Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that “loud music” has been used in the detention camps of the United States‘ “global war on terror.” A survey of practices at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan; Camp Nama (Baghdad), Iraq; Forward Operating Base Tiger (Al-Qaim), Iraq; Mosul Air Force Base, Iraq; Guantánamo, Cuba; Camp Cropper (Baghdad), Iraq; and at the “dark prisons” from 2002 to 2006 reveals that the use of “loud music” was a standard, openly acknowledged component of “harsh interrogation.” Such music was understood to be one medium of the approach known as “futility” in both the 1992 and the 2006 editions of the US Army's field manual for interrogation. The purpose of such “futility” techniques as “loud music” and “gender coercion” is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile, yet the military establishment itself teaches techniques by which “the music program” can be resisted. The article concludes with the first-person account of a young US citizen, working in Baghdad as a contractor, who endured military detention and “the music program” for ninety-seven days in mid-2006—a man who knew how to resist.

This article explores surveillance in cloud-based music streaming. Key catalysts in the transition from ownership- to access-based models of music distribution, services like Spotify, Pandora, or Deezer have positioned themselves as a means of reintegrating listeners into “digital enclosures” over which rights holders exercise greater control. Yet streaming's promise of remonetizing musical commodities demonetized by filesharing has been called into doubt by difficulties in converting users of advertising-based “freemium” services into paying subscribers. In need of alternative means of extracting value from users, streaming platforms have increasingly refashioned themselves as enterprises whose business extends beyond music-related services to encompass the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. In pursuing this strategy, streaming platforms place themselves in direct competition with other new media companies trading in user data. In order to distinguish themselves from such competitors, streaming platforms cast music as a particularly valuable source of data, offering privileged access to listeners’ innermost selves. But they also cast music as an ideal tracking device, accompanying individuals across a variety of social, physical and geographical spaces. In this way, the very attributes that make music so powerful a “technology of the self” facilitate its transformation into an equally powerful technology of surveillance.

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.

Pamela Z is an American composer-performer and audio artist whose use of extended vocal technique and live, body-controlled electronic processing takes place in events ranging in scale from solo events in galleries to large-scale works that combine video, audio, and live musicians, singers, and actors. Her work raises important issues regarding transnationalism, Afrodiasporicism, and identity; acoustic ecologies; the articulation of race and ethnicity; and the place of women in technological media. The essay discusses several of Z's works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, in articulation with cybertheory; the aesthetics of popular and avant-garde music, voice, language, and poetics; intermedia and performance art; and contemporary technological practices.

This article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type of freedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical content and structure of Simone's music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of the transition from King's nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield's Chicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, which had largely avoided overt political statements.

In 2012, the flutist Claire Chase, founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble, received a MacArthur Award for her work as an “arts entrepreneur and flutist.” The award's emphasis on Chase's entrepreneurship reflects the growing demand among classical musicians, educators, and critics for self-driven musical projects, promoted as an engine of classical music's concert culture and as crucial to its renewal in the United States. Entrepreneurship curricula are now in place at almost every music school in the country.

In this article, I offer a critique of the increasingly institutionalized push for musical entrepreneurship, demonstrating that it is rooted in the discourse and ideals of neoliberalism. Drawing on scholarship by economist Guy Standing and political theorist Wendy Brown, I analyze the discourse supporting musical entrepreneurship training, demonstrating the ways it advances neoliberal values through the association of “freedom” and “innovation” with the dismantling of collectivity and valorization of precarious labor structures. This discourse produces an expectation of radical self-sufficiency throughout U.S. society, across multiple economic sectors and including non-economic areas of life. I argue that musical entrepreneurship training serves not as a progressive alternative to other forms of musical career building, but instead habituates musicians to precariousness and insecurity through its rhetoric and institutional endorsement.

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.

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.

This essay undertakes an examination of Steve Reich's music for Robert Nelson's film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), which was originally conceived as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's controversial production A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel of the same year. Reich's long-neglected soundtrack deserves reconsideration for its formative role in the development of the composer's musical style and quasi-liberationist aesthetic at the time, for its participation within what I term the “minstrel avant-garde” in the Bay Area during the mid-1960s and the postmodern revival of blackface minstrelsy more generally, and as a reference point in reflecting upon Reich's professional and political trajectory since its composition.

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.

The New Orleans hot jazz vocal trio the Boswell Sisters was one of the leading ensembles of the 1930s. Enormously popular with audiences, the Boswells were also recognized by colleagues and peers to be among the finest singers, instrumentalists, and arrangers of their day. Many jazz historians remember them as the first successful white singers who truly “sounded black,” yet they rarely interrogate what “sounding black” meant for the Boswells, not only in technical or musical terms but also as an expression of the cultural attitudes and ideologies that shape stylistic judgments. The Boswells' audience understood vocal blackness as a cultural trope, though that understanding was simultaneously filtered through minstrelsy's legacy and challenged by the new entertainment media. Moreover, the sisters' southern femininity had the capacity to further contexualize and “color” both their musical output and its reception. This essay examines what it meant for a white voice to sound black in the United States during the early 1930s, and charts how the Boswells permeated the cultural, racial, and gender boundaries implicit in both blackness and southernness as they developed their collective musical voice.

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.

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.

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.

Since their emergence from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 1960s, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago have created a distinctive multi-disciplinary performance practice centered on collective improvisation. In this article, I conceptualize Art Ensemble improvisations as networks of group interactions, and I analyze an excerpt from a 1972 Art Ensemble concert recording using a phenomenological perspective informed by my conversations with the group about the performance and by my own experience as an improvised-music practitioner. The analysis focuses on the integration of composed material into the improvisatory process, the functions of stylistic diversity and multi-instrumentalism in Art Ensemble performance practice, and the interactive roles played by Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, and Don Moye.

In the winter of 1772–1773, Joseph Johnson (Mohegan/Brothertown) copied musical notation into eight books for Christian Native Americans in Farmington, Connecticut, a town established by English settler colonists on the land known as Tunxis Sepus. Johnson did so because, as he wrote in his diary, “The indians are all desireous of haveing Gamuts.” Johnson's “gamuts” have not survived, but their erstwhile existence reveals hymnody's important role within the Native community in Farmington as well as cross-culturally with the English settler colonists. In order to reconstruct the missing music books and assess their sociocultural significance, this article proposes a surrogate bibliography, gathering a constellation of sources among which Johnson's books would have circulated and gained meaning for Native American Christians and English colonists (including other printed and manuscript music, wampum, and legal documents pertaining to land transfer). By bringing together this multi-modal network of materials, this essay seeks to redress the material and epistemological effects of a colonialist archive. On one level, this is a case study that focuses on a short period of time in order to document the impact on sacred music of conversion, literacy, shifting intercultural relations, and a drive to preserve sovereignty. On another, this article presents a methodological intervention for dealing with lost materials and colonialist archives without recourse to discourses of recovery or discovery, the latter of which is considered through the framework of what I term “archival orientalism.”

Late in his career, John Cage often recalled his brief interaction with German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in 1937 as the primary impetus for his early percussion works. Further examination of this connection reveals an important technological foundation to Cage's call for the expansion of musical resources. Fischinger's experiments with film phonography (the manipulation of the optical portion of sound film to synthesize sounds) mirrored contemporaneous refinements in recording and synthesis technology of electron beam tubes for film and television. New documentation on Cage's early career in Los Angeles, including research Cage conducted for his father John Cage, Sr.'s patents, explain his interest in these technologies. Finally, an examination of the sources of Cage's 1940 essay “The Future of Music: Credo” reveals the extent of Cage's knowledge of early sound synthesis and recording technologies and presents a more nuanced understanding of the historical relevance and origins of this document.