The 1870s

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Music ◽  
Rip Van Winkle ◽  
American Union

Bristow’s stature in New York as a composer, conductor, and organist was unrivaled during the 1870s. He continued to perform with the two orchestras and to conduct several society choirs. The number of new compositions slowed during the 1870s, but his significant works included Great Republic: Ode to the American Union (1870-1876), Pioneer: A Grand Cantata (1872), and his programmatic Arcadian Symphony (1872). An increasingly number of his compositions were performed during the decade, including a revival (unsuccessful) of Rip Van Winkle. He enjoyed a third Grand Testimonial Concert and the performance of his Arcadian Symphony in a Baltimore concert of American music (both 1875).

Racial essences and historical invisibility: Chinese opera in New York, 1930

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Music History ◽  
American Music ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Chinese Opera

Describing the performances of two Chinese opera groups – the visiting famous opera singer Mai Lan-fang and his troupe on Broadway and the local San Sai Gai troupe in Chinatown – and their reception by non-Chinese Americans, this essay tracks various formations and effects of Chinese images in 1930s New York that were deeply imprinted in popular imagination. The regrettable invisibility of Chinese opera in American music history is a result of such a pre-constructed concept of Chineseness.

Are Popular Music Curricula Antiracist?: The CCNY Music Department as a Case Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-451
Author(s):  
Matthew K. Carter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
American Music ◽  
Ear Training ◽  
Music Department ◽  
City College ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Theorist

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

The Fiery Debate

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-112
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Shadle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonin Dvorak ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Vernacular Music

About eight months after Antonín Dvořák became director of Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory of Music in New York, he weighed in publicly on the question of American musical identity and argued that African American vernacular music (or “negro melodies”) should become the foundation of a national classical style. The New York Herald, which first printed his remarks, stoked a months-long debate that exposed deep-seated anti-Black racism throughout the country’s classical music industry as many musicians rejected the Bohemian’s suggestions outright. Dvořák remained supportive of African American music and musicians but did not fully understand the political implications of his positions.

Eileen Southern

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-379
Author(s):  
David Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
College Administration ◽  
Music Department ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Renaissance Music

Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).

‘Chinatown’ and Global Operatic Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 280-290
Author(s):  
Yvonne Liao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Southern Chinese ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Selection Of

In recent years opera studies have taken a distinctly global and migratory turn: Nancy Rao's Chinatown Opera Theater is a notable example. Rao's book sheds new light on the art form's transpacific networks, Cantonese immigrant communities and their highly racialised experience of everyday entertainment in early twentieth-century America, thereby ‘strip[ping] the veneer of exoticism from [southern] Chinese [i.e., Cantonese] opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience’. Still more illuminating is Rao's focus on the Chinatown theatre companies, their contracting of touring performers and their role in transoceanic commerce. Woven into the book is an intimately connected narrative of Cantonese opera in the 1920s, encompassing San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Honolulu and (to a lesser extent) Havana. The selection of these locations is no coincidence, given their significance in the interwar years as port cities linked within imperial steamship networks, amidst the part-conflicting, part-intersecting agenda of dominant and emergent empires (for instance, Japan and the United States, in the case of the latter).

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