During their partnership between 1955 and 1968, composer James Tenney (1934–2006) and artist Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) engaged in what initially appear to be opposing modes of practice. Tenney developed theories concerning the perception of musical form and composed rationalized works based on carefully calculated algorithms. Schneemann, by contrast, was driven by spontaneity and sensuality, and her provocative artworks vehemently address sexual, gender, and political issues. This duality was especially evident in the mid-1960s, when Tenney was conducting psychoacoustic research at Yale University and Schneemann was producing her first theater events in downtown New York. Although his compositional productivity declined during this period, he participated in several of Schneemann's projects, scripted a few theater pieces of his own, and wrote extensive notes on artistic form as a perceptual model of physiological processes. Drawing from unpublished archival documents and personal interviews, this article provides an overview of Tenney's relationship with Schneemann and demonstrates how his simultaneous involvement in theoretical research and theatrical performance transformed his creative work. A close examination of Tenney's scores, journals, and correspondence reveals that he was deliberately exploring the distinctions between abstraction and collage and seeking to reconcile the apparent dualism of theory and theater.

What a brilliant idea JSAM was in 2007. In eleven volumes (and counting), it has engaged at least three generations of readers with deeply researched and thoughtful articles, imaginative (and hefty) bibliographies, and reviews of print scholarship and a growing array of media. Authors, editors, reviewers, submission evaluators, leadership and staff members at the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press, all of whom are responsible for the journal's quality and even its very existence: thank you.

This article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.

Cool Hand Luke has a distinct soundtrack that features original music by composer Lalo Schifrin and an intriguing collection of traditional American music selected by director Stuart Rosenberg. The music emerged over an intense nine-month span in 1966–67, during which ideas flowed freely and original plans were often jettisoned. Rosenberg and Schifrin were the film's primary musical architects, but others contributed along the way, including screenwriters, actors, producers, folk music experts, and a trio of banjo players. Based on a wide range of primary sources, including documents in the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California, interviews with individuals involved in the production, the voluminous popular press about the film, and the film itself, this article is a rare glimpse inside the creative process that produced an unmistakably American soundtrack.

This article investigates Revolutionary-era American political culture through contrafacta of the British anthem “God Save the King.” Before, during, and after the Revolution the tune was frequently set with new lyrics that addressed political topics. The formats through which the song circulated (it was disseminated widely in manuscript and print), shaped the meaning and reception of these various contrafacta. Tracking “God Save the King” through the eighteenth century reveals how the United States remained connected to Britain, even when the lyrics—and the goals of the Revolution—repudiated that bond. Song versions also provide a musical map of the fragmenting political landscape of the early Republic. Ultimately, the diversity of the formats and the song versions reveal the ambivalent relationship between postcolonial United States and Britain, as well as the diversity of political culture within the United States.

This article reconsiders the cultural significance and historical impact of the well-known virtuosic piano composition The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the banjo and the piano inhabited very specific and highly contrasting performance circumstances: black folk entertainment and minstrel shows for the former, white middle- and upper-class parlors and concert halls for the latter. In The Banjo, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lifted the banjo out of its familiar contexts and placed it in the spaces usually privileged for the piano. Taking its inspiration from both African American and minstrel banjo playing techniques, Gottschalk's composition relaxed and muddled the boundaries among performance spaces, racial and class divisions, and two conspicuously different musical instruments in an egalitarian effort to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions of some mid-nineteenth-century musical critics and tastemakers, both the piano and the banjo have a place in the shaping of American music culture.

During World War II, the United States government imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens, half of whom were children. Through ethnographic interviews I explore how fragile youthful memories, trauma, and the soundscape of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Incarceration Camps shaped the artistic trajectories of three such former “enemy alien” youth: two pianists and a koto player. Counterintuitively, Japanese traditional arts flourished in the hostile environment of dislocation through the high number of nisei (second generation) participants, who later contributed to increasing transculturalism in American music following resettlement out of camp. Synthesizing Japanese and Euro-American classical music, white American popular music, and African American jazz, many nisei paradoxically asserted their dual cultural commitment to both traditional Japanese and home front patriotic American principles. A performance of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's patriotic cantata, Ballad for Americans (1939), by the high school choir at Manzanar Incarceration Camp demonstrates the hybridity of these Japanese American cultural practices. Marked by Popular Front ideals, Ballad for Americans allowed nisei to construct identities through a complicated mixture of ethnic pride, chauvinistic white Americanism allied with Bing Crosby's recordings of the Ballad, and affiliation with black racial struggle through Paul Robeson's iconic Ballad performances.

Current scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

With the American Dream seizing center stage, reality television competitions often feature disabled auditionees and their moving tales of overcoming adversity. Musical—and frequently singing—abilities potentially normalize and envoice contestants while silencing vital conversations about the exploitation, stigmatization, and corporate politics at work in these seductive narratives. How do chronicles of overcoming overcome consumers? And how might inspiration porn about disability disable beholders’ emotional, intellectual, and rhetorical faculties? As fans and scholars resist or succumb to the tearfulness induced by sentimental stories, they must chart tricky routes through the heady skepticism of Scylla and the naïve waterworks of Charybdis.

The academic assessment of the products of the Walt Disney Company is usually highly negative, drawing out their sexist, racist, and mercenary factors. Although such views are not easily denied, their strong ideology often hides how Disney texts actually operate and how their audiences interact with them. This article explores how recorded music is used in the Disney theme parks to condition audience response, finding a middle ground between an ideological view, exploring the part music plays in social control, and a hermeneutic view, seeing how music functions in articulating and enhancing the experiences in which Disney's guests participate. Disney's Imagineers draw on the language of film music to create a wide variety of narrative musical spaces that give guests the impression that they navigate through these carefully staged narratives as protagonists. Film-musicological models show that guests are encouraged to feel that they control the respective spaces, although filtering the model through critical theory will demonstrate that the spaces can actually be seen as controlling them. While critical theory and structuralist hermeneutics might seem at first like strange bedfellows, analyses of both the narratives themselves and of their social effects can usefully reflect each other, together providing a more nuanced view of Walt Disney World's experiential texts than has been presented either in the academy or by Disney itself.

In early 1937, Kurt Weill and playwright Clifford Odets collaborated on a Spanish Civil War film that they hoped would lead to a new kind of political–musical picture. Originally titled The River Is Blue, the film was eventually released in 1938 as Blockade without the involvement of either Odets or Weill, but recently uncovered archival material of the abandoned project reveals new facets of Weill's musico-dramatic thought. The discovery of Odets's first draft of the screenplay shows an extraordinarily close collaboration between composer and screenwriter as the shot numbers in the script align exactly with numbers in Weill's score. Read together, these two documents show Weill attempting to combine different paradigms of film scoring that were popular in the 1930s. There are moments of typical Golden Age–style scoring with mickey-mousing and leitmotifs, but there is also evidence of older practices such as the use of popular songs. Weill's score also displays the influence of the Popular Front, elements of Eisensteinian montage, and anti-Wagnerianism. These show Weill working toward what he termed “film-opera,” not a filmed version of an opera but an entirely new genre that combined elements of musical theatre and movies.

The Martin and Morris Music Studio (MMMS) imprint permeated the first fifty years of black gospel music. Jointly owned by singer/impresaria Sallie Martin (1895/6–1988) and composer/arranger/pianist/organist Kenneth Morris (1917–88), the MMMS delivered gospel songs to an eager public and offered ordinary Americans the chance to see their names in print as author or composer on the cover of a gospel octavo, copies of which could then be sold to benefit that same ordinary American. Their influence extended far beyond that service, however. Martin and her Singers performed and popularized music bearing the MMMS imprint in venues ranging from small churches in the Deep South to national conventions in Washington, D.C., and widened circulation of MMMS music via Los Angeles recording studios. The unprecedented accomplishments of the MMMS, active from 1940 to 1993, have not been fully explored. Relying on transcribed interviews of the owners by Bernice Johnson Reagon, James Standifer, and others, accounts in historical newspapers, and company archives, this article addresses that void. The centrality of the MMMS in twentieth-century gospel of all types is clarified through examination of contexts for black-owned music publishing in the last century, the owners’ early business models, and their changing roles in the creation, publication, popularization, and dissemination of gospel music for more than fifty years.

As John Cage wrote in his book A Year from Monday, the “current use for art [is] giving instances of society suitable for social imitation—suitable because they show ways . . . people can do things without being told or telling others what to do.” Cage's ideal anarchic music emphasizes not only renouncing compositional control, but also the process of self-discovery happening to everyone, a process that leads participants to discover their creative abilities. This paper argues that Cage's penchant for self-discovery came from his understanding of George Herbert Mead's theories of the process of individuation (the “me” and the “I”). Cage discovered Mead through reading Zen and American Thought (1962) by his friend Van Meter Ames, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who saw the compatibility between Zen and Mead's concept of self in the capacity of the “I,” a phase of self whose unpredictable steps contribute to human innovation. Cage found the possibility of overthrowing the thought of the world through triggering a self-discovery of the “I” in everyone. He realized this idea in his happenings, such as 0’00”, by requiring performers to respond to the simple descriptions without specifying sound or duration.

Largely because of its troubled publication history, Bitter Music—Harry Partch's journal of a portion of his travels as a hobo—has attracted little scholarly or popular attention. This article aims to help elucidate Bitter Music by examining the influence of hobo philosophy on its creation and reception. Certain aspects of the historical and current hobo subculture's ideology—particularly bricolage, anarcho-syndicalism, radical egalitarianism, and non-hierarchical temporal perception—appear to motivate various factors in Partch's creation of the journal and his later attempts to destroy it. Additionally, I examine how hobo philosophy animates Partch's approach to speech, song, and instrumental music, culminating in a close reading of the journal's longest musical-textual entry. The article concludes with an examination of how Bitter Music’s publication history further enhances the resonance of hobo philosophy with the ways in which the journal is apprehended by readers and, in the current century, listeners.

Storytelling has proved to be a useful metaphor in jazz commentary and analysis. Within such literature it is invariably solos, portrayed as discrete cultural articles, that “tell a story” through their adherence to internal coherence and logic. This prized autonomy is modeled on that which we find in the modern European tradition. Pathbreaking studies by scholars such as Ingrid Monson, Paul Berliner, and Keith Sawyer have redressed this hegemony in highlighting the importance of collaborative work in jazz. This essay needs to be considered a contribution to this focus. Yet approaches that emphasize interaction among band members tend toward dialogical metaphors and analytical frameworks that marginalize forms of creative “collaboration” that can occur retrospectively between musicians and vocalists who may not have even met. Drawing from Walter Benjamin's essay “The Storyteller: Nikolai Leskov,” this essay argues that storytelling in jazz is an intergenerational, accumulative effort in which we see a story continue to unfold with each new telling. It shows that there is generative tension between a musician holding on to his or her distinctive characteristics and approach, and their commitment to sharing (in) the story. Storytelling in jazz involves musicians adding “transparent layers” to the tradition, contributing to musical material, and collaborating with others (both contemporary and temporally distant) in a manner in which personal distinction is actively maintained. Through a consideration of John Coltrane's ideas concerning the centrality of community to the practice, storytelling in jazz is shown to be of extramusical social significance also.

For three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company staged Porgy and Bess in Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.