Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Shadle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
American Racism

Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony exposed the deep wounds of American racism at the dawn of the Jim Crow era while serving as a flashpoint in broader debates about the national ideals of freedom and equality. Following several strands of musical thought during the second half of the nineteenth century, this richly textured account of the symphony’s 1893 premiere shows that even the classical concert hall could not remain insulated from the country’s fraught racial politics. The New World Symphony continued to wield extraordinary influence over American classical music culture for decades after its premiere as it became one of the most beloved pieces in the standard orchestral repertoire.

The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Radicalism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
American Racism

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.

Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett Zon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Musical Thought

Because music is unable to communicate its meaning as directly as words, it has always relied upon thought to help convey its meaning. Nineteenth-century musical thought therefore comes in two interrelated forms: (1) as literature about music (‘music-in-thought’), such as music history, philosophy, or theology; and (2) as music itself (music-as-thought) written for soloists, instruments, and voices in secular or sacred contexts like the concert hall or church. This chapter traces their complex metaphysical interrelationship by using Romantic philosophical and theological concepts of musical meaning to probe understandings of created natural order, from the sound of nature to birdsong, and from the music of man to the music of God. The Great Chain of Musical Being provides a foil for gauging the resilience of the Romantic period’s theological commitment to an incarnational Christianity straining under the influence of secularization.

“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARY HUNTER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Feature ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Spiritual Transformation ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
As If ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

Abstract Performance discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (i.e., writing about interpretative performance in treatises, reviews, dictionaries, articles, and philosophical works) is distinct from that in both earlier and later periods. Although a full early Romantic paradigm of interpretative performance, as articulated in Hegel's Aesthetics, came about piecemeal and was instantiated in different ways in different kinds of sources, the texts examined in this essay communicate two particularly salient features. These are, first, the idea that interpretative performance involves a profound spiritual transformation on the part of the performer, requiring the merging of his own soul with that of the composer; and second, the idea that performance both establishes and collapses apparently intractable dualisms. This structural feature of performance discourse, as well as its content, links the idea of performance to contemporary discussions of consciousness in such a way that performance emerges as a simulacrum of early Romantic subjectivity. At the same time, this discursive structure also finds its way into the more mundane world of pedagogy. Performance thus emerges as more central to the intellectual milieu of Romanticism than has previously been recognized. The structures of discourse established at the turn of the nineteenth century persist in classical music culture today, but devoid of their historical underpinnings.

“We of the North were thoroughly wrong”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond S. King ◽  
Rogers M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Over Time

This chapter talks about the complex patterns of racial alliances that emerged during the Jim Crow era. It shows that, shaped by the interactions of a wide range of groups, the patterns and practices of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years varied from state to state, town to town, even neighborhood to neighborhood, and shifted over time in differing ways in all these locales. Within this new era of American racial politics, diminished but determined racially egalitarian actors, groups, and institutions remained important players in American politics, and over time new ones emerged. From their own efforts, aided by changes in a range of domestic and international circumstances, they would gradually grow more powerful through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.

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

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-336
Author(s):  
LUCY CAPLAN
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Chicago Defender

AbstractThis article examines the music criticism of Nora Douglas Holt, an African American woman who wrote a classical music column for the Chicago 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 the Chicago Defender and Music and Poetry; and assessing her engagement with a single musical work, Tchaikovsky's Symphony 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.

Neo-Passing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mollie Godfrey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Identity Production

Bringing together fifteen essays by leading scholars, including a theoretical introduction by the editors and an insightful foreword and afterword by Gayle Wald and Michele Elam, respectively, this volume analyzes Godfrey and Young’s neologism neo-passing. Godfrey and Young define neo-passing as narratives and performative acts of passing that recall the complex racial politics that define classic tales of passing, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912). The difference, however, between the former concept of passing and what Godfrey and Young call neo-passing is that neo-passing is performed and/or produced in various media after the end of legal segregation (circa 1954). Beginning with the Jim Crow–era assumption that passing will come to pass as soon as desegregation begins, this volume investigates how and why passing not only persists in the post–Jim Crow moment but has also proliferated. As with both neo-slave and neo-segregation narratives, performances of neo-passing speak to contemporary racial injustices and ideologies, asking readers to hold these in mind alongside the racial injustices and ideologies of the past. Typically, neo-passing also goes beyond the black/white binary that defined classic passing narratives to explore how identities are increasingly defined as intersectional—simultaneously involving class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Through explorations of newspaper articles, advertisements, journalism, fiction, graphic novels, film, comedy sketches, reality television, music, and social media, the essays in this volume engage in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing alternatively shores up, deconstructs, or complicates our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim Crow

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

The Survival of English Opera in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-315
Author(s):  
William Weber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
German Lieder ◽  
English Opera ◽  
Concert Life

This chapter shows how selections from English operas composed between the 1730s and the 1790s—chiefly by Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, and Stephen Storace—became standard repertory in concerts throughout the nineteenth century. Such pieces were performed at benefit concerts organized by individual musicians and at events given by local ensembles that blended songs with virtuoso pieces and orchestral numbers. Critical commentary on such songs justified their aesthetic legitimacy as groups separate from pieces deemed part of classical music. By 1900, songs by Arne, Storace, and even Dibdin were often sung in recitals along with German lieder and pieces from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italy or France. The solidity of this tradition contributed to the revival of the operas themselves from the 1920s, most often Arne’s Artaxerxes (1762). This chapter is paired with Rutger Helmers’s “National and international canons of opera in tsarist Russia.”

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