This essay undertakes an examination of Steve Reich's music for Robert Nelson's film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), which was originally conceived as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's controversial production A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel of the same year. Reich's long-neglected soundtrack deserves reconsideration for its formative role in the development of the composer's musical style and quasi-liberationist aesthetic at the time, for its participation within what I term the “minstrel avant-garde” in the Bay Area during the mid-1960s and the postmodern revival of blackface minstrelsy more generally, and as a reference point in reflecting upon Reich's professional and political trajectory since its composition.

In summer 1937, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) commissioned from playwright Paul Green and composer Kurt Weill a work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Green had provided the text for Weill's first American musical play, Johnny Johnson (1936), which the FTP took up with some enthusiasm, and he had scored some success with his outdoor historical drama The Lost Colony (1937). He was also interested in music on the stage following his encounters with Russian director Alexei Granowski in Berlin in 1928–29. Weill, in turn, was involved in various spectacle-driven projects in 1937, not least with fellow émigré Max Reinhardt. Green's first scenario for the new drama focused on the constitutional implications of recent labor disputes in the U.S. South. However, the controversy of summer 1937 surrounding the overt agit-prop of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock—sponsored but then dropped by the FTP—put an end to such political aspirations. Green rewrote his outline in favor of a more conventional treatment of the American Revolutionary War, to be called The Common Glory. Although he produced a rough script, and Weill started composing the score, the project collapsed, in part because of their incompatible visions for the play and its music. Nevertheless, newly uncovered sources reveal them attempting to grapple with the potentials of nationalistic subject matter in the theater, and with the search for U.S. cultural identities in changing times.

The founders of the Canadian League of Composers were young modernists who resented the conservative musical climate in Canada epitomized by the traditional British style of Canada's most famous composer, Healey Willan. In their first decade (1951–60), during which their membership grew from eight to more than forty and they presented dozens of concerts of new Canadian music, they struggled to find a balance between two competing goals: championing the cause of all Canadian composers, regardless of style, and promoting modern and avant-garde styles, which had been virtually ignored by the older Canadian musical establishment. This article probes how those tensions played out in two of the league's early activities: membership decisions and concert programming. Although the league did admit composers and feature works representing a wide variety of stylistic influences, its membership and concerts were nonetheless dominated by younger composers interested in modern styles, especially the group of composers in John Weinzweig's circle in Toronto. The group earned a reputation as young radicals because of their modernistic programming choices and a controversial policy that limited membership to composers younger than sixty. Although its members may not have been entirely successful in their efforts at inclusivity, the league's ground-breaking activities in the 1950s did help to establish a place for composition generally and musical modernism in particular in the postwar Canadian cultural landscape.

Among the vast recorded output of Frank Zappa's remarkable career, two albums—the very early Lumpy Gravy (1968) and the posthumously released Civilization Phaze III (1994)—have special significance, not only for their great originality but also for the conceptual link between them. A close examination of these works, together with recently issued audio-archival material that provides a basis for conjecture about the genesis of Lumpy Gravy, reveals much about Zappa's unique position in the realms of popular and art music as he negotiated the boundary between them. It also shows how and to what extent Zappa embraced an avant-garde aesthetic in Lumpy Gravy, his first solo album, and how this orientation was abandoned yet also, in a way, echoed in Civilization Phaze III.

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.

Housed in the Henry Cowell Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is Cowell's unpublished notebook that comprises written instructions for using “dissonant counterpoint” along with forty-three exercises. Beyond providing information about the technique during its early development (1914–17), the archival source documents Cowell's active involvement in devising a compositional practice that has heretofore been exclusively attributed to Charles Seeger. The notebook also provides evidence of Cowell's work habits and values that challenge current scholarly depictions of the composer as an undisciplined bohemian. He was a systematic and tenacious innovator who revered tradition as well as experimental techniques. He also placed a strong emphasis on the practical application of new ideas in addition to their theoretical development. These traits account for Cowell's continued advocacy on behalf of dissonant counterpoint that extended well beyond the time he compiled his notebook. From the 1910s to the 1960s he disseminated the technique through his writing, composing, and teaching, and thus provided a life for dissonant counterpoint in American musical culture through the end of the twentieth century. Appendix B contains a full transcription of the notebook.

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 the 1850s, the residents of, and visitors to, New York City experienced a world of rapid and sometimes chaotic change. Various reform movements—including Temperance, Abolition, and Women's Rights—became stronger and more widely known through various media. In 1853 a simple story published in the pages of the New York Tribune took the city by storm. “Hot Corn,” the story of Little Katy, a child peddler, is ostensibly a temperance tale, but something made the story resonate among the public. Soon minstrel songs, sheet music, lectures, novels, and melodramas followed, purporting to herald a new moral crusade against drunkenness, poverty, and child abuse, paralleling Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Abolition movement. Within eighteen months, however, the “Hot Corn” phenomenon had faded almost as quickly as it had begun.

The Third Street Music School Settlement was founded on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a dedicated music school offering conservatory-style music instruction along with social services in an effort to improve the lives of the immigrant poor and ease their assimilation as citizens of the United States. Music instruction aligned with social action and service was a powerful combination that attracted financial support and strong enrollment. When societal change and economic fluctuations in New York City affected enrollment and the fiscal health of the school, Third Street responded with renewed efforts to foster music instruction within a social context to serve the changing social needs of students and families. These efforts required negotiating a balance between concepts of music as aesthetic object and as social practice. Daily use of classical music as the expression of a diverse musical community has created contexts in which classical music is heard, not as a European cultural product or a historical artifact, but as a dynamic and living part of everyday life, a force for self-realization, and a basis for personal relationships.

Many women in the United States encountered resistance to their involvement in orchestral conducting and public instrumental performance—both solo and ensemble—in the early twentieth century. Mary Davenport Engberg (1880–1951), however, became involved in the developing musical culture of the Pacific Northwest without encountering opposition based on her gender. In 1911 Engberg founded the mixed-gender Bellingham Symphony Orchestra, which she conducted until she became the conductor of the Seattle Civic Symphony Orchestra in 1921, and she also performed extensively as a violinist in Seattle and along the West Coast. She was the director of an influential music school in Seattle and cofounded the Seattle Civic Opera Association in 1932. Engberg's life and accomplishments reveal the effect of regional differences in the experiences and reception of women in American music. An understanding of her contributions leads to a better appreciation of the varied roles played by women in instrumental music throughout our country's history.

Using ethnographic and archival data, this article explores aspects of global superstar James Brown's participation in the black gospel music community of Augusta, Georgia, from the 1980s until his death in 2006. Using rare footage of Brown performing sacred music on a local gospel music television program, the article builds on scholars’ longtime recognition of Brown's engagement with black sacred song by engaging the singer's negotiation of sacred and secular musical and cultural boundaries from the perspective of his gospel performances. The article also examines Brown's personal relationships with local gospel musicians, ultimately arguing that his involvement with Augusta's gospel tradition near the end of his life provided Brown with an alternative social space for articulating a musical and personal identity somewhat separate from his mainstream media image.

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 1920s, in a bid to elevate musical taste in Houston, Texas, arts patron Ima Hogg anonymously underwrote a series of public lectures on music at the Rice Institute, now Rice University. A trained musician who had spent considerable time in New York and Europe, Hogg recommended potential lecturers for the series, and her collaborator, the music-loving president of the Institute, Edgar Odell Lovett, worked to engage them. Not all of Hogg's candidates were available, and Lovett used his own contacts to supplement them. The resulting slate of lecturers was a diverse mix of musicians and scholars: Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, John Powell, Harold Morris, George Birkhoff, and Henry Hadow. Their lectures survive in printed form in a scholarly journal published by Rice; they provide some of the most important statements about music by their authors. Hogg's patronage was made possible by an increase in her family's wealth, but her goal of public enlightenment was inspired by her family's tradition of public service (her father had been the governor of Texas) and by her longtime involvement in women's music clubs. Her model for the lectures may have been the didactic music club meeting; Lovett's was the university extension lecture directed toward a community audience. This article details and contextualizes Hogg's patronage in light of contemporary views of women's involvement in the support of music.

Mary Elizabeth (“Mollie”) Parmelee Ives (1850?–1929) has long been a figure of considerable mystery. As Stuart Feder put it, “She is scarcely mentioned in any of the family materials. . . . If not medically an invalid, strictly speaking, she appears to have been treated as one socially.” Indeed, the evidence that has emerged heretofore suggests, at the very least, some unspecified “difficulty”—either physical or mental—associated with Mollie. However, a previously overlooked document in the Ives Papers appears to identify a precise physiological cause for Mollie's condition. This article surveys the extant materials concerning Mollie, describes her alleged symptoms, and re-examines them in the light of the evidence recently uncovered.