The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors –formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

This brief introduction flags up the problems of song recovery from eras before the advent of music publishing and mechanical recording. It pits assumptions of European colonial superiority against the voices and musical practices of America’s Indigenous people, from the Inuits of Alaska to the Aztecs of Mexico.

From the moment Christopher Columbus used the tinkling of a hawk’s bell to excite the interest of the welcoming Taínos during the First Encounter, music became a weapon of both conquest and resistance in the struggle for America. Here we are introduced to the nightmare of the Spanish conquest as reflected in the recovered Aztec songs of the Cantares mexicanos describing the massacres at Tenochtitlan and Cholula in the 1520s. Following the Spanish mission to Christianize America through the imposition of church music against the holdouts of Indigenous song, the European scramble for the “New World” introduces British explorations of Canada and musical encounters with the Inuits – sometimes against a background of violence, and sometimes in a tenuous moment of peace.

The campaign songs of Abraham Lincoln help to carry a working-class hero into the White House, while no songs are sung about his background as a wealthy corporate lawyer. Lincoln’s love of opera is only one further dimension to the music of the Civil War era; the sides are drawn in the popular music of the Union and the Confederacy, while the songs of the newly emancipated Black soldiers herald the turn of the tide toward Union victory. The Irish contribution is also charted musically, as are such contentious subjects as the New York Draft Riots and the fate of the war’s prisoners and its disabled veterans. The hope of emancipated Black Americans in the wake of Sherman’s March through Georgia is sung to the skies, before the assassination of Lincoln paves the way for Andrew Johnson and the betrayal of Reconstruction.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.

Telemann’s numerous compositions for the Christmas season reflect important changes in the understanding and celebration of the feast day throughout his prolific career. The early Christmas cantatas are influenced by an understanding of the feast that combined Lutheran mysticism with a language emphasizing the personal relationship between Christ and the believer through the physical/corporeal as well as emotional concepts: love, heart, desire, and so on. Telemann transferred this language to musical compositions featuring highly emotional melodic lines, often employing musical topi (such as sigh figures) that were familiar from pietist songs and operatic love arias. In his later works, especially in the cantata Die Hirten bei der Krippe to a text by Ramler, the focus shifts from personal emotionality to a divine encounter in nature. The pastoral sphere, influenced by the physico-theology of the time, replaces love arias from the earlier works. This chapter traces developments both in Telemann’s music and in theological discourse around the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not the understanding of Christmas that changes but rather the communicative function of emotion and affect both transforms and shifts throughout Telemann’s lifetime.

That Telemann’s annual cycles of church cantatas are differentiated from one through text, music, and scoring was first recognized in the previous century by Werner Menke and Wolf Hobohm. Subsequent studies by Ute Poetzsch-Seban, Christiane Jungius, and others have advanced our understanding of this phenomenon by considering several cycles in relation to others. The present author’s dissertation on Telemann’s Stolbergischer Jahrgang to poetry by Gottfried Behrndt provided the first comprehensive overview of one of the composer’s cycles, including perspectives on his strategies for establishing their individual profiles. This chapter pursues two goals: to offer insights and evaluations of the Stolbergischer Jahrgang in terms of the cantatas’ texts, tonality, scoring, and movement types; and to reflect on Telemann’s tendencies and motivations across his output of cantata cycles. Along the way, I formulate open questions and outline the present state of knowledge regarding Telemann’s efforts to give his cantata cycles distinct profiles.

The premise of this chapter is that an examination of the Cuban son provides important insights into Cuban history and society, into Caribbean race relations, and ongoing processes of cultural fusion involving Afro-descendant and Euro-descendant practices, among others. The chapter focuses primarily on early son history, its antecedent forms, the African-influenced aesthetic sense that gave rise to it, and the popularization of the music and dance in the early twentieth century. Later it briefly considers changes to son music in the 1930s and beyond.

Glass’s early instrumental works reflect a trend known as “minimalism,” which, like its visual arts counterpart, began to occupy a prominent aesthetic position during the 1960s. But it is Glass’s operas and other stage works, beginning in the 1970s, such as Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Satyagraha (1980), that have attracted widespread attention – works that include collaborations with notable figures such as film directors Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, stage directors Robert Wilson, Achim Freyer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Richard Foreman, and Phelim McDermott, and dancer–choreographers Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Susan Marshall, Maureen Fleming, and Twyla Tharp. Audience aficionados include opera lovers, rock musicians, music critics, painters, sculptors, fans of minimalist art, performance artists, and other constituencies. This is, in part, due to Glass’s eclectic interests and collaborative spirit, which have led him to merge music together with theater, dance, film, slides, graphic design, computer animation, photographs, and videos, including video walls and installations. These collaborations have helped place his work in a broad critical context and have attracted a wide audience from an unusually diverse array of followers.

This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.