Phoebe Apperson Hearst, called “California's greatest woman” at her death in 1919, was very rich—and very philanthropic. Despite attending school in rural Missouri only a year or so past the eighth grade, Hearst directed her most influential benefactions toward education, particularly for women. She became a prime mover in the kindergarten movement and PTA, established women's scholarships at UC Berkeley, and was UC's first female regent.

This article, drawing on Hearst's extensive archive, describes music's role in her philanthropy. She supported individual artists and ensembles, staged elaborate musicales at her various homes, funded music performing spaces, patronized renowned singers and instrumentalists, provided musical performances for college students and the general public, and encouraged the formation of an opera school.

As a female patron championing women's education, Hearst was caught between the conservative ideology of male–female “spheres” and the New Woman movement of the early twentieth century. Her wealth allowed her to transcend old models; yet she was also conditioned by them, as shown in her attitudes toward women's suffrage and “proper” female behaviors. By bolstering the traditional view of women as the culture-bearers in U.S. society, Hearst's philanthropy functioned as both retrospective reinforcement and progressive idealism.

From the earliest elections with popular participation to the present day, American presidential candidates have harnessed music's connotative potential and affective properties in a variety of campaign contexts. But in a corporatized electoral landscape where the fields of politics and popular culture are inextricably intertwined, and every aspect of the candidate's public and private life is subjected to intense scrutiny enabled by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, nontraditional texts (such as music) play an increasingly significant role in candidate identity formation. Adding to recent work that explores the aesthetic and social dimensions of newly composed campaign music and its cultural currency, this essay turns a critical lens toward preexisting music and its impact on campaign discourses during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential primary campaign. I investigate three components of Obama's soundscape: 1) his engagement with hip hop—its artists, audiences, and values; 2) the intersections between his professed musical tastes and his complex biography; and 3) the playlists he used at campaign rallies, and the factors that allowed this soundtrack to solidify his own identity as candidate as well as forge alliances with women voters and black voters. Ultimately, cultural and musical analyses reveal how Obama's music strategy allowed him to project a black identity that was both “real” and “respectable.”

In 1956, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie became the first jazz musician to participate in the State Department's Cultural Presentations program, a highly public aspect of U.S. Government's Cold War propaganda efforts abroad. Seeking to capitalize on this historic moment, Gillespie's record company issued two LPs featuring his ambassadorial ensemble: World Statesman (1956) and Dizzy in Greece (1957). To date, scholarship about the tours highlights how Gillespie skillfully navigated the shifting political landscape both on and off the bandstand. The role that commercial record making played in the renegotiation of African Americans’ social position during this era, however, remains undertheorized. This article reveals how, despite the albums’ claims of representation from abroad, the LPs contain only a small portion of Gillespie's tour repertoire. I argue that these LPs were never meant to document the tours with veracity; rather, they were products of a political and technological moment when Gillespie's record label could leverage musical diplomacy to circulate an elevated vision for jazz within the country's cultural hierarchy.

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.

In 2012, the flutist Claire Chase, founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble, received a MacArthur Award for her work as an “arts entrepreneur and flutist.” The award's emphasis on Chase's entrepreneurship reflects the growing demand among classical musicians, educators, and critics for self-driven musical projects, promoted as an engine of classical music's concert culture and as crucial to its renewal in the United States. Entrepreneurship curricula are now in place at almost every music school in the country.

In this article, I offer a critique of the increasingly institutionalized push for musical entrepreneurship, demonstrating that it is rooted in the discourse and ideals of neoliberalism. Drawing on scholarship by economist Guy Standing and political theorist Wendy Brown, I analyze the discourse supporting musical entrepreneurship training, demonstrating the ways it advances neoliberal values through the association of “freedom” and “innovation” with the dismantling of collectivity and valorization of precarious labor structures. This discourse produces an expectation of radical self-sufficiency throughout U.S. society, across multiple economic sectors and including non-economic areas of life. I argue that musical entrepreneurship training serves not as a progressive alternative to other forms of musical career building, but instead habituates musicians to precariousness and insecurity through its rhetoric and institutional endorsement.

Thomas Hastings and his contemporary, Lowell Mason, have often been criticized for rejecting the music of the eighteenth-century American psalmodists and nineteenth-century folk hymnody in favor of what are sometimes considered to be insipid arrangements or imitations of imported European melodies. Hastings, in particular, made a number of vehement statements castigating pieces in these idioms. It is certainly true that Hastings held a low opinion of many pieces in these genres, but it is also true that he printed a surprising number of them in his tune books. While many of these items were probably included because he needed them to help sell his tune books, it is also evident that his rejection of the earlier American pieces was not quite as complete as it is sometimes made out to be. This study traces his use of these “objectionable” items and of some tunes the origins of which are uncertain.

Upon its publication in 1759, Voltaire's Candide, or The Optimist scandalized Europe. Banned for its blasphemous and politically seditious content, it became a succès de scandale and one of the most widely read books of its time. Leonard Bernstein adapted Voltaire's work for the stage in the 1950s. With its emphasis on the improbable, the artificial, and the insouciant, Candide practically begs for a camp (re)interpretation, and it is just such an analysis I offer here. After outlining camp as social critique, I turn to Cunégonde's aria “Glitter and Be Gay” and trace its path through camp's causeways in two different decades: first, in the United States of the 1950s, a period marked by McCarthy's witch-hunts, Cold War anxieties, intense homophobia, and the composer's personal struggle to accept his homosexuality, and second, in the late 1980s, when singer, songwriter, and AIDS activist Michael Callen (1955–1993) recorded his own camped-up version of “Glitter and Be Gay” for what would become his last musical project, a posthumous double album entitled Legacy (1996). By following Cunégonde's sparkling trail of glitter and gemstones through two historical moments, I demonstrate how camp functions as a tool of queer resistance across the last half of the twentieth century.

Amy Beach's “Gaelic” Symphony is the most prominent nineteenth-century American expression of Irishness in music. Despite the reference to another country in its title, the work has largely been interpreted via the lens of American nationalism. Its historiography reflects the immense interest in national style in nineteenth-century American music scholarship. This article initiates a discussion about nineteenth-century American composers’ engagement with the world beyond their own national borders. It explores the “Gaelic” Symphony's transnational dimensions, which engage largely with two groups: concert music composers and the Irish diaspora. Regarding the former, the article illuminates nuances of intertextuality in Beach's style. It revises the historical narrative surrounding the “Gaelic” Symphony as a response to Antonín Dvořák's “New World” Symphony, finding multiple additional models for Beach's work. The “Gaelic” Symphony is positioned instead as a representation of concert music styles that valued cosmopolitan approaches and judged composers on the skill with which they consciously blended multiple streams of influence. Regarding the latter category of the Irish, the article contextualizes the symphony within a revival of Irish cultural practices taking place in the 1890s, revealing how constructions of Irishness in the symphony reflect Gaelic revival values and respond to social tensions between Boston's Irish-American community and the city's upper class.

The article introduces the topic of film music's relationship to the built environment of cinema. The discussion springboards from James Sanders's analysis of New York City sets, based on the architecture of selected movies (mostly from the 1930s and 40s), as presented in his Celluloid Skyline. The focus is on four locations: the brownstone façade, the working-class street, the enclosed courtyard, and the construction site. The argument is that two key components of American cinema's structure—music and architecture—are sometimes in direct dialogue, as composers and filmmakers both render New York ethnographically accurately and offer sometimes a mythic imagining of a particular place.

Azealia Banks's 2011 hit single “212” established her as one of hip-hop's rising stars, with critics highlighting the song's provocative lyrics and Banks's ability as an MC as standout qualities. Banks would later receive attention for her public dispute with white rapper Iggy Azalea, whom she accused of exploiting black musical culture. This article integrates an analysis of “212” with a discussion of Banks's recent public rhetoric in order to examine the ways in which Banks rearticulates the figure of the black female rapper and criticizes white fascination with black female sexuality and black cultural forms. I conclude by situating this discussion within the broader context of contemporary “post-racial” politics, in which the political elements of hip-hop and the systemic racial inequalities they address have become increasingly marginalized in favor of “color-blind” conceptions of United States society and popular culture.

Considering the aesthetic and social value of music making among Issei, first generation Japanese in California, opens a line of inquiry into how this immigrant population negotiated their cultural and political identities in a nation that racially marginalized them. As an integral aspect of Japanese culture, music was a medium through which Issei leaders chose to claim a cultural space in the United States. Their efforts to establish themselves within the social fabric of mainstream American society reveal the social and political forces that prevented their acceptance and assimilation. Issei responded by showcasing traditional Japanese music to educate white Americans about their revered heritage, singing songs for comfort and familiarity, and encouraging their children to perform Western music as an acculturative strategy. Caught between two nations, Issei emerged with alternative identities that ultimately failed due to the racist ideology governing American citizenship.

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.

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.

This article analyzes the revisions producer Cheryl Crawford and her team made to Porgy and Bess for a revival that opened in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1941 and moved to Broadway in early 1942. Crawford's revisions addressed criticisms of the opera that had first been issued at its premiere in 1935, especially complaints about its dramatic viability and the appropriateness of African American performers in opera. The revisions distanced Porgy and Bess from the practices of the Metropolitan Opera House, which the press routinely criticized as antiquated and dull. They also reduced the amount of operatic recitative, which Crawford saw as “out of keeping with the black milieu,” strategically reserving the device for specific moments that played into the stereotype of African Americans as naturally musical. In her marketing of the show, Crawford reframed the critical discussion of Porgy and Bess by deflecting attention away from disputes over genre and race and toward the structural and formal qualities of the work. These strategies, which were aimed at attracting a broad audience with divergent values and aesthetic preferences, proved successful. Whereas the 1935 production was a commercial failure, Crawford's Porgy and Bess became a hit, marking a crucial step toward the establishment of the work in the American operatic repertoire.