As Broadway musicals embrace contemporary popular music styles, orchestrators must incorporate the digital technologies necessary for producing convincing simulations of genres like hip hop and electronic music. At the same time, as production values soar, producers work to minimize their budgets, often putting downward pressure on the size of the orchestra. Although digital and electronic music technologies can expand the sonic register of the Broadway orchestra, they can also replace traditional acoustic instruments and save money. The Broadway musicians’ union, Local 802, has regularly sought to control the use of digital technologies and ensure that live musicians produce as much music as possible. Thus, Local 802's advocacy for the employment of their members can limit the sounds heard on Broadway.

The following narrative considers three digital technologies—synthesizers, virtual orchestras, and Ableton Live—and examines case studies and controversies surrounding their use in Broadway orchestras and implications for liveness in performance. Informed by interviews with industry professionals, author observation of pit orchestras in rehearsal and performance, archival research, popular and industry media, and previous scholarship, I argue that the union's entrenched interests and antiquated regulations can stifle musical innovation on Broadway by resisting the use of digital music technologies.

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.

Even with the widespread adoption of rock-styled “praise and worship” music in American churches, bluegrass and gospel musics still serve as potent musical signifiers, especially among the white southern evangelicals comprising praise and worship's primary demographic. Drawing repertoire and influence from Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and Bill Gaither, evangelical artist David Crowder uses strategic musical references to establish his own sense of “hillbilly” religiosity but often deploys these references in ways that align him with a “hipster” community of young musicians and music fans. In this paper, I demonstrate the ways that strategic references to bluegrass and gospel music allow Crowder to situate himself within these multiple discourses of evangelical authenticity.

The 50-year anniversary of the Beach Boys’ seminal album Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson's corresponding world concert tour have once again brought attention to Wilson and his creative work with the Beach Boys. These events have brought about new recording releases and publications about the band and Wilson, including the first feature-length biopic on Wilson, Love & Mercy. The following essay investigates Atticus Ross's reimaginative approach to Brian Wilson's music for the soundtrack of this film, directed by Bill Pohlad and released in 2014. The film expands recent trends in music biopics of the last couple of decades regarding the mobilization and activation of music to afford new interpretations of their subjects and new ways to hear their work. Ross's approach is distinct for its extensive recomposition of Brian Wilson's music in the film's original score, which allows director Bill Pohlad to show Wilson in a new light.

Ross incorporates Beach Boys recordings (studio sessions and released tracks) into new pieces that highlight processes of manipulation, layering, and repetition, which point to the studio as a major site of Wilson's creativity. These processes furthermore portray the psychic life of the film's characters. Ross's compositions dramatize the subjectivity of hearing and rogue behaviors of auditory recollection and hallucination that characterize both Wilson's creativity and mental illness. In the context of the story of Brian Wilson and Melinda Ledbetter, Ross's compositions take on palliative associations that have direct implications for the reception of the film's original soundtrack.