Music in American nineteenth-century history

This special issue is an act of translation. It is an effort to bring the perspectives of music scholars to bear on the interests and debates of American nineteenth-century historians. It is grounded in the premise that interdisciplinarity works best when its practitioners recognize the unique goals, questions, and methods of disciplinary work. If the enterprise appears difficult or perplexing, we encourage readers to take up the challenge. “Interdisciplinarians often smooth over the rough edges and stress the compatibility between disciplines,” James A. Davis reminds us in this issue, “But there is something to be said for celebrating the friction as well.”

Music – its power, ubiquity, malleability, and diversity – is hardly foreign ground for nineteenth-century American historians. Historically trained Americanists have produced a deep and expanding literature on music and music-related topics in the nineteenth century.¹ Meanwhile, music scholars whose work centers on the American nineteenth century have long taken history and historical context seriously.² Despite this overlap, however, historians typically to write for historians (about American nineteenth-century music) and musicologists typically write for musicologists (about American music in the nineteenth century). This issue bucks that trend.

Candace Bailey employs microhistory to “disrupt the conventional narrative of American music” – but also to show how the inclusion of primary source material from the archive of nineteenth-century music can help us rethink the intersections between class, gender, and race. Given the vastness of that archive, and the relatively small proportion of it that has been analyzed by historians, it is not too much to think that Bailey’s methodology provides a model for many future studies. Whereas Bailey’s work homes in on one family, Christopher Smith’s contribution offers a macro-level synthesis of “radical song” as a tool of labor agitation across the United States – and its imperial imagination – over the long nineteenth century. Christopher Lynch approaches the intersection of music and political culture differently, showing how the erection of a statue of Stephen Foster in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century revived Foster’s waning reputation and memorialized him as a national symbol of Lost Cause reconciliation. In keeping with nineteenth-century musicology’s expanding geographical scope, Katherine Preston’s research takes us to another unexpected locale – late nineteenth-century Denver, Colorado – to showcase the entrepreneurial prowess of women opera managers who “functioned as powerbrokers in an emerging cultural industry” but whose contributions have all but escaped the historical or musicological record.

Meanwhile, Laura Lohman’s teaching essay translates both music pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into the sphere of nineteenth-century US history teaching – with surprising results. On the one hand, Lohman provides specific and useful advice for how historians can include music in the teaching of nineteenth-century US history. But in translating historians’ pedagogical practice through the lens of UDL, she also shows that, as a discipline, we as historians are less likely than our peers in many other disciplines to articulate a commitment to the values of UDL in our course material. Thus, Lohman’s work offers us not one but two major opportunities: to develop our use of music in the classroom, to be sure, but also to articulate more clearly and consistently our commitment to designing “the least restrictive environment for all learners.”

Finally, James A. Davis provides an afterword that speaks to the benefits of difficulty, incompatibility, rough edges and even conflict between disciplines – guiding us to transform a “polite dance” into something more robust and energetic. We as editors accept his invitation to “embrac[e] those moments of friction,” and hope that readers will too.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Billy Coleman

Billy Coleman is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Missouri and author of Harnessing Harmony: Music and Politics in the United States, 1789–1865 (UNC Press, 2020).

J. M. Mancini

J. M. Mancini is an Associate Professor of History at Maynooth University and, most recently, author of Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking and Taking from Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War (California, 2018).

Notes

1 Foundational examples include DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; and Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness. More recent examples, in chronological order, include White and White, The Sounds of Slavery; Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy; Suisman, Selling Sounds; Ostendorf, Sounds American; McWhirter, Battle Hymns; Wood, “‘Join with Heart and Soul and Voice’”; Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About; Roberts, Blackface Nation; Waldstreicher, “Minstrelization and Nationhood”; Coleman, Harnessing Harmony; Bateson, Irish American Civil War Songs; Barnes, Darkology.

2 Besides the contributors to this volume, a small but illustrative selection of this work includes Bentley, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera; Broyles, ‘Music of the Highest Class’; Goodman, Cultivated by Hand; Ryan, “‘The influence of Melody upon man in the wild state of nature’”; Barnes and Goodman “Colloquy: Early American Music and the Construction of Race.” For a previous example of interdisciplinary collaboration see Jackson and Pelkey, Music and History.