Central among Lou Harrison's pioneering East-West fusions, the works for gamelan and Western instruments are frequently cited either as exemplars of the composer's Californian, postmodern musical sensibility or as noteworthy instances of cultural hybridity. Close examination of Main Bersama-sama (1978) and Bubaran Robert (1976, rev. 1981), however, shows that these pieces can and should be understood for what they tell us about Harrison's deep engagement with melody. A self-proclaimed “melode,” Harrison has mistakenly been regarded as a West Coast musical dabbler, writing tuneful pieces that lack the complexity that characterizes the work of his East Coast contemporaries. Yet analysis of the pitch structure of Main Bersama-sama and Bubaran Robert reveals intricate compositional “games” similar to the pre-compositional strategies of composers more typically associated with algorithmic compositional methods. Because these intricacies lie beneath the melodic surface of the music they have largely been unheard and unappreciated in Harrison's work. The melodic nature of these games not only challenges the widely accepted depiction of Harrison as a mere “tunesmith,” but also shows that Harrison explored the ability of melody (as opposed to large-scale tonal or harmonic schemes) to create form and serve a central generative function in his music.

Musical modernism was born kicking and screaming in 1922 in New York, fathered by Edgard Varése and his International Composers' Guild; the French émigré saved the nation from its own backward-looking ways. Or so the story goes. But this reading ignores numerous and widespread musical activities that were well under way seven years prior to the founding of the ICG. As early as autumn 1914, members of Alfred Stieglitz's artistic circle, including Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank as well as Claire Reis and A. Walter Kramer among others, were engaged in organized efforts to promote musical modernism, with Leo Ornstein as their front man. The initial result was a series of concerts in January, February, and March 1915 that Ornstein performed at the Bandbox Theatre; the programs consisted of entirely modernist music. These concerts catapulted Ornstein to fame, but he was not the isolated figure that he has been portrayed to be. Rosenfeld, Reis, and Kramer continued to promote both Ornstein and modernism with ideas for new societies, and Ornstein himself developed close ties not only to literary figures but also to artists, including Leon Kroll, William Zorach, and John Marin. Music, far from being isolated from other artistic efforts, was part of a burgeoning modernist scene that was securely in place by 1915, and Leo Ornstein was at its center.

This paper examines Bernstein's early relationship with Rhapsody in Blue, including his first encounter with the sheet music at age thirteen; a recently discovered whimsical arrangement of the work (scored for accordion, ukulele, and voice, among other instruments), written in response to Gershwin's death in the summer of 1937; and Bernstein's performances of the piece with the Works Progress Administration's State Symphony Orchestra in Boston in 1938 and 1939. From an early age, not only did Bernstein have a particular vision of how the Rhapsody should operate; he also identified deeply with it. These findings provide important new insights into Bernstein's later, more polemical interpretations of the work in both recordings and the concert hall—interpretations that have had profound implications on the reception of the Rhapsody on the global stage.

In its inaugural 2007 press release, New York–based New Amsterdam Records announced its mission to “foster a sense of connection among musicians and fans in this ‘indie classical’ scene.” New Amsterdam's publicity apparatus brought “indie classical” into widespread media circulation, but by 2013 the label had ceased using the term. In the intervening years, the meaning of indie classical had been hotly contested by the community of musicians it was meant to champion. Drawing on more than fifty interviews, archival research, and reception history from traditional publications and new online sources, I recreate the rise and fall of indie classical as it transpired over a decade. Tracing the background of the composers and performers who first labeled themselves as indie classical, unveiling the origins of the term and how it was disseminated, and examining the debates that surrounded it and its subsequent decline reveals how the aesthetic discourse of new music is constructed in the twenty-first century.

Twenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.

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.

In the 1950s, Omnibus, a US television variety show sponsored by the Ford Foundation, provided US viewers with their first encounters with classical music and dance from Japan and India and folk traditions from Yugoslavia. Omnibus was an important part of a popularization of world music and dance as part of a greater arts and cultural literacy campaign in the 1950s, aimed at educating and entertaining the average American. As the US government sought to “promote world peace” through the multifaceted economic interventions of endeavors like the Marshall Plan, private organizations such as the Ford Foundation also spent massive sums in the US and abroad. This article contributes to a broader understanding of US postwar cultural diplomacy by examining how international musical guests on Omnibus helped develop an American self-concept that was culturally and politically internationalist.

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.

After the Obama administration (2009–17) began authorizing musical exchanges with Cuba in 2009, Havana's music festivals became a primary site for transnational interactions and a public face for US-Cuban engagement while politicians worked towards normalization in secret. This article uses field research from the Havana International Jazz Festival, interviews with festival participants, and media coverage to explore Cuban music festivals as politically liminal spaces where musical and political life commingled to reflect the changing US-Cuban relationship. While diverse lineups attracted international tourists, artists faced bureaucratic challenges to legally traverse the Florida Straits and create music in the context of intercultural dialogue. Despite these difficulties, Havana as a festival space encouraged musicians to defy genre conventions, explore cultural commonalities, and negotiate social differences on stage during the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival. These transnational interactions culminated in Arturo O'Farrill's album Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded by US and Cuban musicians in Havana during the 2014 jazz festival and is characteristic of festival exchanges in its representation of a more harmonious international relationship.

“The Irish came early and often to America,” quipped musicologist Charles Hamm in his landmark book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. Although the largest waves of immigration occurred during the years of the potato famines in the 1840s and 1850s, the process began long before then and continues to the present day, albeit with many ebbs and flows in the stream. Today nearly 36.5 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry.

A small basement in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood, an area known for its bohemian values, is home to what is now one of jazz's oldest and most significant venues, the Village Vanguard. Although its very name, geography, and twentieth-century countercultural context define the Village Vanguard, a haven for experiment, its unequaled historical significance and current status as a major landmark within worldwide jazz culture have led to a twenty-first-century reality in which the club not only features but also plays an important role in defining the music that constitutes the most widely accepted subgenre of contemporary jazz, an improvisatory, small-group tradition rooted in the philosophical and musical heritage of bebop. Through an examination of performances both at the Vanguard and in other contexts by pianist Fred Hersch, a performer regularly featured at the club, this article argues that the cultural role of the Village Vanguard, both in spite of and because of the way its longtime owner Lorraine Gordon retained mid-twentieth-century appearances and practices, has shifted from its former purpose as a space for avant-garde experiments to become a powerful force in defining mainstream jazz. Hersch tailors his performances to suit the culture of the Vanguard at multiple levels, including his choice of personnel and ensemble type, the repertoire he does and does not play there, and the musical details of his improvisatory practices. Due to the venue's fame and prevalence as a recording space, choices like these by Hersch and other musicians shape the music widely understood to be at the center of the “jazz tradition,” marking a shift in the nature of the Vanguard that parallels changes in both its local and global context over the past half century as Greenwich Village has undergone substantial gentrification and jazz has gained an ever-stronger foothold as an institutionally recognized art music.

Women composers' concerts, arranged by Phyllis Fergus, were held for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1934 and 1936. They featured music by members of the National League of American Pen Women—an organization for writers, artists, and composers—and were part of a substantial agenda proposed by Fergus, its music director and later president, to achieve national recognition for its composer members. Drawing on Fergus's scrapbooks and documentation in the FDR Library and Pen Women's archives, this article explores the events that Fergus helped to organize, including concerts in Miami, Chautauqua, and Chicago, the latter played by members of the Women's Symphony Orchestra. White House appearances by Amy Beach helped emphasize the League's professional status, and the nationalistic tone of its publicity, urging audiences to “Buy American” during the Depression, worked to distract from age-old assertions of women's lack of creativity. However, the musicales for Roosevelt, who received the composers socially rather than as paid professionals, reinforced women's domestic position, and financial restraints limited most League programming to the genres typically associated with female composers. Despite its separation from a male mainstream, the NLAPW was nonetheless a significant force in promoting women's music in the 1930s.

This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

Cornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago's northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. Most attendees camped on-site, and many arrived one or two days early when the campgrounds opened before official programming started. Like many contemporary multi-day festivals in relatively rural or remote locations, Cornerstone's festival grounds and campsites functioned as a temporary village. For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as loci of face-to-face musical life. Outside Cornerstone, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separateness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival's physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

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.

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.

Scholarship on American composer Harry Partch (1901–74) has long focused on the composer's use of Greek musical ideals as the basis of his aesthetic, but little attention has been paid to China, a nation with which Partch had familial ties and with which he claimed an affinity. Using Partch's published writings, along with unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, this article repositions China's role in the development of Harry Partch's music and aesthetic. By surveying his early experiences with Cantonese opera, his early expositions of his theoretical thinking, and his first full-scale composition, a setting of seventeen poems by Li Po, it demonstrates that China symbolized an alternative path. China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. Through the Chinese musical quotations that reside in several of his works, the article also shows that, despite his later protests to the contrary, Chinese music both informed and shaped his music. Finally, it suggests that only by exploring the implications of China in his music can we fully understand Partch's compositional aesthetic.

Composer-conductor Henry Kimball Hadley (1871–1937) is widely viewed as a conservative musical figure, one who resisted radical changes as American musical modernism began to flourish. His compositional style remained firmly rooted in late-Romantic European idioms; and although Hadley advocated for American composition through programming choices as a conductor, he mostly ignored the music of younger, adventurous composers. In one respect, however, Hadley was part of the cutting edge of musical production: that of musical dissemination through new media. This essay explores Hadley's work conducting and composing film music during the transition from silent to synchronized sound film, specifically his involvement with Warner Bros. and their new sound synchronization technology, Vitaphone, in 1926–27. Drawing on archival evidence, I examine Hadley's approach to film composition for the 1927 film When a Man Loves. I argue that Hadley's high-art associations conferred legitimacy upon the new technology, and in his involvement with Vitaphone he aimed to establish sound film composition as a viable outlet for serious composers. Hadley's example prompts us to reconsider the parameters through which we distinguish experimental and conservative musical practices, reconfiguring the definitions to include not just musical proclivities but also the contexts and modes through which they circulate.

In a letter dated to 1960, Harry Partch describes living two lives simultaneously—one in modern America and another in ancient Greece. Furthermore, throughout his life, Partch exhibited striking dualities in both his music and personal life. Partch's affinity for Greek themes and modalities in his music and music theory is well known, but less known is his feeling of bilocation between Greek and modern life. Using writings by Vonnegut, Woolf, and Stephen Hawking, I examine methods of constructing history that support Partch's temporal irregularity and, in so doing, foster new ways of understanding Partch and his music. With a particular focus on corporeality within his late work Revelation in the Courthouse Park, I explore how Partch leaned on his sense of bilocation to cope with his decidedly outsider status, how that in turn helped him deal with reality, and how biographers might tackle this most perplexing issue.