Introduction: This is Our Music

Abstract

GERALD EARLY, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1997 and Chair of the Academy’s Council, is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (2011), One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture (rev. ed., 2004), and This is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s (2003). The twentieth century has many names: the Century of the Child, the American Century, the Century of Genocide, the Age of the Atom, the Era of Mass Culture, the Age of the Welfare State, the Age of Totalitarianism. But the most apt characterization of the last century may be historian Tim Blanning’s “the Age of the Triumph of Music.”1 To be sure, in Western society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, music was an incredible force–from the creation of national anthems to the rise of folk music as an expression of the authentic, from wild adulation for certain composers and performers (Beethoven, Liszt, Rossini, Nellie Melba, Jenny Lind, among many others) to the popularity of a highly racialized American minstrelsy that became the cornerstone of the American musical theater. (The rise of the piano as a major performance vehicle and source for composition and the rise of the parlor piano as a signi1⁄2er of domestic bourgeois taste and manner are themselves extraordinary occurrences of the modern musical sensibility.2) The twentieth century did not invent the popular obsession with music, but it did, in both degree and kind, transform the nature of the obsession. In the twentieth century, thanks to recording technology, music became ubiquitous; audiences could experience it divorced from live performance and, as studio technology improved, divorced from the constraints of live performance.3 (This brings to mind legendary rock and roll producer Phil Spector’s observation about his bombastic teen tunes of the