African Past, American Future: Uplift Ideology in Early 20th Century Opera

This paper explores how two African American composers, Scott Joplin (c. 1868-1917) and Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954), advocated for Black Advancement and uplift ideology through their syncretic operas in the early 1900s. What is presented here however is the introductory content of a larger work. Joplin and Freeman were intimately conscious and supportive of national debates for Black Advancement, propelled especially by W.E.B. DuBois, and both employed rhetorical strategies paradigmatic of the movement. They were both interested in showing White and Black Americans alike that African American music, such as gospel, spiritual, and ragtime, could be held to the same high esteem as music of the Western canon, just as Black academics often endeavored to prove their intellectual prowess to their White counterparts. To this end, Joplin and Freeman combined “Black” music and classical styles in their operas to declare the equality and richness of an integrated sound. The thematic content of these operas, Treemonisha and Voodoo, respectively, interact with the Black Advancement movement’s drive for progress and education as well. They present Black Americans’ struggle for modernity as a conflict between the “superstitious” West African religious customs still ingrained in emancipated communities and Christianity. However, Joplin and Freeman’s works diverge aesthetically and ideologically from this point forward. Joplin’s aesthetic considerations derived chiefly from ragtime, a modern African American musical form genre, while Freeman took inspiration not only from African ethnic music but Africa itself. Joplin’s form of uplift was found in the education of small Black communities, while Freeman framed his work in a nationalistic and pan-Africanist context. These distinct choices, though crafted with the same aim, help reveal subtle divergences in argumentation within the Black Advancement movement.

Soundscapes of Liberation

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

The Fiery Debate

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.