Journal of the Society for American Music最新文献

Since the late nineteenth century, the “Indian” as symbol has been a recurring trope in the art music of Mexico and the United States. Composers in both countries have often turned to representations of Indigenous Peoples as symbolic of nature, spirituality, and/or aspects of the national Self. This article seeks to place James DeMars's opera Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Roses (2008) in the context of two major cultural trends: Indianism in the U.S., and the representation of Mexico by U.S. composers. DeMars's use of Indigenous instruments in Guadalupe, including Mexican pre-Hispanic percussion, and flutes performed by famed Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai, continues the Indianist tradition of associating the Indigenous cultures of both countries with nature, spirituality, and authenticity. Similar associations emerge in the development and reception of both “world music” and the Native American recording industry since the 1980s, as exemplified by Nakai's career. DeMars uses these instruments in combination with Plains Native American features and generic exoticisms to represent both the Mexican Indigenous Peoples and the spiritual message of the opera. The sympathetic treatment of Indigenous cultures in Guadalupe nevertheless exists in tension with their exoticism and Otherness; in this the work is representative of U.S. cultural responses to Mexico stretching back throughout the long twentieth century.

The Ohio-based Black songwriter, Joshua Simpson, published two books of antislavery songs in the mid-nineteenth century, Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852 and Emancipation Car in 1854. Unlike most other known songsters, which were compilations of poetry from several authors, Simpson authored original lyrics for borrowed melodies, and he did so with extraordinary care, engaging the original song to enhance his activist messages. Employing the rhetorical practice of signification, his linkage of new lyrics with preexisting songs sometimes builds upon meaning from the original text, reusing it to add weight to the moral and political arguments against slavery. He also extends nature imagery and lyrics about the comforts of home and family in traditional ballads and contemporary sentimental songs to his new lyrics, but more often his signifying practice is ironic. He inverts the original song's sentimentality in deliberately discomforting ways that could persuade Americans to assist self-emancipating people and work toward wholescale abolition of slavery. Simpson's most radical songs talk back irreverently to the originals, especially minstrel tunes containing degrading caricatures and proslavery propaganda as well as patriotic anthems proclaiming hypocritical platitudes. Simpson did not simply write new songs; he transformed some of the most popular and beloved songs of his era, harnessing their renown to sharpen his activist messages.

In 1981, Bernice Johnson Reagon gave a talk at the West Coast Women's Festival, challenging the group of mainly white feminists to embrace coalition politics—a political praxis theorized and advocated by Black and Israeli feminists that sought to build coalitions only after distinct group identities were embraced and nurtured. Long before she articulated this concept as the future of the Movements within which she worked, Reagon piloted it in her post-Civil Rights Movement music making. In her work with the Harambee Singers and the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project between 1966 and 1974, Reagon developed a musical coalition politics that would inform her later interventions. Not only were Reagon's musical coalition politics during this period a musical embodiment of the vanguard of feminist theory, but they also shed light on how one of the most important musician-scholar-activists of the twentieth century approached the crafting of a new political identity in conversation with the shifting front of the Black Freedom Movement in the immediate wake of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. This little-known period of Reagon's output offers scholars of Black music, scholars of American music, feminists/Black feminists, and activists much to contemplate and incorporate into our work.

Throughout the history of television, American audiences have participated in a tradition of programs that follow a consistent structure: Amateur musicians and entertainers are offered an opportunity to display their talent on stage, competing for audience votes to win first prize and a chance at stardom. This article contributes to a growing literature on the significance of televised talent shows, demonstrating how their remarkable longevity and representational power stems from their configuration as a “format,” the set of guidelines that structure and constrain the content of each broadcast—an aesthetic process grounded in exclusion. Through their formatting, I argue, these programs reify the notion of “talent” at the heart of talent shows, transforming a multidimensional and context-contingent assemblage of musical abilities into a seemingly stable object able to be recognized, rated, and ranked. Musical auditions offer a microcosm of formatting's role as a means of training audiences’ attention. They normalize the practice of eliminating whatever (or whomever) is deemed unworthy—on these programs and in the wider world. Through analyzing examples from Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour (1948), The Gong Show (1978), and The Voice (2017), the article demonstrates how beneath the widely discussed content of contestant demographics, judge commentary, or audience voting results, the talent show format serves to obscure the contradictions upon which meritocracy's cruel optimism rests.

During the nineteenth century, many heard the afterlife before they could see it. These clairaudient forays took place in the context of spiritualism, a religious movement that facilitated communication between the living and the dead. Although the senses were important to spiritualism, sound was especially crucial for developing cosmologies of the afterlife. Sound can have powerful affective effects, especially in the realm of religion. In the case of spiritualism, however, notions of sound are complicated because of the inclusion of clairaudient and acousmatic sounds. This article analyzes spiritualist soundscapes in terms of acoustemologies, using personal narratives and instructional materials to demonstrate how spiritualists developed a sense of space through sound. Not only does my analysis demonstrate the importance of sound to these spiritual communities, but it also shows that spiritualist conceptions of sound require a special understanding of the nature of sound.