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Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today, but audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall, and what they heard were not just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, it considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians' unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players.

Italy in the early seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in the composition of instrumental music. Large, varied, and strikingly experimental in nature, this new repertoire constituted arguably the first significant body of independent, idiomatic instrumental music in the western tradition. In an age most widely known for its innovations in vocal music, Galileo Galilei explained that, in fact, it was instrumental music that was most effective as a means to “awaken the secret affetti of our soul.” In their new approach to instruments, musical composers were not alone. Instruments of all kinds stood at the center of changes in systems of knowledge in the early modern era. The telescope, the clock, the barometer, the pen—these were the tools of the natural philosopher, the collector, the patron, the early modern thinker. Scholars in the history of science have shown that in this period, the very notion of an instrument changed dramatically. No longer merely used to re-make an object, or to repeat a process already known, instruments were now increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry that would lead to new knowledge. Although the instrumental music of this period has long been recognized as foundational to the Western tradition, the impulses that gave rise to it have never been adequately understood. This interdisciplinary study argues that the new instrumental music grew out of the early modern fascination with instruments of all kinds—scientific and artisanal tools that served as mediators between individuals and the world around them.

Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, “Do you ‘Body and Soul?’”—and from there the subtle craft of playing the jazz repertoire is tested in front of a live audience. This book presents the view from the bandstand, revealing the array of skills necessary for working musicians to do their jobs. While learning songs from sheet music or by ear helps, the jobbing musician's lexicon is dauntingly massive: hundreds of thousands of tunes, from jazz classics and pop standards, to more exotic fare. Since it is impossible for anyone to memorize all of these songs, the book shows that musicians collectively negotiate and improvise their way to a successful performance. Players must explore each other's areas of expertise, develop an ability to fake their way through unfamiliar territory, and respond to the unpredictable demands of their audience. The book dishes out stories and insights drawn from the authors' own experiences and observations, as well as interviews with a range of musicians. The authors' detailed portrait of the musician at work holds lessons for anyone who has to think on the spot or under a spotlight.

The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp is not performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. This book portrays several Sacred Harp groups and looks at how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members' often profound differences. The author's research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. She finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs.

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. This book showcases how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, the author bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering a framework for musical analysis that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound. Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma, the book depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries—from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban—and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.

Today, jazz is considered high art, America's national music, and the catalog of its recordings—its discography—is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the intense desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets a full-length treatment in this book. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz's legacy organized, it tells a story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer. This book examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and 1930s, through the overwhelming deluge of 12-inch vinyl records in the middle of the twentieth century, to the use of computers by today's discographers. Though the book focuses much of its attention on comprehensive discographies, it also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer's guides and library catalogs, and the book closes with a look toward discography's future.

What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific discovery were not mutually exclusive. The collection gathers work by leading scholars to reveal as-yet-undocumented associations between music and science. These two disciplines were conjoined in ways hitherto unrecognized, through vibrant popular practices that celebrated entanglements of seeing and hearing. Sound was implicated in the development of new forms of knowledge, furnishing understandings of light and its perception, even while vision informed scientific conceptions of music. The power of science, as much as the power of music, relied on performance, spectacle, experiment, and the virtuosic art of the "romantic" performer-genius. London is reimagined here: no longer the capital of das Land ohne Musik, it is rather the most important European center for the consolidation of the study of sound. The focus is a crucial sixty-year period, from Charles Burney’s ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe “from the earliest ages to the present period” (completed in 1789) to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. The accumulated contents of these framing repositories set the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, throwing light on an era before the "natural" division of aural and visual knowledge.

This book probes New Orleans's history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, the book brings to life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. It shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans's complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture.

This book sheds light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock and the Black Power era—white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. It focuses on 1968 and 1969, years when the New Left in the US and UK began to combine cultural radicalism and political radicalism. White musicians sought to employ Black music for revolutionary aims that included personal transformation, political protest, and/or free publicity. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by African American music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of Black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. Radical white musicians during the 1960s were invested less in direct imitation of African American music than in adapting and synthesizing it, seeking to rework its practices and principles into forms that were relevant, and perhaps radicalizing, for their predominantly white audiences. There was therefore more to the racial dynamic of popular music during the late 1960s than a simple conflict between cultural appropriation and resistance.

This book is about the changes that took place in popular music in the United States, in the period from 1870 until 1929. It explores the context for those changes and offers an explanation for why they happened. Above all, it aims to tell a particular kind of story about popular musicians, one that foregrounds their relationship to new conceptions of wealth, power, and social order. Central to this story is American vaudeville and its role in the transformation of musical values, practices, repertoires, and artistic institutions. Although the early signs of this transformation were evident by the mid-nineteenth century, especially as a result of the international achievements of the minstrel show, it was not until the 1890s that a new musical culture came into view. The major objective of this study is to clarify the ways in which the economic, political, and moral authority of the emerging corporate society managed to reshape this musical culture so dramatically, and with such long-lasting effects. Because popular musicians were such active participants in this process, it examines their efforts to open up creative spaces within those institutions most closely identified with the emerging entertainment industry.