“Strange What Cosmopolites Music Makes of Us”: Classical Music, the Black Press, and Nora Douglas Holt's Black Feminist Audiotopia

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the music criticism of Nora Douglas Holt, an African American woman who wrote a classical music column for theChicago Defender(1917–1923) and published a monthly magazine,Music and Poetry(1921–1922). I make two claims regarding the force and impact of Holt's ideas. First, by writing about classical music in the black press, Holt advanced a model of embodied listening that rejected racist attempts to keep African Americans out of the concert hall and embraced a communal approach to knowledge production. Second, Holt was a black feminist intellectual who refuted dominant notions of classical music's putative race- and gender-transcending universalism; instead, she acknowledged the generative possibilities of racial difference in general and blackness in particular. I analyze Holt's intellectual commitments by situating her ideas within the context of early twentieth-century black feminist thought; analyzing the principal themes of her writing in theChicago DefenderandMusic and Poetry; and assessing her engagement with a single musical work, Tchaikovsky'sSymphony No. 4 in F Minor, op. 36.Ultimately, Holt's criticism offers new insight into how race, gender, and musical activity intersected in the Jim Crow era and invites a more nuanced and capacious understanding of black women's manifold contributions to US musical culture.