Abstract Each year, twice a year, musicians flock to the Catskill Mountain hamlet of East Durham, New York, transforming this otherwise sleepy town into a bustling site of music, dancing, and parties. East Durham is home to multiple Irish cultural festivals a year, but two stand out for their focus on Irish traditional music: the Catskills Irish Arts Week and the Northeast Tionól. These festivals, affectionately referred to collectively as “the Catskills,” are curious in their allure. Sprawled across a three-mile stretch of rural highway, most festival facilities are rundown and date to the heyday of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, when East Durham was an enclave of Irish American resort vacationers. Dotting the side of the road are more vacant and dilapidated buildings than there are in use. Yet, musicians attend each year with fervor, citing both the difficulties of the location and its pleasurable potentials as core to the “Catskills” experience. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and interviews, I examine this affective ambivalence and how it is structured by sensory qualities unique to the physical geography and infrastructure of the Catskill Mountains. Though these sensory experiences are characterized with a negative valence, they generate positive musical experiences, creative production, and deep sociality. I argue that this affective transformation occurs because the sensational features of the Catskills provoke reflexive encounters among musicians that resonate with and amplify values central to Irish traditional music making.

Abstract Washington, DC was littered with fliers that promoted shows happening within the local punk scene during the 1980s. Often posted on poles, walls, and bulletin boards around the city, these fliers included which bands were playing, the date of the show, entry cost, and the name and location of the performance space. For shows that occurred in the homes, community centers, and schools of suburban Maryland and Virginia, the flier maker often included an address as well as directions. Sometimes these directions took the form of a hand-drawn map. More often, they were written in prose. This article studies the directions included on such fliers and asks, “where do flier makers assume attendees will begin their travels?” To answer this question, it adopts a methodology from geographic information systems (GIS) and follows the directions backwards from the venue to the unspoken and assumed starting point. Such methods show how directions typically began in the suburbs themselves or in and around Georgetown, one of DC's more affluent neighborhoods. The individuals that made these fliers functioned as popular cartographers who, via their directions or maps, articulated their identity and worldview. By focusing on the unassumed, unspoken, and default “starting point” of punk audiences, this article argues that punk fliers created a view of DC that articulated and engrained a segregationist, classist, exclusionary logic, even within a progressive, integrated musical scene that existed in the city during the 1980s.

Abstract In the wake of the 60th anniversary of the 1961 film, the December 2021 release of a second film adaptation of the 1957 musical West Side Story sheds light on the continued cultural impact of this musical. Indeed, West Side Story permeates popular consciousness of the genre and has been celebrated over decades for its artistic integrity and achievement. Works with this type of canonical status often carry an expectation for a certain amount of fidelity when being adapted. Yet in the move from stage to screen, changes become necessary due to media specificity. More than that, the effect of time has much to do with several of the choices made in each of West Side Story's film adaptations. Drawing on adaptation theory, this article examines the adaptation approaches of the 1961 and 2021 films with a focus on the songs and how larger-scale changes affect the characterizations and dramatic arc each film. These changes reveal much regarding Hollywood's approach to the relationship between concepts of cinematic realism and the musical as genre.

Abstract During the ragtime craze at the turn of the twentieth century, the popular repertoire of “coon songs” was coupled with a robust style of vocal delivery called “coon shouting.” This vocal technique was associated with white women—the most famous “coon shouters” of the day—who, like the performers of the nineteenth-century minstrel show, claimed to have studied so-called authentic Black performance in order to replicate it on stage. Performing the “coon song” repertoire, these women sang, often from a Black male protagonist's point of view, about the trials and tribulations of Black life and romance. How did the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality in this repertoire change when it was performed by Black women? This article addresses this question by examining caricatures of Black womanhood within the “coon song” genre and by exploring the phenomenon of Black women performing the “coon song” repertoire, using the career of vaudeville performer Dora Dean (1872–1949) as a case study. I track Dean's participation in the “coon song” craze through an archival survey of sheet music and newspaper reviews dating from the height of her career (ca. 1896–1914). Using these sources, I explore the recurring theme of racial passing and the ubiquity of caricatures derived from blackface minstrelsy within Dean's “coon song” repertoire. I argue that Dean successfully navigated stereotypes of Black women's femininity, sexuality, and morality in her performances of “coon songs” and, in the process, subverted stereotypes of Black life, romance, and vocal sound.

Abstract This article explores the cultural commemorations of J. Robert Oppenheimer through the lenses of opera and film, specifically focusing on Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic (2005/2018). It engages with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theories on history and mythmaking to analyze how these cultural productions function as acts of commemoration that sanitize and mythicize historical processes. The revival of Oppenheimer as a mythic figure reflects a broader societal negotiation with the legacy of nuclear technology and its implications in the twenty-first century. Both the opera and the film reify a political and ideological attachment to the U.S. nuclear complex. Furthermore, this article critically examines the production settings of “Doctor Atomic” at the Santa Fe Opera and Nolan's on-location filming in New Mexico. It argues that these settings add a ritualistic valence to the narrative, enhancing the mythic portrayal of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Through a detailed analysis of narrative strategies and media affordances, this study reveals how contemporary depictions of historical figures and events shape and sustain national myths that support an ongoing attachment to the nuclear complex.

Abstract In its ruling on White-Smith v. Apollo (1908), the Supreme Court declared that the punched holes of a player piano roll did not constitute a form of writing, and thus fell outside the purview of copyright statutes. Because the decision was superseded by the Copyright Act of 1909, which extended copyright coverage to piano rolls and sound recordings, commentators have relegated White-Smith v. Apollo to the status of legal footnote. The case, however, deserves closer attention. It reveals much about the fault lines between the auditory experience of music and its visual representation at the beginning of the era of recorded sound. Witness testimony is notable for its disquisitions on the history of musical notation, exegeses of recently patented notation systems, and philosophical ruminations on the nature of a musical work in relationship to its visual representation and sonic instantiation. Trial proceedings show how the perforations of a piano roll, which were more evocative of traditional musical notation than soundwaves etched on a phonograph cylinder or disc, destabilized the mundanity of reading music. Moreover, this instability suggests an explanation for why the piano rolls figuring in the case featured the music of Adam Geibel. The composer was blind, and in a lawsuit about the textuality of music, his disability served to contrast musical sights and sounds. Moreover, White-Smith v. Apollo furnishes a means of bringing the player piano out of the shadow of the phonograph, giving it a place in the “separation of the senses” that media scholars identify with modernity.

Abstract This essay examines how racial discrimination operates under the surface and through the guise of preserving musical excellence, as exemplified through the 1969 lawsuit filed by double bassist Arthur Davis and cellist Earl Madison charging the New York Philharmonic with racial discrimination in hiring practices. Analyzing the narratives that emerged during the 1969 hearings around artistic merit, racial discrimination, and screened auditions, I argue that the New York Philharmonic weaponized musical excellence as a pure entity abstracted from race and other social categories in order to claim that its sanctity required protection from societal charges of discrimination. Notably, these same legal arguments were used in a subsequent case in which timpanist Elayne Jones charged the San Francisco Symphony with discrimination on the basis of race and sex following her tenure denial in 1974. Placing these two cases in conversation not only illuminates the tenacity and power of discriminatory ideas and practices in U.S. orchestras, but it also demonstrates how the experience of fighting legal battles reverberated personally and professionally for Black classical musicians. These lawsuits exacted a significant toll on Davis, Madison, and Jones, each of whom was sacrificed at the altar of change that, decades later, has yet to come.