Welcome to our special issue on Technology and Black Music in the Americas. As guest editor, I'd like to offer my personal thanks to all of our contributors, who are exploring relatively uncharted currents in the overall flow of black music technology. I'd also like to thank JSAM editor Ellie M. Hisama and assistant editor Benjamin Piekut for their tireless efforts, as well as their extraordinary abilities as editors to navigate quickly between leaf- and forest-level views.

Scholarship on Charles Ives has too often been reluctant to sort out what is problematical in his musical image of America. This article attempts to do so as part of an examination of Ives's A Symphony: New England Holidays, a cycle of tone poems depicting the major patriotic holidays celebrated during Ives's boyhood. The work is both a memorial to national unity, which Ives felt had collapsed in the twentieth century, and a protest against the political culture responsible. The musical means to these ends raise the question of the relationship between politics and musical form, and, with form, of musical analysis, in a particularly transparent way. Like many European composers of the era, Ives wanted to create a national style. But he did not want a style that could be reduced to formulas and circulated as a commodity. The old America he celebrated, as opposed to the new one he resisted, could be identified (or fantasized) as a culture that above all could not be commodified. The Holidays Symphony seeks to create what one might call a critical nostalgia. Its music demands to be understood as a “picture” of authentic American experience by refusing to be understandable as music on the only terms available in its day.

This article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type of freedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical content and structure of Simone's music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of the transition from King's nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield's Chicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, which had largely avoided overt political statements.

Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that “loud music” has been used in the detention camps of the United States‘ “global war on terror.” A survey of practices at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan; Camp Nama (Baghdad), Iraq; Forward Operating Base Tiger (Al-Qaim), Iraq; Mosul Air Force Base, Iraq; Guantánamo, Cuba; Camp Cropper (Baghdad), Iraq; and at the “dark prisons” from 2002 to 2006 reveals that the use of “loud music” was a standard, openly acknowledged component of “harsh interrogation.” Such music was understood to be one medium of the approach known as “futility” in both the 1992 and the 2006 editions of the US Army's field manual for interrogation. The purpose of such “futility” techniques as “loud music” and “gender coercion” is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile, yet the military establishment itself teaches techniques by which “the music program” can be resisted. The article concludes with the first-person account of a young US citizen, working in Baghdad as a contractor, who endured military detention and “the music program” for ninety-seven days in mid-2006—a man who knew how to resist.

Although literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied, music so inspired has received far less scholarly attention, and film music even less so. Musical ideologies of the 1930s, including the utopian thinking of many artists and intellectuals, emerge in some surprising ways when we consider two films of the era. Both The Spanish Earth (1937), an independent documentary, and Blockade (1938), produced in Hollywood, were intended to awaken Loyalist sympathies. The music for the former, consisting of recorded excerpts chosen by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson and widely understood as folkloric, embodies leftist composers' idealization of folk music. Werner Janssen's score for Blockade relies on many stock Hollywood gestures, granting it the status of a commodity. This article explores both films in light of Michael Denning's reflections of the relationship between the “cultural front” and the “culture industry,” along with Fredric Jameson's advocacy of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic tool. It argues that the music for The Spanish Earth unwittingly subverts the Loyalist cause, whereas the score of Blockade, with its manipulation of Hollywood codes, is far more persuasive than the political whitewashing of its plot would seem to suggest.

This article investigates the music created by current rap and R&B producers such as Timbaland and Pharrell Williams in order to understand how their works evoke certain constructions of sonic space. The opaque, spare, two-dimensional qualities of the virtual spaces assembled by these artists serve as a useful window onto broader cultural forces, such as the peculiar short circuit of space and temporality that Paul Virilio evokes in his concept of “telepresence.” The author argues that the sonic construction of telepresence allows contemporary black music to comment upon the notion of “biopolitics,” the reduction of the political to the horizon of the body.

Hidden in plain sight, the five songs in the middle of, Gosford Park (2001) prepare the audience for the untangling of sordid relationships and the resolution of a murder mystery at the end of the film. This article presents a detailed analysis of the film's central musical sequence using video captures, reception history, transcriptions, and other approaches from music history and film studies. As is shown, the close relationship between music and image reflects the fascination of US audiences with British-themed films and the equally complicated appeal of Hollywood films to British audiences. Additionally, the songs provide a surfeit of narrative information crucial to the resolution of the multiple story lines. Lastly, the songs complicate and expand the work's seemingly straightforward murder-mystery genre to include such incompatible models as the British heritage film, Hollywood musicals, melodramas, and the double feature. Informing this musical sequence, and the entire film, is a complex, reciprocal transatlantic exchange founded on mutually inaccurate, yet often irresistible, myths of history and identity.

This essay takes Paul Robeson's 1939 performances of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's popular cantata Ballad for Americans as a focal point to explore how Robeson's persona and sound as folksinger—a “people's artist”—and his political identity and struggles as a radical black intellectual interacted and collided with the cultural-racial politics of “people's music” and with Popular Front discourses on the folk. From its legendary CBS radio premiere in November 1939 throughout the war years, Robeson's voice critically mediated—and most powerfully articulated—not only the work's narrative of nation but also the diverse formal and stylistic sonic frames through which this narrative was sounded. The ideological conflict in Ballad for Americans between accommodation and protest, national affirmation and critique, the realities of racial and ethnic divides and the promise of national inclusiveness indexed troubling contradictions of race and nation. Yet the internationalist contexts of Robeson's work as a singer-activist during this period, in particular the performative black internationalism embodied in his concert programs, suggest other perspectives and interpretive frameworks for rehearing Ballad for Americans.

The history of twelve-tone serial music in the United States extends from the late 1920s to the present day. Practitioners of a distinctively American brand of twelve-tone music have included many well-known composers in three distinct waves of activity: prewar experimentation by native-born “ultra-modern” composers amid an influx of European émigrés; a postwar boom; and a third wave of twelve-tone activity since 1980. This extensive repertoire shares certain structural features, including twelve-note aggregates and serial ordering, but even these very general compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. To give an accurate account of this music's history, we must first pry away the many myths that have accreted around it. In the process, we will need to abandon historiographical models that focus on one or two “great men” and that describe the history of style as a series of changing fashions. This article proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady state within which modernist styles, including twelve-tone serialism, persist as vibrant strands within the postmodern musical fabric.

Among his instrumental music, Victor Herbert's Second Cello Concerto, op. 30 (1894) in particular deserves greater attention, not only because it has become standard repertoire but because of its historical importance as a stimulus to Antonín Dvořák. An analysis of the piece reveals a subtly crafted composition that brilliantly exploits the resources of the cello—Herbert's own instrument—and that builds upon the composer's earlier work for cello and orchestra. The work also exhibits that stylistic amalgam of Irish, German, and American elements that characterize Herbert's operetta scores. Scholars have long appreciated the fact that the piece helped inspire Dvořák to attempt a cello concerto of his own (1895). But Herbert, as has been suggested in the case of George W. Chadwick, might have influenced Dvořák's “American” music more generally. In turn, Dvořák's music—in particular, his “New World” Symphony—seems to have left its mark on Herbert's Second Concerto. In short, Herbert and Dvořák—colleagues at New York's National Conservatory in the early 1890s—engaged in a sort of musical dialogue, one that reflected differing ideas concerning nationalism and American music.

A cartographer constructs a map of an individual creative history, that of the American artist kara lynch, as it emerges in connection to a collective history of African American cultural expression. Positioning history as complex, dynamic systems of interwoven memory networks, the map follows lynch's traversals through various “zones of cultural haunting”: places where collective memories made invisible through systematic processes of cultural erasure may be recovered and revived. Through these traversals, which are inspired by lynch's “forever project” Invisible, the map covers such terrains as haunted narratives, mechanisms of abstraction and coding within African American media production, water as an informational technology, the distribution of memory in blood, the dialectics of materiality and immateriality that frame considerations of black subjectivity, and the possibility that place of music might not be the site of sound but instead the social production of memory.

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.

The Casino Ballroom of Avalon, Catalina Island, is located about twenty miles off the coast of the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Completed in 1929 under the direction of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., the ballroom became a significant venue for dance bands of the 1930s and early 1940s. The Casino did not, however, feature any of the most familiar names of the era. Instead, it was designed as a state-of-the-art dance hall for the presentation of exclusively white dance bands playing “sweet” jazz, a style that avoided the most obvious musical signifiers of “hot” popular music.

Through a comparison of three commercial recordings of “Avalon,” I detail how the music of Jan Garber's sweet jazz orchestra—a group immensely popular at the Casino—differed from the music of hotter jazz dance bands, such as the Jimmie Lunceford and Casa Loma Orchestras. Garber's sweet “Avalon” established a sonic place characterized by specific musical relationships and values that were easily fused to the ideology of the island's promoters. For the owners and managers of the Casino Ballroom, jazz was to be the sound of modernity suffused with nostalgia for a threatened, racialized social order.

Anthony Braxton's opera Trillium R (1991): Shala Fears for the Poor is examined macroscopically, microscopically, and theoretically for its resonances with both spoken and written language. The latter is posited as an ur-technology spawning six more specialized technologies tropes, through which the macroscopic survey unfolds. Braxton's music is conflated with the academic discourse of “speculative musicology” and the genre of “speculative fiction,” the literary arena of most fertile explorations of technological potential. The microscopic study examines the relationship between Braxton's libretto and music in the score, and that between the determinate and indeterminate in both, as the techne (tool) of its effectiveness. Finally, the article explains Braxton's work through its European, African, Asian, and Native American influences.

Since their emergence from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 1960s, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago have created a distinctive multi-disciplinary performance practice centered on collective improvisation. In this article, I conceptualize Art Ensemble improvisations as networks of group interactions, and I analyze an excerpt from a 1972 Art Ensemble concert recording using a phenomenological perspective informed by my conversations with the group about the performance and by my own experience as an improvised-music practitioner. The analysis focuses on the integration of composed material into the improvisatory process, the functions of stylistic diversity and multi-instrumentalism in Art Ensemble performance practice, and the interactive roles played by Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, and Don Moye.

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.