Between 1903 and 1904, the two-step “Hiawatha” spread rapidly throughout much of the colonial world. The travels of “Hiawatha” reveal both what Stuart Hall calls the “double-stake” of popular culture as well as what Amy Kaplan describes as the “anarchic” nature of empire: through its circulation and repeated hearings, “Hiawatha” became both a kind of colonizing force and also a medium that disturbed ideas about racial hierarchies and nationhood that served to justify colonial rule. By charting the global movement of “Hiawatha,” I show how the song became both a colonial force and also a medium for expressions that challenged imperial logic. The tune exhibited imperial tendencies: it saturated soundscapes and, as part of an emerging form of new musical commodities, coaxed listeners into recognizing their shifting status from auditors to consumers. Through its Native American subject matter, the song also helped to perpetuate ideas of evolutionary racial science that served to justify the violence of imperialism. The very qualities that made “Hiawatha” a colonizing song, though, especially its repetitious ubiquity, also increased the complexity of its meaning as it circuited the globe, leading some listeners to hear an accumulation of meanings that seemed to exceed the forms of US imperial pop.

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.

Nuns in New Spain were celebrated with music and elaborate rituals when they took the habit and professed in a convent. These grandiose profession ceremonies drew in a host of urban citizens to the convent churches. Indeed, “more girls are smitten by the ceremony, than anything else,” remarked Fanny Calderón, wife of a Spanish ambassador who lived in Mexico City in the early 1840s, confirming that the iconic festivity endured well into the nineteenth century after Mexico's independence.

This article on nuns’ professions is framed within the Order of the Immaculate Conception (Conceptionists). One of the largest extant collections of Novohispanic convent music comes from the Conceptionist community of the Santísima Trinidad, founded in seventeenth-century Puebla. The manuscripts are preserved at Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical “Carlos Chávez” in Mexico City, and they contain profession villancicos. My research on Conceptionist ritual books and biographies of noteworthy nuns allows me to place the villancicos within the wider context of Conceptionist devotion, convent race relations, and artistic patronage. The texts for the villancicos present women as the main subject of the compositions, which adorned a spectacular ritual also centered on women. The profession ceremony is, therefore, a valuable source to begin understanding Novohispanic women's contribution to music making.

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.

Liberace entered the sprawling scene of US pop culture in 1952 emceeing a TV show that initially garnered higher ratings than I Love Lucy. The Liberace Show presented staples of the classical piano repertoire in abridged versions that cut the “dull parts” and liberally added orchestrations. Liberace's heterodox practices outraged prominent music critics, who soon deemed him the very incarnation of kitsch. Turning from aesthetic criticism to an archaeological analysis of media, I discuss the show's presentation of classical music, taking as its main case study Liberace's iconoclastic rendition of Beethoven's “Tempest” sonata, and examine it through the theory of remediation advanced by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Analyzing archival videos, I show how the alterations exerted on the musical text were inextricably tied to the telegenic mise-en-scènes staged for each episode while situating them in the new media landscape that emerged in the 1950s. The show remediated not only the pieces Liberace performed but also his own TV persona to nurture an intimate bond with home viewers who became captivated by the host's enchanting presence. I contend that Liberace's remediations drastically collapsed the specificity of performance medium that modern critics construed to be immanent to the musical work. This collapse entailed a proliferation of musical and audiovisual media that afforded Liberace's devoted viewers an alluring experience of immediacy and ultimately retrieved the domestic intimacy that had been integral to the genealogy of the piano sonata.

The three essays brought together in this cluster are immersed in themes that characterize “Americanness” in the twentieth century. They provide a microcosm of critical issues that define opera in the United States during these first decades when the nation helped shape the creation of opera rather than principally being a site for importing European works. Although most of the composers discussed in these articles were born in Europe (Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek) and only a few in the United States (Marc Blitzstein and George Antheil), all of them spent significant time in the United States, and all of the works discussed are either set in the United States, utilize American characters, or tied to important American themes.

In this essay, I explore the ways in which kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitarists) articulated Native Hawaiian aspirations for self-determination and reterritorialization during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. I argue that Hawaiian music speaks to a liberatory politics that is embedded within an aesthetic of nahenahe (soft, sweet, melodious). Nahenahe invests slack key guitarists with the mana (power, authority) to invoke a Native Hawaiian perspective that empowers and sustains Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) efforts for self-determination and political autonomy. The connections between music and political activism were highlighted and strengthened throughout the period. Indeed, although numerous political groups organized throughout the period, providing the modern foundations to the struggles for sovereignty today, at the forefront of it all were the musicians.

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.

San Miguel de Allende, a city of 171,857 located in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, most often appears in media outlets in laudatory publicity, advertising this urban space as perfect for voluntary “lifestyle” immigration and tourism both foreign and national. This article addresses the social tensions, fissures, and paradoxes that emerge from specific auralities of San Miguel's temporary residents. Their romanticized reception of traditional Indigenous danza performances contrasts sharply with the perceived noise of hip-hop in the town's historic center. As more and more residents hailing from outside San Miguel search for their own versions of “small town Mexico,” the racialized experiences of young sanmiguelenses are invisibilized in the overwhelmingly positive reception of Indigenous danzas. The championing of mestizaje as the sole visage for Mexican modernity leaves a convenient space for transnational racism located at the nexus of racialized economic privilege and colonial imagination. In this purportedly post-racial ideological context, how can the analysis of settler-colonizer aurality uncover the racialized structures that undergird the nation-state's management of cultural tourism?

This study explores piano advertising strategies after 1940 by examining ads printed in Etude, the Music Magazine between then and 1957, when it discontinued publication. Aware of the emerging US consumer culture, piano companies experimented throughout this period with more aggressive marketing techniques than they had previously used. Because Etude’s intended audience included musicians and enthusiasts of every skill and experience level, it was approached accordingly by advertisers. Thus, we can trace in its pages the development of methodologies that, owing to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contemporary range of consumers and their interests, came to target distinct and different market segments. Examination of strategies aimed at the respective groups illuminates an important chapter in the development of twentieth-century advertising while highlighting the piano's special status among consumer products and its cultural associations. Analysis of the industry's strategies in dealing with the mid-twentieth-century US economy reveals contemporary understandings of such associations and their effect on the implications of piano acquisition.

The premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910 inspired enthusiastic reactions from the New York audience. However, as demonstrated by Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis's 2005 study, Puccini and the Girl: History and Reception of “The Girl of the Golden West,” the critical reception of the work highlighted the Italian composer's inability to measure up to the critics’ preconceived notions about the American West. Among the many perceived oddities of the opera was the character of Jake Wallace, a “wandering camp minstrel,” who appeared in an unconventional form of blackface and sang an aria based on a transcription of a Native American song. This essay reexamines the early American reception of La fanciulla by analyzing the coverage of the opera in Italian-language newspapers published in New York. Articles in these periodicals suggest that Jake's nostalgic song (canto nostalgico) and the sentiment of homesickness that it projected played a central role in the positive reception of the work among their readers. Acknowledging such a reaction to the opera reminds us of the difficulty of ascribing a uniformly “American” reception to any work. It also uncovers an unexpected way in which Puccini and his collaborators promoted the opera to a particular segment of the American society.

This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.

This article argues that in the late 1920s, the German genre of Zeitoper paradoxically became an essential component of the search for a new kind of uniquely American opera, resulting in a transatlantic cycle of mutual influence. This influence was possible because Germans and Americans alike saw the United States as the embodiment of modern life and technology. American producers and composers thus adapted German Zeitoper to bring it more in line with Americans’ self-image. I examine this dynamic by juxtaposing two German and two American Zeitopern, looking specifically at their engagement with jazz, film, race, and American popular musical theater: Paul Hindemith's Hin und zurück, Marc Blitzstein's Triple-Sec (inspired by Hindemith's opera), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in the United States, and the unsuccessful effort to stage George Antheil's Transatlantic (modeled on Jonny and revised under the mentorship of Krenek) in New York. Both Germans’ image of America and Americans’ self-image were as much real as imagined, and although the similarities between them facilitated this cultural exchange, their differences also impeded it.

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.

Motown Records churned out hit singles with remarkable efficiency, thanks largely to a stable of skilled professional session musicians. However, exactly who played on their most iconic recordings remains a mystery because, as was standard within the music industry, no Motown release in the 1960s credited these musicians for their work. These practices have led to conflicting accounts, the most famous of which concerns bassists James Jamerson and Carol Kaye. To this day, Kaye alleges that she played on numerous classic Motown recordings but has been purposefully omitted from Motown history. Conversely, Jamerson—who died more than thirty years ago—continues to be vehemently defended by acolytes such as biographer Allan Slutsky, who see Kaye's claims as blasphemous. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article reconstructs Kaye's involvement with Motown and, in so doing, reevaluates the merits of the Kaye/Jamerson controversy. Building on the work of Andrew Flory, I explore the role of session musicians in Motown's creative process and argue that critics and fans have propagated a problematic discourse in which Jamerson has been valorized and Kaye has been dismissed. Ultimately, Kaye's story not only provides a useful corrective to the historical record, it also demonstrates the need for further research into session musicians’ contributions to popular music.