“Its Bite and Its Feeling”

Between Beats ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 33-60
Author(s):  
Christi Jay Wells
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Tourist Destinations ◽  
Plantation Life ◽  
Necessary Connections

This chapter positions the quadroon balls of nineteenth-century New Orleans as a critical generative source of, and productive metaphor for, the complex of miscegenation fantasies that mark jazz as both seductive enough to excite our collective sense of subversion and quintessentially American enough to serve as the nation’s “classical music.” Building upon Emily Clark’s work on quadroon balls’ imbrication within a feedback loop between romanticized narrative and lived experience, which she terms the “plaçage complex,” the chapter demonstrates that the romanticization of New Orleans as jazz’s ostensible birthplace is rooted in discursive moves that long predate jazz itself. As such, this chapter draws a through-line from the early nineteenth-century genesis of quadroon balls through their mid-century boom and the fantastical white-authored travel narratives that made them tourist destinations and the ways they subsequently informed both New Orleans’ Storyville district and representations of antebellum plantation life in New York City stage revues. Through this analysis, the chapter draws uncomfortable yet necessary connections between jazz historical discourse, and especially its romanticization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Orleans, and the discursive engines that maintained white supremacist structures during the nineteenth century and that remain active, if obfuscated, in the present.

Hide and Seek: The Historian and Nineteenth-Century Social Accounting

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 545-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald A. DeBats
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
York City ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Social Accounting ◽  
The Law

The problem of census undercounts, a familiar political issue for modern groups or instrumentalities that consider themselves underrepresented in the Census Bureau statistics, has only recently attracted attention from historians. While the modern “miss rate” is potentially high among some groups (the reason for the emphasis on the homeless in the 1990 census), the general rate of underenumeration appears to have diminished in recent censuses. The bureau acknowledges a net undercount of 5.6% of the population in 1940; the error declined gradually to an estimated 1.4% in 1980 (Burnham 1986; Anderson 1988; Edmondson 1988).Nineteenth-century censuses no doubt contained more serious errors. Although he did not have underenumeration specifically in mind, the administrator for the 1870 census said that “the censuses of 1850, 1860, and of 1870 are loaded with bad statistics. There are statistics in the census of 1870,I am sorry to say, where some of the results are false to the extent of one-half. They had to be published then, because the law called for it; but I took the liberty of branding them as untrustworthy and in some cases giving the reasons therefore at some length” (quoted in Sharpless and Shortridge 1975: 411). Strikingly modern quarrels surrounded the accuracy of the 1840 Boston and New Orleans censuses, while the errors in the 1870 enumeration of New York City and Philadelphia were sufficient to cause recounts of both cities (ibid. ; Knights 1971: 145).

scholarly journals “Choosing to Stay”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Anja Nadine Klopfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The City

Oral histories of the Hurricane Katrina experience abound in stories of conscious decisions to “ride out the storm.” My article explores the narrative of “choosing to stay” as an empowering narrative rooted in assertions of place-knowledge and traces its historical genealogy to the nineteenth century. I argue that claiming agency in New Orleans and articulating a sense of belonging and local identity through professed intimate knowledge of the local environment took shape as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of American progress after the Civil War. Ultimately, this counternarrative of connecting to place as “homeland,” drawing on knowledge arising from lived experience, defied the normative twist of modernization, simultaneously reformulating power relations within the city. “Choosing to stay” thus turns out to be a long-lasting narrative not only of disaster, but of place, belonging, and community; without understanding its historical layers, we cannot fully make sense of this particular Katrina narrative.

Establishing a Career

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Abelson Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Ludwig Van Beethoven ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Initial Failure ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Edvard Grieg

This chapter examines the state of classical music in the United States in the late nineteenth century as well as Fannie Bloomfield's first attempts to establish a career as a pianist during that time. It first describes the European ensembles that toured the United States beginning in midcentury, such as the Germania Musical Society, and the European virtuosos who barnstormed the country. It then considers Theodore Thomas's role in promoting an interest in classical music, and especially how he helped further Bloomfield's career. It also discusses the impediments to women's success as virtuosos, including the assumption that women were incapable of interpreting the likes of composers considered to be “virile,” such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Edvard Grieg. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Bloomfield's audition with Thomas; her initial failure to present a New York debut; her career-altering contract with the Wm. Knabe & Co.; her subsequent debut performances in Chicago and New York; and her marriage to Sigmund Zeisler in 1885.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Daggett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Language Barrier ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The City

The advent of Modern American Spiritualism took place in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. This book focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey, a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans historiography owning, in part, to a language barrier. The book weaves an intriguing historical tale of the supernatural, chaotic postbellum politics, and the personal triumphs and tragedies of Henry Louis Rey. Besides Rey’s séance circle, there is also a discussion about the Anglo-American séance circles in New Orleans. The book places these séance circles within the context of the national scene, and the genesis of nineteenth-century Spiritualism is examined with a special emphasis placed on events in New York and Boston. The lifetime of Henry Rey and that of his father, Barthélemy Rey, spanned the nineteenth century, and mirror the social and political dilemmas of the black Creoles. The book concludes with a comparison of Spiritualism with the Spiritualist and Spiritual churches, as well as voodoo. The book’s narrative is accompanied by wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs.

The Entrepreneur-conductors and their Orchestras

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Paris Opera

The story of the orchestra in the nineteenth century usually focuses on two types of orchestras: theatre orchestras – such as La Scala, the Queen's Theatre (London), and the Paris Opéra – and concert societies – such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris), and the New York Philharmonic. It concentrates on the conductors who led these orchestras, many of whom were also famous composers, such as Weber, Spontini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Wagner, whose works form a large part of today's ‘classical’ music repertory. This story is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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