to urge them to action in the present for outcomes envisioned in the future, compellingly anchored in terms of gratitude, virtue, and memory.

Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, a free classical music series, provides a case study for exploring how music festivals contribute to the musical life of cities. Each summer, the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra and Choir perform dozens of free performances at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park and in residential neighborhoods. In 1935, James C. Petrillo, head of the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, initiated the festival, then called Grant Park Concerts, to employ musicians during the Great Depression with funds from the federal Works Progress Administration. Changes in the city's cultural policies, its demographics, financial support, and expectations for how the festival serves the community have impacted how it programs its season and seeks audiences. Based on archival research, this article focuses on how the festival as a civic institution creates a listening public invested in particular narratives of Chicago as a dynamic city through programming music in public spaces. Looking at Grant Park Music Festival from contemporary and historical angles provides insight into how changes in aesthetic and social values, funding for the arts, and urban planning shape the way a festival engages with the city.

The 1746 Ephrata Codex, a 972-page music manuscript in the Library of Congress, is the central document of this study, which locates and identifies several eighteenth-century composers who were solitary sisters and brothers of the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Ephrata was an insular, mainly celibate, Pietist, Sabbatarian, ascetic community, which, at its height in the 1740s and 1750s, was home to approximately 300 individuals. Like many German diaspora societies in colonial Pennsylvania, it produced devotional prints and manuscripts. Ephrata is unique because most of its spiritual texts and music were written by and for its inhabitants. More than 130 extant Ephrata music manuscripts in libraries, archives, and collections in the United States and United Kingdom comprise a corpus of over 1,500 hymns, composed according to rules mandated in an original music theory treatise. The concept of authorship at Ephrata was complicated: Communal creative activity frequently existed alongside calls for individual recognition, evidenced by name attributions found in printed hymnals and music manuscripts. The solitary sisters’ agency and creative activity at Ephrata brings an added nuance to the discussion of authorship and credit, drawing attention to the contributions of women as creators, a notable exception to the male-dominated sieve of music history. The 2020 release of Voices in the Wilderness, an album of new Ephrata hymn transcriptions, is connected to this article. Recorded in the Ephrata Meetinghouse, or “Saal,” the room for which the music was composed, it provides a new perspective on Ephrata's composers, compositional methods, and performance practice.

Current scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

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.