By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

Conquered peoples are turned into sideshow exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair, with Filipinos singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Geronimo singing and dancing for spectators. Black composers fight against the deracialization of ragtime threatened by white popularizers like Irving Berlin and Lewis Muir, while Chinese opera singers work to challenge the orientalism and exoticism of a snowballing “Chinatown” craze in popular music. The walls of the Angel Island and Ellis Island detention centers are scrawled with anonymous songs of despair and outrage, and the corrido continues to challenge US hegemony with its portrayals of legendary outlaws like Gregorio Cortéz and Pancho Villa. George M. Cohan – “the man who owns Broadway” – emerges with his own muscular celebrations of US power. The cities are swelling with immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths warn them not to “Bite the Hand that Feeds You.” Immigrant performers like Adolf Philipp and Eduardo Migliaccio work to ease the path of assimilation for their fellow countrymen, and the Yiddish musical theater sinks its roots deeper into the foundations of US culture. Puccini’s US-themed operas – Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West – inspire Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick to write The Padrone, his own operatic critique of immigrant exploitation.

Woman suffragists and labor activists continue to sing together, in more than one language, while, in Chicago, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 introduces a new musical genre – ragtime – to the world. Black composers and lyricists – Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Will Marion Cook, Harry T. Burleigh, Bob Cole, and the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson – work to free themselves from the debasements of the “coon song.” Black operatic singers like Marie Selika Williams and Sissieretta Jones carve out their careers against the tide of popular minstrelsy. A strange new phenomenon – Filipinos in “coon songs” – reflects the latest muscle flex of US Manifest Destiny: the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and – for good measure – Hawai’i, all richly captured in popular song. Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and Hawaiian annexation lead to two remarkable musical by-products of US imperialism: the infiltration of Puerto Rican kachi kachi music in Hawai’i and the unique work-song body – the hole hole bushi – of the Japanese plantation laborers – all women. Meanwhile, Tin Pan Alley has a field day with the newly seized territory, transforming a site of misery and loss into a popular music paradise with the likes of “Hula Hula Dream Girl,” “Along the Way to Waikiki,” and “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wiki Wacki Woo.”

Noting Stravinsky’s recent interest in African American music in the Manchester Guardian, Ernest Newman remarked that Ragtime might have been better received in a cinema or restaurant. As a tribute to vapid entertainment, he averred, the piece was ‘hardly worth the while of a man of original genius’; Stravinsky, Newman claimed, had exhausted his compositional resources and – ‘having nothing urgent or vital of his own to say now’ – was busy ‘larking about boyishly among the more stereotyped musical humours of the day’.2 As a caricature of popular culture, in other words, Ragtime was beneath Stravinsky and, by extension, inappropriate fare for the concert hall. How should we understand this strange act of aesthetic transgression? Isn’t modernism supposed to maintain distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’?