Demystifying a largely misunderstood chapter in John Cage's biographical narrative, this article explores the pivotal role architect and philanthropist Paul Williams played in Cage's life, and for whom Cage named his famous magnetic tape composition Williams Mix (1952–53). Retracing the activities of both men, beginning with their earliest encounter at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948, this investigation documents for the first time the extent of their mutually devoted relationship. Newly uncovered source material and photographs also reveal the valuable contributions Williams made as primary benefactor and mastermind of the intentional community called the Gatehill Cooperative (a.k.a. “Stony Point”), a place Cage called home for seventeen years (1954–71). There Cage developed a “hunger for nature,” wrote his widely read and influential book Silence (1961), and undertook some of his most significant musical projects.

In 1894 Syrian émigré Alexander Maloof arrived in the United States to join the thriving community in New York's “Syrian Quarter.” Working first as a music instructor and pianist, Maloof found success as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher, integrating Arabic and US popular music and light classical styles. He wrote and edited Arabic-language piano songbooks for the Arabophone communities in the United States, and ran the Maloof Records label, the “Oriental” division of the Gennett Company's “race records” enterprise. Drawing on Arabic-language discourse from around the Syrian mahjar (diaspora), this article uses Maloof's output to demonstrate music's role in the vibrant and contested political conversations taking place in Arabic around the world, from the homelands around Beirut and Damascus, to the initial Syrian settlements in Cairo and Paris, to the American colonies in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Concluding with a discussion of the 1919 “American Maid” (composed under a pseudonym), I argue that a thorough understanding of the history of Orientalist popular music in the Americas requires a decentering of European American audiences in order to examine those questions animating the New York mahjar, most centrally the political fate of greater Syria.

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.

The case of conductor Karl Muck and the Boston Symphony Orchestra during World War I is notorious for its combination of nationalist patriotism and opposition to international influence on US concert organizations. Although it seemed on the surface to be a spontaneous uprising against a foreign musician who refused to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the public outcry against Muck was part of a larger campaign orchestrated by a shadowy propaganda magazine named The Chronicle, published in New York from March 1917 to November 1918. This journal was marketed to the United States’ wealthy elite and was available to subscribers by invitation only. By strategic publication of fake news stories and xenophobic opinion pieces, editor Richard Fletcher spread fear and suspicion through the most rarefied strata of US society. The journal was instrumental in blacklisting suspicious arts organizations and fomenting prejudice against enemy aliens. This article examines for the first time the role of this magazine in the banning of German-language operas at the Met, the internment of Muck, and the near-elimination of German repertoire from US orchestral programs.

Bradford Cox's physical appearance has mystified audiences, critics, and fans since the inception of his American indie rock band Deerhunter in the early 2000s. As the band's frontman, Cox is 6’4” with an exceptionally thin, angular frame, physical effects associated with Marfan syndrome. Yet many critics and fans do not recognize that he has a disability per se, instead speculating about possible anorexia, drug abuse, mental illness, and even his gender and sexual orientation. Through analysis of Cox's reception and creative output, I argue that the simultaneous fetishization and normalization of his body is due to its resonance with two overlapping countercultural discourses: the current idealization of thinness in indie rock as it both extends and departs from an earlier tradition of freakery and androgyny in punk. I show that Cox resists what he views as the masculine heteronormativity and performative apathy of indie rock through “freakish” sartorial reference to his androgynous punk idols PJ Harvey, Joey Ramone, and Patti Smith, an aesthetic that for Cox is vitally queer. Cox uses his solo musical output to further convey his alienation as a queer-disabled male artist: through his lyrics, album art, and specific vocal affectations and production techniques, he establishes a continuity across the visual and sonic registers of his identity to ultimately achieve a sense of belonging.

In 1987, Tony Melendez—a guitarist born without arms who plays the instrument with his feet—played at a youth rally for Pope John Paul II. Immediately after his performance, the Pope kissed Melendez and instructed him to continue “giving hope” through his music. Although the guitar accompaniment of confessional, singer-songwriter music is rarely considered virtuosic, Tony Melendez's bodily difference makes his ability to sonically pass as what he calls a “common player” an impactful display of skill for his audiences. Because Melendez's body is treated as simultaneously virtuosic and disabled, his example foregrounds the social construction of both categories and challenges the tendency to isolate either in the individual body. Rather than suggesting a sort of qualified approach to “disabled” virtuosity, this article argues that there is no such thing as unqualified virtuosity. The presumed limitations and possibilities of bodies, instruments, and repertoires always inform our understandings of skill, but we are not always explicitly aware of them. Through interviews and analysis of his performances and their media representations, I show how bodily difference and the complex subject positions of both performers and audiences contribute to what counts as skill, creative labor, and agency within a particular context.

Benny Goodman and Chick Webb's 1937 battle of music has become a mythic event in jazz historical narratives, enshrined as the unique spectacle that defines Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and its legacy. While this battle has been marked as exceptional and unique, as an event it was a relatively typical instantiation of the “battle of music” format, a presentational genre common in black venues during the 1920s and 1930s. Within African American communities, battles of music re-staged ballrooms as symbolically loaded representational spaces where dueling bands regularly served as oppositional totems that indexed differences of locality (Chicago vs. New York), gender (men vs. women), ethnicity (Anglo- or African American vs. Latin), or race (black vs. white). This article details the ten-year history of battles of music that preceded the Webb/Goodman battle and that made its signifying rhetoric legible within African American communities. It then argues that the disconnect between the battle's relatively typical signifying rhetoric and its subsequent enshrinement as an exceptional event occurred due to a specific confluence of circumstances in the mid-1930s that shaped its immediate reception and subsequent legacy: Goodman's emergence as the “King of Swing” during a new period of massive mainstream popularity for swing music, a coterminous vigilance among both white and black jazz writers to credit black artists as jazz's originators and best practitioners, and the emergence of athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as popular black champions symbolically conquering white supremacy at home and abroad.

After her performances in Shuffle Along (1921) on Broadway and in Dover Street to Dixie (1923) in London, Florence Mills became one of the most famous jazz and vaudeville singers. Known as the Harlem Jazz Queen, Mills was revered by Black Americans for her international breakthrough and because she used her commercial success as a platform to speak out against racial inequality. Extensive descriptions of her performance style and voice exist in writing, but there are no recordings of her singing. I respond to this archival loss by considering the sound of Mills's voice in two compositions written for her: William Grant Still's Levee Land (1925) and Edmund Thornton Jenkins's Afram (1924). In my analysis, I show that Still and Jenkins imagined a much more musically complicated and politically powerful voice than that found in the racialized and gendered stereotypes permeating both her vaudeville and Broadway repertory and the language of her reception. While scholars have written about how Mills's outspokenness regarding issues of race and omission of sexually explicit roles made her central to 1920s Black political and artistic life, I consider how the sonic properties of her voice positioned her as a leading figure in the New Negro Renaissance.

Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, a free classical music series, provides a case study for exploring how music festivals contribute to the musical life of cities. Each summer, the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra and Choir perform dozens of free performances at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park and in residential neighborhoods. In 1935, James C. Petrillo, head of the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, initiated the festival, then called Grant Park Concerts, to employ musicians during the Great Depression with funds from the federal Works Progress Administration. Changes in the city's cultural policies, its demographics, financial support, and expectations for how the festival serves the community have impacted how it programs its season and seeks audiences. Based on archival research, this article focuses on how the festival as a civic institution creates a listening public invested in particular narratives of Chicago as a dynamic city through programming music in public spaces. Looking at Grant Park Music Festival from contemporary and historical angles provides insight into how changes in aesthetic and social values, funding for the arts, and urban planning shape the way a festival engages with the city.

The Banff Summer Festival of the Arts and the Stratford Summer Music Festival have been unrecognized sites of operatic innovation in Canada. Indeed, the flourishing of what might be termed “new music theater” in Canada is imbricated with the history of these two festivals. Archival research reveals that the inventive, often revolutionary, approaches to music theater honed at Stratford and Banff from 1970–1990 ultimately defined the course of Canadian new music theatre in the decades that followed. Founded in 1953 as a Shakespeare festival, the Stratford Festival eventually became renowned for its (nearly exclusive) focus on musical theater. At Banff, discussions about generic innovation occurred regularly, producing what I suggest was one of the foremost centers in the world for innovation in music theater. Charting the development of opera in Canada through conversations that took part at the Banff and Stratford festivals during the period 1970–1990 reveals the unique possibilities that the peripheral positioning of these festivals—aesthetically, critically, and geographically—offered to the development, dissemination, and innovation of so-called new music theater in Canada.

In the midst of the Prohibition era, New York City proliferated with nightclubs that presented patrons with imagined worlds of music and entertainment. This essay explores the role of music in creating such imagined worlds, looking specifically at the Russian-themed nightclubs founded by and employing émigrés recently exiled from Bolshevik Russia. Examining Midtown's Club Petroushka as a prime example of such a space, this essay focuses on the so-called “Russian Gypsy” entertainment that caught the eye and ear of the club's patrons, whose ranks included Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the Gershwin brothers. Based on an examination of archival material—including memoirs, compositions, and extant recordings of Club Petroushka's musicians and photographs detailing its interior—as well as on advertisements and reviews from Russian American and other newspapers and magazines, this essay contends that the “Russian Gypsy” music presented at Club Petroushka enabled a transformative experience for patrons while providing a performative space for its recently exiled musicians. I argue that two aspects of this music in particular enabled the transformative process as it was delineated in contemporary discourses: 1) heightened emotionality; and 2) playing with a sense of time (a musical attribute I call “achronality”). Examining the complex cultural entanglements at work in the performance of “Russian Gypsy” music and situating my analysis within a theoretical framework of night cultures proposed by Brian D. Palmer and mimesis proposed by Michael Taussig, this essay illuminates the multivalent role of this musical trope for the different constituencies comprising Club Petroushka, while it also documents the largely overlooked Russian-Romani musical tradition as it took shape in the anti-Bolshevik, first wave Russian diaspora.

This article examines the music criticism of Nora Douglas Holt, an African American woman who wrote a classical music column for the Chicago Defender (1917–1923) and published a monthly magazine, Music and Poetry (1921–1922). I make two claims regarding the force and impact of Holt's ideas. First, by writing about classical music in the black press, Holt advanced a model of embodied listening that rejected racist attempts to keep African Americans out of the concert hall and embraced a communal approach to knowledge production. Second, Holt was a black feminist intellectual who refuted dominant notions of classical music's putative race- and gender-transcending universalism; instead, she acknowledged the generative possibilities of racial difference in general and blackness in particular. I analyze Holt's intellectual commitments by situating her ideas within the context of early twentieth-century black feminist thought; analyzing the principal themes of her writing in the Chicago Defender and Music and Poetry; and assessing her engagement with a single musical work, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, op. 36. Ultimately, Holt's criticism offers new insight into how race, gender, and musical activity intersected in the Jim Crow era and invites a more nuanced and capacious understanding of black women's manifold contributions to US musical culture.

The mid-1960s has figured as a central period in the historiography of popular music, but the role of improvisation has been little discussed. This article argues that issues of improvisation and value are crucial to understanding the emergence of a high-low split within popular music, a division that figures prominently in criticism and fan discourse up to the present day. This new stratification within popular music made it possible for rock to acquire critical prestige relative to other popular music genres. The formation of rock also relied on its association with a primarily white, male, middle-class demographic. This article demonstrates that rock's prestige rests simultaneously on maintaining this narrow demographic profile while locating aesthetic and spiritual value in musical practices coming from elsewhere (in terms of geography, race, or cultural hierarchy): blues, Indian classical music, jazz. The socio-musical transformation in which improvisation played such an important role is explored through a survey of recordings and an analysis of the development of rock criticism in 1966, the year in which a new constellation of aesthetics, politics, and musical style crystallized.