Immigrant Musicians Research Articles

‘Magnificence of promises’: novelty instruments in concert in Britain, c.1750–1800

Abstract In this article I explore the occurrence and use of novelty musical instruments in concert in the second half of the 18th century, arguing that these instruments were used as a means of self-promotion for the performer, and in some cases were intrinsically linked with their identity as immigrant musicians in Britain. I start by examining music marketing in the 18th century, then consider what novelty means in the context of musical performance. I consider, firstly, imported musical instruments which existed in reasonable numbers in Britain, focusing on the mandolin, English guittar and viola d’amore. I then move to observe the more fleeting inventions to grace British concert rooms and theatres, including the inventions of Charles Clagget, and I draw attention to the sociocultural forces which may have encouraged their development. I conclude by surmising that even with the best marketing and inventions, the majority of novelty instruments were only ever destined for public performance as promotional tools, and not to be brought into the home for domestic music-making.

Fujianese Provincial Brass Band Traditions of Chinese Immigrant Musicians in New York City: The Chinese Voices

This article focuses on the Chinese Voices Wind Orchestra. Fujianese brass band musicians immigrated to New York and changed Chinatown’s musical soundscape. The bands perform mainly inside or on the street outside of funeral parlors on Canal and Mulberry Streets. Their profession is mainly that of a funeral musician. They also travel to Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. for rites. They accompany families and decedents to cemeteries to play special repertoire. After the burial they perform songs of prosperity at receptions in restaurants. They maintain a wide repertoire of funeral songs and national marches. Funeral performances are a hidden music tradition performed at a sacred place for a sacred function, not intended for the public. Passers-by though observe bands performing outdoors when a coffin is brought to the hearse. There is a display of music and drama at this moment, for bands’ sounds transform the Downtown neighborhood into a Taoist aura. Bands came to perform adjacent to traditional Chinese instruments and at funerals as early as 1908, during the late Qing Dynasty influenced by the European imperial tradition. Today Chinese brass bands are transnational, and Fujianese bands bring the genre of a European brass band to New York in a Chinese interpretation of nationalism.

“It Should Always Be a Give-and-Take”

The 1960s and 1970s are regarded by some historians as being particularly creative decades for jazz in Britain, when British jazz developed its own sound that was distinct from that of American jazz. While not denying that this was a creatively fruitful period in British jazz, in this paper I argue that a ‘British sound' in jazz is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define, even though some authors have referred to a sense of ‘Britishness', particularly in the work of certain musicians discussed by Ian Carr in his book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. Some British jazz, performed largely by white (and mostly male) musicians at this time, was influenced during the 1960s by the contribution of immigrant black musicians from South Africa and the Caribbean; at the same time, musicians such as Michael Garrick and John Surman were drawing to some extent on British folk music for inspiration. Referring to examples from the period, I suggest that although much British jazz from 1960 to 1980 was innovative and became less ‘American', development of its styles was affected by many musical, cultural and political factors. To what extent this music sounds ‘British' is debatable, but its influence has led to the pluralism of jazz styles in Britain that continues today.

Music Outside? Innovation and ‘Britishness' in British Jazz 1960-1980

The 1960s and 1970s are regarded by some historians as being particularly creative decades for jazz in Britain, when British jazz developed its own sound that was distinct from that of American jazz. While not denying that this was a creatively fruitful period in British jazz, in this paper I argue that a ‘British sound' in jazz is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define, even though some authors have referred to a sense of ‘Britishness', particularly in the work of certain musicians discussed by Ian Carr in his book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. Some British jazz, performed largely by white (and mostly male) musicians at this time, was influenced during the 1960s by the contribution of immigrant black musicians from South Africa and the Caribbean; at the same time, musicians such as Michael Garrick and John Surman were drawing to some extent on British folk music for inspiration. Referring to examples from the period, I suggest that although much British jazz from 1960 to 1980 was innovative and became less ‘American', development of its styles was affected by many musical, cultural and political factors. To what extent this music sounds ‘British' is debatable, but its influence has led to the pluralism of jazz styles in Britain that continues today.

Sound at First Sight: Jam Sessions and Immigrants in Brooklyn, New York

This essay examines the incorporation of immigrant musicians in a jazz jam session in Brooklyn, New York. Migration scholars define incorporation as a dialectical process in which hosts and immigrants negotiate established social boundaries between “us” and “not us.” While the social dynamics of jam sessions have intrigued scholars since the 1950s, the interactions between immigrants and American-born musicians in jazz jam sessions have not been studied. Drawing on ethnographic participation as a bass player in a weekly jam session in Brooklyn, I analyze the ways musical competence is used to establish and negotiate social boundaries between immigrants and hosts. Ultimately, I argue that jam sessions privilege incorporation, allowing immigrant musicians to cross, blur and shift social boundaries between themselves and their American-born peers.

Across a divide: Cosmopolitanism, genre, and crossover among immigrant Moroccan musicians in contemporary Andalusia

Across a divide: Cosmopolitanism, genre, and crossover among immigrant Moroccan musicians in contemporary Andalusia

Note from the editor

Note from the editor

“The collective circle”: Latino immigrant musicians and politics in Charlotte, North Carolina

Through their music making, Latino immigrant musicians and audience members in Charlotte, North Carolina, debate political questions relevant to their lives as workers and residents of a globalizing city. Despite contentious politics around immigration, Charlotte's Latino musicians are not active in the organized immigration-reform movement. Looking at their ambivalent political positionality, I engage with five key themes: how “relationship songs” reveal musicians’ personal politics; the effect of everyday policing on immigrant communities and musicians’ responses to immigration enforcement policies; the politics of laboring as a Latino musician, including the training and professional ethics that accompany music making; the emergence of musicians as “grassroots intellectuals”; and the importance of the “collective circle”—a frenetic style of band–audience interaction—in helping constitute a sense of agency and shape the informal political stances that Latino musicians take.

Bristow’s Symphony No. 2

George Frederick Bristow. Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 24 (Jullien). Edited by Katherine K. Preston. (Recent Researches in Music, 72.) (Music of the United States of America, 23.) Middleton, WI: Published for the Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., 2010. [Foreword, p. ix; acknowledgments, p. xi-xiii; American Orchestral Music at the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: Louis Antoine Jullien and George Bristow's Jullien Symphony, p. xv-cvi; 6 plates; score, p. 3-220; apparatus, p. 221-42; bibliog., p. 243-51; discog., p. 253. ISBN 0-89579-684-8, ISBN-13/EAN 978-0-89579-684-4. $220.] Perhaps no nineteenth-century United States composer of classical works is more underrated than George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898). Several of his contemporaries--too many to name here--are the subjects of book-length biographies. He is not. His extensive compositional oeuvre includes five symphonies, an opera, an oratorio, two large cantatas, at least four concert overtures, and dozens of shorter works scored for various small ensembles or soloists. Yet only two of these, the Third Symphony and a piano miniature, are readily accessible on commercial recordings; a handful of others were released on LP albums that are no longer widely available. A critical edition of his oratorio Daniel appears in the Recent Researches in Music series (vol. 34, ed. David Griggs-Janower [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1999]), and a reprint of a published piano-vocal score to his opera Rip Van Winkle appears in the Earlier Music series (vol. 25, ed. Steven Ledbetter [New York: Da Capo, 1991]). His symphonies, arguably his best works, remain essentially terra incognita for the greater musicological community, while his papers and music manuscripts reside at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The volume under consideration here, a critical edition of Bristow's Second Symphony introduced by an outstanding monograph-length essay by Katherine Preston, vigorously challenges us to reassess our collective opinion of Bristow by offering a new interpretive perspective on his life, his music, and the roles played by each within the broader development of orchestral music in the United States. Preston's introductory essay alone is worthy of extended commentary, for it not only describes the work's genesis and musical characteristics, but also weaves an engaging and meticulously researched narrative about the forces animating United States orchestral music at midcentury. In sum, this volume is a much-needed and long overdue addition to our knowledge of orchestral music culture during the period. Like many musicians of his generation born in the United States, Bristow followed multiple career paths: in addition to composing, he was an orchestral violinist, a piano soloist, an organist in area churches, a conductor, and an educator in New York's public school system. His relatively long life, which more than fully encompassed that of Brahms, began in the Jacksonian Era, reached a midpoint during the Civil War, and concluded during the early Progressive Era. This roughly seventy-five-year period witnessed a seismic shift in the public's appreciation and support of classical music, and Bristow was at the epicenter--at least within the New York metropolitan area--for most of his life. After opening with a concise account of Bristow's professional career, Preston's essay then moves to the broader cultural milieu of orchestral music in the United States at midcentury, along with its transatlantic connections to Europe. The period was defined by movement, she argues. Itinerant opera companies and touring orchestras (mostly imported from Europe) introduced the public to a wide array of operatic and instrumental music repertories, while immigrant musicians intending to become permanent residents arrived in steady streams, especially after the European revolutions in 1848-49. …

Breaching the Profession: The Musicians' Union of Australia, Immigrant Musicians and the Post-World War II Australian Music Industry

For four decades of the twentieth century, the Musicians' Union of Australia sought to prevent any foreign musicians from working in Australia. In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Union found itself at odds with the government-sponsored mass immigration program that, for the first time, brought large numbers of non-British European immigrants to the country. This article documents the Union's efforts to secure government endorsement of restrictions on musician immigration and to impose nationality quotas on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's symphony orchestras. Local support for immigrant musicians and the eventual dismantling of forty-year discriminatory Union procedures is charted.

In Their Own Voices: Immigrant Musickers in a Changing City

The following paper is drawn from a larger research project undertaken during2008-2009, in which I closely examined the immigrant music community inSt. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. To this end, I interviewed overtwenty-!ve people, most of them immigrant musicians, and in some cases viewedperformances and rehearsals, created jam sessions, and participated in variousmusic-making activities over an eight-month period. Here, I will present portraitsof some of my consultants from that time, whose negotiations in their musicmakingactivities demonstrate the diverse ways they see themselves in the Canadianmulticultural milieu and the issues faced in relocation. I will highlight someof their experiences that provide insight into the social integration process andlater, explore the limitations of certain culturally-integrative activities that thecity of St. John’s supports.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Pan-American Symphonic Ideal

Receptivity to the cultural and musical values of Western Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, laid the foundation for the growth of classical music in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The ascendancy of German musical culture in the United States began with American musicians’ importation and performance of scores by famous German composers in the 1820s and 1830s. The rise continued throughout the century as waves of German-speaking immigrant musicians played leading roles in the establishment of performing ensembles. Prominent critics such as John Sullivan Dwight, Richard Storrs Willis, and Theodore Hagen bolstered the efforts of these organizations by roundly applauding their performances of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and others. Moreover, as political historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has recently argued, the establishment of foundational components of the United States’ musical infrastructure, including the solidification of a canonical symphonic repertoire, was the result of a “soft diplomacy” rooted in an aggressive agenda of German cultural expansionism. 1 It is easy, then, for us to conceive of the world of classical music in the nineteenth-century United States as a sponge perpetually absorbing musical

Life after death: the viola da gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch

It is normally thought that the bass viol or viola da gamba dropped out of British musical life in the 1690s, and that Henry Purcell was the last composer to write for it. Peter Holman shows how the gamba changed its role and function in the Restoration period under the influence of foreign music and musicians; how it was played and composed for by the circle of immigrant musicians around Handel; how it was part of the fashion for exotic instruments in the middle of the century; and how the presence in London of its greatest eighteenth-century exponent, Charles Frederick Abel, sparked off a revival in the 1760s and 70s. Later chapters investigate the gamba's role as an emblem of sensibility among aristocrats, artists and intellectuals, including the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Edward Walpole, Ann Ford, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gainsborough and Benjamin Franklin, and trace Abel's influence and legacy far into the nineteenth century. A concluding chapter is concerned with its role in the developing early music movement, culminating with Arnold Dolmetsch's first London concerts with old instruments in 1890. PETER HOLMAN is Professor Emeritus of Historical Musicology at Leeds University, and director of The Parley of Instruments, the choir Psalmody, and the Suffolk Villages Festival.

Ethiopian Musical Invention in Diaspora: A Tale of Three Musicians

This essay, based on ethnographic interviews and observation, discusses the lives and careers of three prominent Ethiopian musicians from sacred, folkloric, and popular musical domains (Moges Seyoum, Tesfaye Lemma, and Mulatu Astatke, respectively) whose individual initiatives have shaped the musical life of the Ethiopian diaspora during its formative years in the United States. These three careers provide an overview of musical activity within the Ethiopian American diaspora community since its inception and shed light on concepts of creativity as conceived both in the Ethiopian homeland and among the immigrant musicians profiled. The conclusion suggests that the ability of each man to negotiate the transition to diaspora life varied according to the musical domain in which he was engaged, his personal background, and the moment and circumstances of his arrival in the United States. (January 2009)

All roads lead to Piazza Vittorio: Transnational spaces in Agostino Ferrente's documusical

ABSTRACTThis article begins by tracing a period in recent Italian history (2001–06) characterized by deep geopolitical paradox: an era that was shaped, on the one hand, by strict governmental reform of Italian immigration policy and, on the other, by the country's significant influx of ‘non-national’ settlement. On the backdrop of such a tumultuous environment, wherein the construct of ‘nation’ is evidently manifold, I consider Agostino Ferrente's L'orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006)—a documusical that recounts the establishment and progress of an international orchestra in Rome's most ethnically diverse neighbourhood—in terms of both existing sociopolitical and constructed filmic spaces. Utilizing Hess and Zimmermann's notion of the ‘transnational documentary’ as a firm starting point, I examine Ferrente's representative negotiation as that between the documentation of a Leftist initiative and the film-maker's ‘othering’ of the project's immigrant musicians, through the tenacity of the concept of nationality and the ‘eternal’ city of Rome. Specifically, I argue that this enables us to excogitate the ‘transnational documentary’ not through postnational ideology, but rather within a nation in which national identity is still inherently—albeit fluidly—a part.

Claiming diaspora: music, transnationalism, and cultural politics in Asian/Chinese America

Figures Tables Musical Examples Technical Notes Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. The Formation of a Diasporic Musical Culture as a Site of Contradiction 3. New York and the Transpacific Routes: Music in the Racialized History of Chinese American Experience 4. Music Here and Now: A Diasporic Soundscape in a Global City 5. From Private Realm to Public Display of Multiculturalism: Mapping the Local Geocultural Processes of Music Production, Consumption, and (Re)Presentations 6. Our Goal Is to Be in Sync with Other Areas of the World: Transnational Media Culture and Popular Music 7. The Poetics and Politics of Displacement: Portraits of Seven Immigrant Musicians 8. The Ambiguities of Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese American Music Discourse Notes Appendix I. Chinese American Musical Groups in the New York/New Jersey/Greater New York Metropolitan Area Appendix II. Sheung Chi Ng's Taishan Muyu Song Repertories Appendix III. Complete Chinese Texts of Poems and Lyrics Cited Glossary Bibliography Discography Filmography Index

Playing for the Big Time: Musicians, Concerts, and Reputation-Building in Cincinnati, 1872–82

Like many midwestern cities in the nineteenth century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was home to large numbers of German immigrant musicians, among them the founders of the Cincinnati Grand Orchestra in 1872. Their model of musician-based organization eventually ran counter to the prestige-building potential of Western art music, which made it attractive to local civic leaders determined to earn respect for their city at a national level. The successful Cincinnati May festivals beginning in 1873 under the artistic leadership of conductor Theodore Thomas brought the city the desired renown. But the musical monumentality needed for large festival performances could not be obtained locally, leaving Cincinnati's players with opportunities to perform at a high level but without a way to define their performance as a significant achievement in the world of high art. Although their orchestra was ultimately unsuccessful, however, these musicians demonstrated an agency that transcends their historical obscurity and helps incorporate aesthetic and practical aspects of institution-building into the social arguments common to discussions of Western art music in the United States.

Ethiopian Musical Invention in Diaspora: A Tale of Three Musicians

This essay, based on ethnographic interviews and observation, discusses the lives and careers of three prominent Ethiopian musicians from sacred, folkloric, and popular musical domains (Moges Seyoum, Tesfaye Lemma, and Mulatu Astatke, respectively) whose individual initiatives have shaped the musical life of the Ethiopian diaspora during its formative years in the United States. These three careers provide an overview of musical activity within the Ethiopian American diaspora community since its inception and shed light on concepts of creativity as conceived both in the Ethiopian homeland and among the immigrant musicians profiled. The conclusion suggests that the ability of each man to negotiate the transition to diaspora life varied according to the musical domain in which he was engaged, his personal background, and the moment and circumstances of his arrival in the United States. (January 2009)

Music in conflict management – a multicultural approach

In 1989 the Norwegian Concert Agency (NorConcert) initiated a three-year programme of introducing multicultural music teaching in Norwegian primary schools. Eighteen schools in and around the capital took part in a research project to determine the effects of immigrant musicians introducing the music of their countries of origin to fourth-graders. Remarkable results were found, especially with respect to reduced harassment and ethnic tension. multicultural music is now regularly on the school concert agenda. A total of 3000 such concerts have been presented to an audience of more than a quarter of the total school population in Norway.