National Voices, Modernist Histories: Race, Performance and Remembrance in American Music, 1927–1943

This dissertation examines questions of race, identity and nation in American music, focusing on musical life in New York during the years 1927–1943. The project investigates these theoretical questions through a series of case studies on works usually kept separate in musicological discussions: Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's avant-garde operatic collaboration Four Saints in Three Acts; Edward “Duke” Ellington's “jungle style” pieces for the Cotton Club and his jazz concert work Black, Brown and Beige; and Paul Robeson's version of Earl Robinson's and John LaTouche's 1939 cantata Ballad for Americans. Each of the case studies engage with issues of race, identity and nation in different ways and, accordingly, raise historical and aesthetic issues specific to the topics at hand. An overarching premise of this project, however, is that these diverse topics can be conceived of as a set of complementary developments where competing but, ultimately, interdependent notions of American musical modernism emerged. Both the topics selected for study and their ordering in the project afford a series of contrasting perspectives on the relationships of musical modernism and race—as both a social fact and as a cultural/discursive “fiction”—in the articulation of a U.S. national identity during this period.