During the ragtime craze at the turn of the twentieth century, the popular repertoire of “coon songs” was coupled with a robust style of vocal delivery called “coon shouting.” This vocal technique was associated with white women—the most famous “coon shouters” of the day—who, like the performers of the nineteenth-century minstrel show, claimed to have studied so-called authentic Black performance in order to replicate it on stage. Performing the “coon song” repertoire, these women sang, often from a Black male protagonist's point of view, about the trials and tribulations of Black life and romance. How did the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality in this repertoire change when it was performed by Black women? This article addresses this question by examining caricatures of Black womanhood within the “coon song” genre and by exploring the phenomenon of Black women performing the “coon song” repertoire, using the career of vaudeville performer Dora Dean (1872–1949) as a case study. I track Dean's participation in the “coon song” craze through an archival survey of sheet music and newspaper reviews dating from the height of her career (ca. 1896–1914). Using these sources, I explore the recurring theme of racial passing and the ubiquity of caricatures derived from blackface minstrelsy within Dean's “coon song” repertoire. I argue that Dean successfully navigated stereotypes of Black women's femininity, sexuality, and morality in her performances of “coon songs” and, in the process, subverted stereotypes of Black life, romance, and vocal sound.

This article explores the cultural commemorations of J. Robert Oppenheimer through the lenses of opera and film, specifically focusing on Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic (2005/2018). It engages with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theories on history and mythmaking to analyze how these cultural productions function as acts of commemoration that sanitize and mythicize historical processes. The revival of Oppenheimer as a mythic figure reflects a broader societal negotiation with the legacy of nuclear technology and its implications in the twenty-first century. Both the opera and the film reify a political and ideological attachment to the U.S. nuclear complex. Furthermore, this article critically examines the production settings of “Doctor Atomic” at the Santa Fe Opera and Nolan's on-location filming in New Mexico. It argues that these settings add a ritualistic valence to the narrative, enhancing the mythic portrayal of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Through a detailed analysis of narrative strategies and media affordances, this study reveals how contemporary depictions of historical figures and events shape and sustain national myths that support an ongoing attachment to the nuclear complex.

Renowned for its 400-year-old Ottoman/Turkish/Armenian past and produced by “America's oldest family-run business,” the Zildjian cymbal is paradoxically rendered an unremarkable “humble object” in its assumed inclusion in orchestras and bands around the world. Tracing the lineages of the Zildjians and their cymbals through historical documentation, ethnography, and the materiality of the instruments themselves, I first discuss the cymbal's shifting musical contexts and functions in Ottoman Janissary mehter bands, European orchestras, American jazz bands, and many other ensembles over the past four centuries, as well as the role of the Zildjians in this musical expansion. Then, I examine how twentieth-century negotiations of Zildjian kinship emerged in contentions over the authenticity and ownership of cymbal production. Finally, I consider how the assimilatory pressures of nation-states shaped narratives of cymbal production as well as the Zildjians’ mobilities, particularly in the context of the ethnoracialization of minority populations in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic as well as the struggle of Armenian migrants to the United States to be recognized as valid U.S. American citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. By approaching the cymbal itself as the main interlocutor of this exploration, I aim to foreground the ways in which cymbals have sounded and resounded the mobility and kinships of its human creators. In doing so, I regard musical instruments as essential mediators of histories of cultural and musicological development as well as constructions of human identity and relationship, glimpsing how such objects may both reify and unsettle our epistemologies and the institutions of modern life.

In its ruling on White-Smith v. Apollo (1908), the Supreme Court declared that the punched holes of a player piano roll did not constitute a form of writing, and thus fell outside the purview of copyright statutes. Because the decision was superseded by the Copyright Act of 1909, which extended copyright coverage to piano rolls and sound recordings, commentators have relegated White-Smith v. Apollo to the status of legal footnote. The case, however, deserves closer attention. It reveals much about the fault lines between the auditory experience of music and its visual representation at the beginning of the era of recorded sound. Witness testimony is notable for its disquisitions on the history of musical notation, exegeses of recently patented notation systems, and philosophical ruminations on the nature of a musical work in relationship to its visual representation and sonic instantiation. Trial proceedings show how the perforations of a piano roll, which were more evocative of traditional musical notation than soundwaves etched on a phonograph cylinder or disc, destabilized the mundanity of reading music. Moreover, this instability suggests an explanation for why the piano rolls figuring in the case featured the music of Adam Geibel. The composer was blind, and in a lawsuit about the textuality of music, his disability served to contrast musical sights and sounds. Moreover, White-Smith v. Apollo furnishes a means of bringing the player piano out of the shadow of the phonograph, giving it a place in the “separation of the senses” that media scholars identify with modernity.

This essay examines how racial discrimination operates under the surface and through the guise of preserving musical excellence, as exemplified through the 1969 lawsuit filed by double bassist Arthur Davis and cellist Earl Madison charging the New York Philharmonic with racial discrimination in hiring practices. Analyzing the narratives that emerged during the 1969 hearings around artistic merit, racial discrimination, and screened auditions, I argue that the New York Philharmonic weaponized musical excellence as a pure entity abstracted from race and other social categories in order to claim that its sanctity required protection from societal charges of discrimination. Notably, these same legal arguments were used in a subsequent case in which timpanist Elayne Jones charged the San Francisco Symphony with discrimination on the basis of race and sex following her tenure denial in 1974. Placing these two cases in conversation not only illuminates the tenacity and power of discriminatory ideas and practices in U.S. orchestras, but it also demonstrates how the experience of fighting legal battles reverberated personally and professionally for Black classical musicians. These lawsuits exacted a significant toll on Davis, Madison, and Jones, each of whom was sacrificed at the altar of change that, decades later, has yet to come.