The practice of segregated union locals, common in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) during the first half of the twentieth century, led to racial confrontation in San Francisco. In 1934, black Local 648 sued its much larger counterpart, Local 6, which had attempted to control all musical employment in the Bay Area. Though Local 648 eventually withdrew its suit, its charter was revoked and black musicians were placed in “subsidiary” status. A new “colored local” (669) was chartered in 1946 and worked alongside Local 6 until the state forced amalgamation in 1960. Many other segregated locals did not merge until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The saga of Locals 6, 648, and 669 brings into focus the complex social and economic forces buffeting the working musician in the early twentieth century. Racialist attitudes in the US labor movement, mirrored in the musicians' union, forced blacks to organize separately and accept lower wages in order to secure employment. The AFM, for its part, was constrained by its dedication to local autonomy. Black union musicians were themselves divided—torn between outrage at their second-class status and the apparent benefits of working for change from within the organization.

I am delighted to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Launching SAM has been an exciting and labor-intensive undertaking to which many hands have contributed. We look forward to working with Cambridge University Press, which publishes an outstanding line of music journals. I am grateful to SAM's President Michael Broyles and Executive Director Mariana Whitmer for their helpful responses to my countless questions over the past months; Past President Carol J. Oja and Vice President Judith Tick for their inspired ideas about the journal's potential directions; the Editorial Board, Assistant Editor Benjamin Piekut, and Reviews Editors Ron Pen, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark for their excellent and invaluable work; our many contributors for their patience during the transition of editorial homes and publishers; and—not the least!—SAM's members for their continued vigorous support of our Society's journal. On behalf of SAM, I would also like to thank Columbia University's Department of Music for graciously housing the journal during the term of my editorship, and Kip Lornell, David Patterson, Howard Pollack, and Catherine Parsons Smith, the outgoing Editorial Advisory Board members for American Music, SAM's former journal.

Composed in 1888 by Juventino Rosas, the waltz “Sobre las olas” (“Over the Waves”) soon made its way to North America and beyond, reverberating in the great spaces of the circus, fairground, skating rink, dance hall, and park. Recycled in cartoons and films, in television, and in various cover versions, Rosas's waltz has become a kind of popular liminal music. The complex, circuitous routes it has traveled have led to a present-day musical convention. This essay attempts to lay bare the mechanisms at work in the dissemination of such a widely known piece of music in three ways: 1) by accounting for the multiple themes related to “Sobre las olas”; 2) by considering the range of technologies through which Rosas's waltz has been disseminated; and 3) by theorizing public knowledge of the waltz as a musical “quote,” a snippet recognizable after a few notes.

Folksinger-songwriter Bill Staines came of age at the height of the mid-twentieth-century American folk music revival and has spent the years since then writing and playing music that seems impelled by the conviction that this vanished era's core stylistic premises and clear-eyed optimism remain as alive and available as they were at the revival's peak. Through this exploration of his 1984 album Bridges, I seek to show that Staines accomplishes this fantasy of the revival's continued vitality not, as his commentators frequently suggest, by clinging fast to decades-old stylistic practices but by introducing a dimension of reflexivity into his craft. What comes to matter is not music's political or social meaning but the self-conscious celebration of the idea of music having such a meaning.

The article's first section explores Staines's self-mythologizing enfolding of his own persona into Woody Guthrie's in the Guthrie ballad that opens the album. The second section examines Bridges' poetic weaving of music into narratives of social redemption and personal self-actualization. The third section examines Bridges' many moments of diegetic song, which effectively collapse the worlds of Staines's poetic subjects into that of his immediate audience. The last section explores how melodic choices in the traditional song that closes the album have the effect of bringing many of the songs that precede it directly into the fold of traditional music.

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.

It is with great pleasure that the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press jointly launch a new journal devoted to the study of American music. Only a few decades ago, American music topics were ignored, or if acknowledged, appeared as the unexpected article in more mainline journals or were relegated to the corners of conference programs. Within the past three decades, American music's status has changed dramatically. It has grown in size and its presence is secure and stable; what had been activity on the periphery is now squarely in the center. As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I have been able to share in the challenge and the excitement of this burgeoning field. Today it is especially gratifying to witness sophisticated American music scholarship emerging from many continents. Dissertations, books, articles, and papers are being written on American music by scholars throughout the world.

The New Orleans hot jazz vocal trio the Boswell Sisters was one of the leading ensembles of the 1930s. Enormously popular with audiences, the Boswells were also recognized by colleagues and peers to be among the finest singers, instrumentalists, and arrangers of their day. Many jazz historians remember them as the first successful white singers who truly “sounded black,” yet they rarely interrogate what “sounding black” meant for the Boswells, not only in technical or musical terms but also as an expression of the cultural attitudes and ideologies that shape stylistic judgments. The Boswells' audience understood vocal blackness as a cultural trope, though that understanding was simultaneously filtered through minstrelsy's legacy and challenged by the new entertainment media. Moreover, the sisters' southern femininity had the capacity to further contexualize and “color” both their musical output and its reception. This essay examines what it meant for a white voice to sound black in the United States during the early 1930s, and charts how the Boswells permeated the cultural, racial, and gender boundaries implicit in both blackness and southernness as they developed their collective musical voice.

This article explores the cultural work of white masculinity in barbershop quartet singing in two historical contexts: the barbershop revival of the 1920s and 1930s and barbershop's struggle for survival in twenty-first century Philadelphia. It first details how revivalists attempted to re-create Victorian white masculinity by codifying and promoting a barbershop musical style and repertory that fostered closeness between men. By performing their musical style in public, masculine spaces, and admitting only white men to their gatherings, the organizers of the Barbershop Harmony Society opposed a number of contemporary social changes in the United States, including shifting gender roles, a rise in immigration, the economic instability of the Great Depression, and New Deal liberalism. The article then documents how and why barbershoppers in Philadelphia at the turn of the twenty-first century still perform this “close,” neo-Victorian mode of white masculinity. In this new context, barbershop whiteness enabled a group of white men to claim belonging in their racially divided city despite years of migration and displacement caused by deindustrialization and urban decay. In both historical moments, barbershoppers used whiteness to challenge social and economic change and to assert the continued relevance of their musical style.

Since the 1970s, klezmer has undergone a revival and radical transformation. Originally a European Jewish music, klezmer is now a staple of the world music scene. Although the fusion of instrumental and vocal genres under a single musical umbrella is a significant marker of change between the Old World and revived klezmer repertories, the extension of the boundaries of the klezmer repertory to encompass vocal material has largely been overlooked by practitioners and scholars. This article reinstates song in the narrative of the klezmer revival, exploring how and why it has assumed its prominent position. In case studies of three ensembles, song gives insight into the sensibilities of individual musicians and offers a prism through which to consider contemporary klezmer as both an American Jewish heritage music and a world music genre.

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.

This article is a study of ornamentation in the fiddling of Eileen Ivers. Ivers grew up in the Bronx, studied with Limerick-born fiddler Martin Mulvihill, and has since become one of the most well-known of contemporary Irish fiddlers. Although Ivers is known primarily for her Irish fusion playing style, her more traditional core style is reflected in this article, which is based on a series of interview-lessons. The types of ornaments and their placement, combination, function, and effect in Ivers's performance of Irish dance music are discussed.

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.

Musical modernism was born kicking and screaming in 1922 in New York, fathered by Edgard Varése and his International Composers' Guild; the French émigré saved the nation from its own backward-looking ways. Or so the story goes. But this reading ignores numerous and widespread musical activities that were well under way seven years prior to the founding of the ICG. As early as autumn 1914, members of Alfred Stieglitz's artistic circle, including Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank as well as Claire Reis and A. Walter Kramer among others, were engaged in organized efforts to promote musical modernism, with Leo Ornstein as their front man. The initial result was a series of concerts in January, February, and March 1915 that Ornstein performed at the Bandbox Theatre; the programs consisted of entirely modernist music. These concerts catapulted Ornstein to fame, but he was not the isolated figure that he has been portrayed to be. Rosenfeld, Reis, and Kramer continued to promote both Ornstein and modernism with ideas for new societies, and Ornstein himself developed close ties not only to literary figures but also to artists, including Leon Kroll, William Zorach, and John Marin. Music, far from being isolated from other artistic efforts, was part of a burgeoning modernist scene that was securely in place by 1915, and Leo Ornstein was at its center.

This is the inaugural volume of a series of four designed to give a vivid and rounded sense of the vibrant energy that impelled American twentieth-century music. A must-read for anyone who cares about the foundations of that music, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music contains a series of transcriptions from interviews housed at Yale University in their archives of the oral history of American music (OHAM). These interviews were conducted either directly with those composers—Ives, Eubie Blake, Copland, Gershwin, Cowell, Varèse, Ellington, and others—who collectively shaped our nation's music in the first decades of the twentieth century or with others who knew them firsthand. The latter range from persons we might expect (fellow musicians, family members, and business associates) to those who leap from the page as wonderful surprises—for example, Ives's barber! Rarely have five hundred pages of musicological text contained such richness of information combined with such liveliness of presentation. So candid are these interviews, so electric in rhythm, preserving the “jumpiness” of live speech, that it is hard to put the book down.

Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Our Prayer/Gee, Heroes and Villains, Roll Plymouth Rock, Barnyard, Old Master Painter/You are My Sunshine, Cabin Essence, Wonderful, Song For Children, Child is Father of the Man, Surf's Up, I'm in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop, Vega-Tables, On a Holiday, Wind Chimes, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, In Blue Hawaii, Good Vibrations. Brian Wilson, vocals and keyboards, with accompanying musicians. Produced and arranged by Brian Wilson. Booklet includes song lyrics and notes by David Leaf. Nonesuch 79846-2, 2004.

Pamela Z is an American composer-performer and audio artist whose use of extended vocal technique and live, body-controlled electronic processing takes place in events ranging in scale from solo events in galleries to large-scale works that combine video, audio, and live musicians, singers, and actors. Her work raises important issues regarding transnationalism, Afrodiasporicism, and identity; acoustic ecologies; the articulation of race and ethnicity; and the place of women in technological media. The essay discusses several of Z's works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, in articulation with cybertheory; the aesthetics of popular and avant-garde music, voice, language, and poetics; intermedia and performance art; and contemporary technological practices.