During the Civil War, countless musical works were written about the conflict and marketed to amateur musicians, especially women. Among them were pieces composed in response to recent conflicts, often published within days or weeks of the relevant event. Popular genres included keyboard battle pieces, which depicted some of the most pivotal battles of the war in musical rhetoric, bringing them alive in the minds and imaginations of drawing room performers and audiences.

This essay is the first detailed study of American keyboard battle pieces from the Civil War. It investigates how they mirror many aspects of Civil War life, including the civilian demand for vivid war news, especially eyewitness accounts from the front, the advent of telegraphic reporting, and the fallibility of the media in reporting on the war. The pieces also reflect cultural trends of the mid-nineteenth century not related to war, particularly the popularity of theatrical melodrama on the stage and the prominence of virtuosity in piano repertoire. In investigating the performance of battle pieces as a site where women imagined and experienced the perils of war, this article contributes to scholarship that deepens our understanding of how women at home participated in mass culture.

In 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned new musical settings of poems by Frank O'Hara for a concert honoring the late poet. Among pieces by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, the program featured a new work by Charles Mingus: his String Quartet No. 1. Mingus's piece was performed only once, at that concert, and was never recorded. It survives only in manuscript form.

String Quartet No. 1 thwarts nearly all expectations of a piece by Mingus. Scored for strings and voice, the work's modernist approach to rhythm and pitch is unprecedented for the composer. Mingus chafed at being categorized as a “jazz” composer, and String Quartet No. 1's style is both a bid for and an undermining of the prestige of the high art world. Faced with primitivist discourses that characterized jazz musicians as unschooled and nonverbal, Mingus deployed poetry as a mode of resistance. He worked with poetic texts throughout his life, often writing the poetry himself. Mingus's sensitive setting of O'Hara's text in String Quartet No. 1 points to the centrality of poetry to Mingus's artistic and political project, and suggests that the piece's anomalous style can be partially understood as his response to O'Hara's text.

This essay explores the multiple histories, traditions, and authorities present in more than 200 recorded performances of “Body and Soul.” The early recordings (dozens of them from 1930 alone) demonstrate both enormous variety and distinct British and American performance patterns, but few of these innovations survive beyond 1940. Coleman Hawkins's version from 1939, and not the original sheet music or early performance history, set a standard key (D-flat—even for singers!) and a slower standard tempo (quarter = 90, although later it became even slower). Charlie Parker and others in the 1940s, however, were influenced by the Chu Berry and Roy Eldridge recording of 1938, which introduced a “jump” chorus widely reproduced for two decades. Billie Holiday determined which set of lyrics would be sung, but not the form in which they would occur. John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner's new modal approach in 1960 created both direct imitators and also a new tradition of trying to neutralize the harmonic complexity of the tune, which Hawkins had so carefully exploited. This study asks whether a more African and less European model of jazz tunes might reveal a less fixed and more complex notion of a musical work that includes orally preserved and recorded innovations and performance traditions. This research also explores how the record itself, as a physical object, has become an authority.

In a letter dated to 1960, Harry Partch describes living two lives simultaneously—one in modern America and another in ancient Greece. Furthermore, throughout his life, Partch exhibited striking dualities in both his music and personal life. Partch's affinity for Greek themes and modalities in his music and music theory is well known, but less known is his feeling of bilocation between Greek and modern life. Using writings by Vonnegut, Woolf, and Stephen Hawking, I examine methods of constructing history that support Partch's temporal irregularity and, in so doing, foster new ways of understanding Partch and his music. With a particular focus on corporeality within his late work Revelation in the Courthouse Park, I explore how Partch leaned on his sense of bilocation to cope with his decidedly outsider status, how that in turn helped him deal with reality, and how biographers might tackle this most perplexing issue.

In an environment of racial tension and conflict in Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century, the Ramona Pageant and the plays by the Padua Hills Mexican Players offered Mexican American performers a vital role in perpetuating cultural memory through music and dance. The Ramona Pageant, which began in Hemet, California in 1923 and is still in operation, remains one of the longest-running pageants, or historical dramas, in U.S. history. Similarly, the Mexican Players were founded during the Great Depression in 1931 in Claremont, California and performed continuously for more than forty years. This article argues that Hispanic musicians achieved a degree of cultural agency in these plays through the performance of Mexican folk music, especially canciones (love songs) and corridos (narrative ballads), which were essential elements in the “soundscape” of the Southwest. Although Anglos created and directed the plays, they did not create or perform the music. In spite of the plays’ largely romanticized portrayals of California's Spanish and Mexican past, they provided some of the few prominent forums in Southern California for Mexican American musicians and dancers during the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1984 Pepsi-Cola released two groundbreaking commercials for its “Choice of a New Generation” campaign. Marketers reimagined Pepsi's product alongside superstar Michael Jackson's most iconic visual “symbols” and composed a slogan to be sung over fragments of the backing-track to his then-hit song, “Billie Jean.” Although merely replacing Jackson's original lyrics about lust and revenge with a family-oriented slogan had the potential to change meaning potentials the song held in other contexts, it was the re-working of Jackson's celebrity image and omission of key musical structures present within the original that allowed “Billie Jean” to acquire new meanings in the commercials. On the album, careful voice leading practices that pivot precariously between the natural and flat-VI underpin the score's complex harmonic structures to reinforce Jackson's cautionary tale. Pepsi's commercials, on the other hand, skillfully pick “Billie Jean” apart, extract its most memorable themes, and stitch the fragments back together. Consequently, when paired with Pepsi's overtly positive images, the reworked track noticeably diffuses the tension expressed in the original. By incorporating formal musical analysis, musicological inquiry, and formative cultural theory on advertising, MTV, and musical meaning in multimedia, this article contributes to growing discussions about pre-existing popular music's roles in advertising.

The original series of Star Trek (1966–69) documents the social tensions of the late 1960s, responding positively, on the one hand, to the progressive political and social movements of the Civil Rights era by supporting racial and gender equality, but resisting its own efforts on the other, remaining faithful to conservative power structures. As the representative musical statement of the series, Star Trek's title cue embodies and expresses this paradox. Using audio-visual analysis, as well as sketch scores, interviews, and correspondence from the archives of the series’ composers and producers, this article analyzes the cue's compositional history, its musical codes, its narrative structure, and its use as framing, referential, and leitmotivic material within the series’ underscore in order to demonstrate the ways in which it communicates Star Trek's conflicting ideologies.

Throughout his career, John Williams has set the musical tone for the American presidency, most elaborately with his scores for Oliver Stone's controversial films JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). While invested in capturing the character of these commanders in chief through musical codes, Williams's soundtracks are equally engaged in the act of the evocation and telling of “history.” Specifically, they construct a tragic myth of 1960s America in which the promise represented by JFK is destroyed from without, and Nixon from within, both by the malevolent forces of the military-industrial complex. In considering the thematic and dramatic means by which Williams paints his orchestral portraits, I reveal the extent to which music supports Stone's paranoiac narratives, especially in cases where the director's collage-like visual aesthetic puts pressure on the otherwise nostalgic traits of Williams's default tonal style.

I offer a music-analytical approach to JFK and Nixon informed by interviews, studies of political mythology and paranoia, and musicological appraisals of Williams's music. Stone's 1960s-as-lapsarian-metanarrative positions Kennedy as a romanticized absence, an image of the fabular fallen King, and Williams renders him as a public recollection rather than a human being with interiority. Nixon, by contrast, is a tragic antihero, consumed by dark forces of history and an abundance of ambivalent thematic material. Particular attention is paid to the dismantling of Kennedy's noble leitmotif during JFK’s prologue and motorcade sequence and to the near-fascistic musical accompaniment of Nixon's speeches. Having demonstrated the active role these scores play, I conclude that Williams's music constitutes an authoring of history in a strong, albeit postmodern, sense, consistent with but independent from Stone's screenplay.

Contemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest within European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always shown as transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented twenty-first-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized fault lines, the relationship between “sensory” music, its “intelligent” comprehension, and its analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars. And so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives, and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.

Cue: Lalo Schifrin's “Theme from Mission: Impossible.” If the return of Tom Cruise, explosions, and fast-paced chases to the screen this summer is any indication, Americans (and the global audience for Hollywood action film) love an impossible mission. Certainly, U.S. music scholars do. Reading the eight reviews of the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter, AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles Garrett (with a large and distinguished editorial team and nearly fifteen hundred contributors), as well as dipping frequently into its entries, we were deeply impressed both by the quality and ambition of the eight-volume, 5.4 million-word encyclopedia and by the “gargantuan” task (as Leta Miller puts it) with which the reviewers had been charged.

In November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

Manuscript sources for Edward MacDowell's Sonata Eroica (1895) divulge a radically different, notably more sinister program than the commentary that the composer imparted to Lawrence Gilman, his first biographer. Gilman's widely promulgated account, merely comprising four character sketches based on Tennyson's Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, maintains that the score's movements respectively depict the coming of Arthur, Doré's engraving of a knight surrounded by elves, MacDowell's idea of Guinevere, and the passing of Arthur.

Inscriptions in a continuity draft preserved at the Library of Congress, however, reveal that the first movement was initially conceived as an independent ballade (an intrinsically programmatic genre) and was originally inspired by Tennyson's portrayal of Vivien seducing Merlin. Another inscription discloses that MacDowell envisioned the third movement as Lancelot's adulterous serenade to Guinevere. Additional manuscript variants and close correlations between the score's vibrant musical topics and Tennyson's literary contexts demonstrate that the entire sonata, including the elfin scherzo and war-like finale, embodies a tale of seduction and its dire consequences.

Although the Eroica's vivid, newly discovered program remains compatible with MacDowell's professed aesthetics, he suppressed the inscriptions. Speculative reasons for his doing so include formal considerations, critical opinions on programmaticism, and his attitudes toward sex.

“How does one review a monument?” Richard Crawford wondered when he sat down to review the first AmeriGrove in 1987; it puts “the conventional notion of a review to the test.” Some thirty years later, with the new AmeriGrove twice the size of the first edition and with the U.S. soundscape becoming more global and hybrid by the day, the challenge has increased for the potential reviewer. Indeed, how do you review a collective enterprise with up to 1500 authors and 9300 entries (some old, some new) along a timeline of some 350 years? For a professional insider like Richard Crawford the test was tough enough, but to assess its virtues and faults from a European perch, it is positively daunting, particularly when post-national, global crosscurrents continue to inspire a constantly evolving U.S. musical scene.

The publication of a dictionary in one's discipline is always a welcome event, allowing its users to quickly find essential information on a variety of topics, people, and institutions. The second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter AmeriGrove II), an eight-volume set comprising some 5300-plus pages, offers a comprehensive view of all musics American; it is a delight to peruse. At more than double the length of its predecessor, which was published in 1986, AmeriGrove II covers an even wider array of topics. It “refers to musical life and cultures within the region now covered by the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories. [It] likewise features coverage of the music-making practices of native cultures whose occupation of these regions predates European contact” (1:vii).