The powerful concept of orientalism has undergone considerable refinement since Edward Said popularized the term with his eponymous book in 1978. Orientalism typically is presented as a totalizing process that creates polar oppositions between a dominating West and a subordinate East. U.S. orientalisms, however, reflect uniquely North American approaches to identity formation that include assimilating characteristics usually associated with the Other. This article explores the complex relationship among three individuals—U.S. composer Charles T. Griffes, Canadian singer Eva Gauthier, and German-trained Dutch East Indies composer Paul J. Seelig—and how they exploited the same Javanese songs to lend legitimacy to their individual artistic projects. A comparison of Griffes's and Seelig's settings of a West Javanese tune (“Kinanti”) provides an especially clear example of how contrasting approaches manifest different orientalisms. Whereas Griffes accompanied the melody with stock orientalist gestures to express his own fascination with the exotic, Seelig used chromatic harmonies and a chorale-like texture to ground the melody in the familiar, translating rather than representing its Otherness. The tunes that bind Griffes, Gauthier, and Seelig are only the raw materials from which they created their own unique orientalisms, each with its own sense of self and its own Javanese others.

Leonard Bernstein (1918–90)—the now-legendary composer and conductor—had deep roots among Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Boston. This volume of essays explores aspects of that personal and sociocultural experience as revealed through an intensive team-research seminar at Harvard University during the spring semester of 2006. Titled “Before West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein's Boston,” the course positioned Bernstein within interlocking local networks, primarily during the 1930s and early 1940s. Its aim was not to prepare a standard biographical narrative, but rather to interrogate the synergy between an individual and supportive communities, whether religious, ethnic, educational, or musical. Carol J. Oja and Kay Kaufman Shelemay designed and team-taught the seminar, guiding a group of nineteen graduate and undergraduate students in both fieldwork and archival research, and they timed it to precede “Leonard Bernstein: Boston to Broadway,” a major international festival and conference about Bernstein, which took place at Harvard in October 2006. By drawing on complementary methodologies and capitalizing on the multiple layers of activity made possible by such a large group of researchers, the students covered an extraordinary amount of turf in a short time, and they did so in innovative ways. As their work unfolded, intriguing insights emerged about the powerful, ongoing role played by Boston's Jewish immigrant community in shaping the identity and character of a man who was to become one of America's most illustrious musicians.

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer stages the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. This essay proposes that the representations of Palestinian hijackers in three different productions show the opera reinventing itself before and after 9/11, when Arab identity hovers ambiguously in the U.S. Imaginary. Analyses focus in particular on distinct forms of collaboration among artists and media. In 1991 thorny associations among media produce an ambiguous Arab subject that reflects, and encourages, a capability for dialogue around the topic of terrorism. By contrast, two productions in 2003 rely on film and photograph to situate rigidly delineated Palestinian characters—demonstrating a dependency on visual media and a consequent highlighting of race that may be emblematic of a post-9/11 era. The essay concludes that different forms of collaboration in The Death of Klinghoffer can be approached as a microcosm of social and political interactions taking place far beyond the opera proper.

This article addresses Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay as a developing form of collaborative, participatory rock music performance. Drawing on ethnomusicology, performance studies, popular music studies, gender and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary digital media scholarship, I investigate the games' models of rock heroism, media debates about their impact, and players' ideas about genuine musicality, rock authenticity, and gendered performance conventions. Grounded in ethnographic research—including interviews, a Web-based qualitative survey, and media reception analysis—this article enhances our understanding of performance at the intersection of the “virtual” and the “real,” while also documenting the changing nature of amateur musicianship in an increasingly technologically mediated world.

The bulk of Leonard Bernstein's first book, The Joy of Music (1959), consists of three imaginary conversations and seven scripts of Omnibus lectures intended for the education of lay audiences. These texts have long been admired for their pedagogy but have largely been ignored as reflections of Bernstein's aesthetic views. This article proposes that The Joy of Music functions not only as a pedagogical document but also as an aesthetic manifesto preparing Bernstein's audiences for some of his best compositions—especially the Third Symphony (Kaddish; 1963, rev. 1977) and West Side Story (1957). In the context of The Joy of Music, Kaddish appears as the fulfillment of “the real American symphonic form” and West Side Story as the ultimate American musical stage work, that is, a work that is as sophisticated as opera but rooted in the American musical.

Leonard Bernstein is most often perceived as the quintessential New Yorker—music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 and composer of Broadway shows that made New York their focus. Yet his grounding in the greater Boston area was powerful. He was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in various Jewish neighborhoods within Boston. The young Leonard went to Boston Latin, a prestigious public prep school, and graduated from Harvard in 1939.

This article explores a team research project, made up of Harvard graduate students and undergraduates, which delved into the urban subcultures and post-immigrant experiences that shaped Bernstein's youth and early adulthood. It considers the synergy between an individual and a community, and it examines the complexities of blending pedagogy with research, analyzing the multilayered methodologies and theoretical strategies that were employed.

Given Bernstein's iconic status, his life and career illuminate a broad range of questions about the nature of music in American society. Fusing the techniques of ethnographic and archival research, our team probed Bernstein's formative connections to Jewish traditions through his family synagogue (Congregation Mishkan Tefila), the ethnic geography that defined the Boston neighborhoods of his immigrant family, the network of young people involved in Bernstein's summer theatrical productions in Sharon, Massachusetts, during the 1930s, and the formative role of the city's musical venues and institutions in shaping Bernstein's lifelong campaign to collapse traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

This essay addresses the unlikely but profound synergy between Arnold Schoenberg and Lou Harrison. Despite their personal rapport and mutual interests in visual art, they held antithetical beliefs about the nature of musical composition. Schoenberg maintained that a composition was the presentation of a metaphysical “Idea.” Harrison saw composition as the process of systematically gathering and assembling resources and techniques.

After studying with Henry Cowell and Schoenberg, Harrison displayed a fascination with musical resources that led him to compose twelve-tone works using disparate compositional tools. A 1937 piano piece combines Schoenberg's methods of variation with Cowell's and Seeger's techniques of “dissonation.” The “Conductus” from the 1942 Suite for Piano, a work inspired by Schoenberg's Suite für Klavier, op. 25, explores all twelve prime forms of the row in light of Cage's square-root form. A nontonal 1944 string quartet ends on a triad like Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, op. 41.

In the 1950s Harrison rejected the aims of the total-serialist movement and found his own voice in just intonation instead. By the 1980s all vestiges of twelve-tone technique disappeared from his pieces; however, analogous serial techniques resurfaced in his paintings. Thus Harrison retained deep respect for Schoenberg as a composer, teacher, and friend.

In 1906 Appleton's Magazine published John Philip Sousa's most celebrated—and vitriolic—article, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” In it Sousa predicts that piano rolls and recordings will end amateur music making in the United States. Modern writers have often condemned Sousa as a hypocrite (the Sousa Band was itself a major recording ensemble) and chastised him for failing to see the cultural and financial benefits of mechanical music. But, in fact, Sousa's article was part of a larger scheme to gain public support for the 1909 copyright revision. It was also just one step in Sousa's lifelong battle for composers' rights, a battle with five distinct phases: (1) the debate over the right of public performance precipitated by the success of Gilbert and Sullivan in the United States, (2) a test of the limits of contractual obligations between performers and managers, (3) the instigation of an international copyright law, (4) the battle over mechanical rights, and (5) the ability of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to collect royalties as related to public performance.

Anthony Philip Heinrich's two symphonies on avian themes— The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or The Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras (original version ca. 1835; final form 1857) and The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons (ca. 1857)—have not been generally considered among his nationalistic works. Placing these works into historical context, however, makes the nationalism of their programmatic content clear. These symphonies reveal surprising connections in the U.S. consciousness between birds and national identity in the nineteenth-century United States. Through the examination of this music in the contexts of naturalist writers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon, the last of whom was a close friend of Heinrich's, this article demonstrates the extent to which Heinrich's music tapped into the popularity of ornithology in the United States.

Eminem's emergence as one of the most popular rap stars of 2000 raised numerous questions about the evolving meaning of whiteness in U.S. society. Comparing The Slim Shady LP (1999) with his relatively unknown and commercially unsuccessful first album, Infinite (1996), reveals that instead of transcending racial boundaries as some critics have suggested, Eminem negotiated them in ways that made sense to his target audiences. In particular, Eminem's influential single “My Name Is,” which helped launch his mainstream career, parodied various representations of whiteness to help counter charges that the white rapper lacked authenticity or was simply stealing black culture. This “rearticulation” of whiteness in hip hop paralleled a number of other ideological realignments in the 1990s, many of which pit questions of class against those of race in the service of constructing new political and cultural authenticities. Eminem's performances provide us with a mirror in which numerous questions surrounding whiteness's significance come into focus.

This essay will place Leonard Bernstein within the context of the Boston Jewish community in which he was raised. It was at Boston's Congregation Mishkan Tefila, the family's synagogue, where Bernstein first encountered serious music. The essay places special emphasis on the role of Prof. Solomon Gregory Braslavsky, the music director and organist of Mishkan Tefila, whose influence on the young Bernstein was far greater than scholars have imagined. In 1973 Bernstein wrote to Braslavsky “[I] never forget the tremendous influence you and your music made on me when I was a youngster.” Bernstein, I contend, meant what he said.

This article explores the story and agency of conjunto master musician Jesse Ponce from his early life in San Antonio to his migration to northwest Ohio as an “authentic” Tejano (Texas-Mexican) musician. Although Ponce used this status as a form of cultural capital to construct his identity, integrate into local Latino communities, and interface with Latino cultural institutions, three outside agents, including the author, worked to publicize his expertise in Ohio, which, in turn, led to new acknowledgment and self-identification. The recent history of the “traditional” conjunto style is revealed as paralleling Ponce's career and aesthetic preferences. Both are in slight decline: Ponce, because of his failing health and resulting fewer performance opportunities; traditional conjunto, because of the rise of a more virtuosic “progressive” style

Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital and Loza's concept of enculturation are utilized to explicate Ponce's experience and self-construction in urbanizing northwest Ohio. The author's experiences with Ponce (as promoter and musician) are included to demonstrate the constant negotiations between Ponce, his musical identity and authority, and the outside world

How does the music of Bruce Springsteen interrogate prevailing constructs of the U.S.-Mexico border region? In his folk masterpiece The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and other works that feature Spanish-speaking protagonists, Springsteen implicitly reconceptualizes the Americas as an unbordered and fluid space. His performances enact Mexico and the United States as transamerican ideations rather than discrete nations. Although the booming academic field of border studies reframes static images of both Latin America and the United States in favor of malleable transnational paradigms, it still tends to privilege cultural production emanating from the borders themselves. This propensity does not leave much space for an engagement with canonical figures of U.S. culture such as Springsteen, a singer/songwriter who theorizes the borderlands in ways that at first may seem at odds with his career-long, conscious associations with red, white, and blue semiotics. This article examines the Hispanic presences in Springsteen's oeuvre from his debut 1973 albums onward and contrasts them with the relatively fixed representations of the borderlands in the lifework of Bob Dylan.

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 spite of the publicity generated at times by the politics of the mature Leonard Bernstein, the roots of his entanglement with political causes have been little-explored. As part of a larger collaborative project investigating Bernstein's ties to Boston, this article traces his role in the Harvard Student Union's theatrical productions. These shows were important because they represented some of Bernstein's earliest efforts at writing and directing for the theater. Bernstein worked on two shows sponsored by the Union: the production of Marc Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock in 1939, during Bernstein's senior year at Harvard, and that of Aristophanes' play Peace in 1941, two years after he graduated. Although the Harvard Student Union was a major progressive political force on campus, Bernstein's relationship with the group appears to have been surprisingly casual. Examination of archival materials surrounding the productions, as well as selected interviews from the larger collaborative Bernstein project of which this article is but one part, reveals Bernstein as a man who was primarily interested in the Harvard Student Union insofar as it was an organization amenable to supporting his musical activities. As the heat of Bernstein's celebrity cools with time, such findings are an important aid in avoiding drawing overly deterministic conclusions about the significance of Bernstein's affiliations while ignoring his own immediate aims, political or otherwise.