American composer David Mahler (b. 1944) has nurtured a career that is independent, diverse, and hard to classify. Democratic, inclusive, and community oriented, Mahler thinks deeply about sound in specific environments, and how music gets made, both by amateurs and professionals. Mahler's work is thus integrally connected to places, to the people in them, and to the songs those people sing. He is influenced and inspired by U.S. traditions of band music arrangements, the ragtime of Joseph Lamb, the songs of Stephen Foster, the bitonality of Charles Ives, the simple harmonic motion of classic minimalism, and the indeterminacy of John Cage. His teachers included Harold Budd, Morton Subotnick, and James Tenney, and he has been an important influence on many composers of his generation, including Michael Byron, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Thom Miller, and Stuart Dempster. Defining himself as a “Listener-in-Residence,” he has composed, performed, taught, organized, and directed, all while remaining almost completely unaffiliated with academic institutions. This article provides a portrait of Mahler's career in the context of the communities that have shaped his work and explores how his music responds to the world around him.

Charles Frederick (Freddie) Hedges (1886–1920), his brother Elven Everett Hedges (1889–1931), and Jesse Jacobson (1882–1959) converged as Hedges Brothers and Jacobson in 1910 in San Francisco. Elven played piano, saxophone, and guitar, and all three sang and danced. In 1910–11, critics in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and smaller cities greeted the act as something new and exceptionally good. Instead of pursuing more general fame in North America, the trio accepted a music-hall contract in England, where they became leaders in creating a craze for American ragtime singing, a craze that prepared the English public for the momentous arrival of jazz after the First World War. The trio recorded eight released songs for Columbia in 1912–13. In 1913, they also performed in Paris and South Africa. In 1914, after eight months back in the United States, they returned to English success but soon dissolved the act and performed separately until 1919, when they reunited to accept an unprecedented contract (£30,000 for six years). Early in 1920, Freddie killed himself. Forest Tell (b. 1888) replaced him in the trio, and the new group recorded six released songs for Zonophone in 1920. The trio disbanded at the end of the contract. Elven retired shortly afterward, but Jesse stayed in show business at least through World War II.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios released a series of backstage musicals starring Eleanor Powell, a dancer known for her tuxedoes as well as her virtuosic tapping. Powell's tap routines are in and of themselves commanding, with her male dress seeming to originate from her confidence and the masculine aura of tap dance. Yet it is the narratives of her films, inspired by the so-called Cinderella stage musicals of the 1920s, that hold the key to her tuxedoed performances. MGM's backstage stories feature a young dancer, who dreams of Broadway stardom, and her show business boyfriend, who expresses reservations about her desire to perform. This tension between the couple's burgeoning romance and her desire for a stage career shapes the costumes, choreography, music, and camerawork of the show-within-the-film production number; ultimately, Powell's character impersonates her boyfriend in order to achieve theatrical success, a performance that illuminates a Depression-era understanding of a woman's place in show business as well as the backstage musical's “doubled” approach to narrative and number.