Conference Agenda

Leonard Bernstein’s appearances on the Ford Foundation’s TV variety show Omnibus (1952–61) are conventionally treated as an outgrowth of his exceptional career as a conductor and educator. Indeed, the runaway success of Bernstein’s Omnibus performances and his later Young People’s Concerts, are emblematic of his cultural status as a paragon of American music and as an ambassador of music education for the public. While the character of Bernstein has become the crux of the show for many music scholars, Omnibus illuminates a critical intersection of material factors that made educational programming possible in America. Yet, these developments in infrastructure and policy are obscured by the celebrity status of program hosts. Charismatic figures such as Leonard Bernstein and Ed Sullivan are often noted for their mid-century musical influence, but popular perception overprioritizes the role of TV hosts as agents of musical aesthetics. The success of Bernstein’s appearances on Omnibus and the Young People’s Concerts demonstrated his dedication to a burgeoning music appreciation movement in the United States, but a hosting persona is merely one facet of how variety shows became taste makers at mid-century.

In this paper, I contend that nascent musical variety shows became a leading model for middlebrow music education in the long 1950s through an interconnected network behind the scenes that extended far beyond hosts. At the intersection of music studies, television studies, and media history, I demonstrate how even commercially sponsored entertainment programs like Omnibus were made possible only by a reevaluation of education’s role in early commercial TV. Drawing on alterations to FCC licensure policy, Ford Foundation philanthropy, and professional advocacy in the Music Educators Journal, I suggest that postwar TV variety programs helped determine public musical tastes because of material conditions and resource allocation otherwise forgotten. When we consider the network of these invisible taste-making elements, we must reassess the role of hosts like Bernstein in determining postwar American musical aesthetics.

Film soundtrack albums have long provided a revenue stream for studios and record labels, but the albums are not only monetized mementos. Instead of replicating the film’s music, soundtrack albums feature recontextualized and often altered settings, designed to fit specific audio formats and enhance musical coherence. The 1964 album Duke Ellington Plays with the Original Motion Picture Score from Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins gives the soundtrack album a distinctively different spin. Released shortly after the film’s premiere, the concept album initiates dialogue around the work of Ellington’s band, the source film, and other Poppins soundtrack albums featuring Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs. Despite its unwieldly title, the Ellington-Poppins album represents a bold effort to balance competing musical, commercial, and cultural priorities.

Discussion of the album, however, rarely extends beyond the perceived novelty of setting Ellington’s musicianship alongside Disney and Mary Poppins. Closer study of the album art, liner notes, solos from band members, and arrangements by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn showcase divergent responses to the film’s musical materials. This paper sets these elements within the context of three streams of recorded music that converge in the album: first, contemporaneous Ellington-Strayhorn adaptations, especially the Nutcracker and Peer Gynt suites (1960) and the album All American in Jazz (1962), which comprises arrangements of the Broadway show’s score; second, previous instrumental jazz albums devoted entirely to musicals or opera (Dave [Brubeck] Digs Disney [1957], Miles Davis’s Porgy and Bess [1959]); and third, the Disney label’s albums of Mary Poppins songs, with one featuring the film’s stars and another “budget” alternative with vocalists from the film’s ensemble. Featuring archival research on Ellington's and Strayhorn’s manuscripts, this presentation highlights examples from “Feed the Birds,” “Step in Time,” and “Chim Chim Cheree,” to show how unsung lyrics are reframed through the voices of jazz instrumentalists. These transformations prompt both questions and rejoinders to the film’s performances of gendered authority and sublimated minstrelsy (an image of dancing, sooty chimney sweeps adorns the album's cover). Duke Ellington Plays with…Poppins shows how soundtrack albums can provide opportunity for amplifying themes easily missed in the film itself.

In the spring of 1950, Fred McNeely Rogers, a Music Composition major at Rollins College, wrote a short story entitled Josephine the Short Neck Giraffe as a classroom assignment as part of his minor in French. He also used portions of the story as lyrics for songs for what he envisioned as a chamber opera as part of his music studies. The story involved a young giraffe whose short neck leaves her feeling ugly and isolated from her community. Her feelings of inadequacy are only resolved after her group of friends, and a boy giraffe in particular, show her that they love and accept her just as she is, teaching her to embrace their kindness and to love herself.

As a senior in college, Fred’s post-graduate plans had practically nothing to do with children, making his choice to write this charming story as a kind of moral fable akin to a fairy tale somewhat perplexing. Rogers had already been accepted to and was planning to attend the Western Theological Seminary in Michigan, with intentions of becoming a Presbyterian minister. This choice had already perplexed his well-to-do family, who had made their fortune in manufacturing and expected their son to join the family business. Little did they or young Fred know that he was in fact destined to become one of the most beloved figures in American popular culture by way of a television program for children called Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

From the moment Rogers first laid eyes on the new invention of the television, he was simultaneously captivated by the medium and horrified at the slapstick humor and thoughtless violence shown in the children's programming of the day. That was when Fred Rogers discovered his true calling, and he set out for New York to begin a career that would eventually lead to his beloved series in 1966.

Using a combination of puppetry, clever stagecraft, memorable songs, and a constant acknowledgement and acceptance of the emotional realities of children, Mister Rogers Neighborhood became a cutural touchstone in America. With his methodical, gentle voice, Fred Rogers tackled complex issues such as war, racism, death, and disability, explaining to young people that our world is not perfect and that it is sometimes okay to be sad or afraid, but that there are always people who are there to help. Songs like "It's You I Like" and "You're Much More" taught the audience that everyone is worthy and deserving of love and acceptance.

Twenty-three years after Neighborhood first hit the airways, in 1989, Fred decided to revisit the story of Josephine, using his compositional skills to adapt his earlier composition assignments into a fully-conceived chamber opera which would be performed on the show. This work is only one of the fourteen operas, chamber works, and roughly two hundred songs Rogers would compose during his student and professional career. As an opera, Josephine the Short Neck Giraffe would eventually air over three episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, impacting millions of children through its moral of finding love and acceptance among friends, even if one feels different from those around them.

Using archival materials from Rollins College and the Fred Rogers Institute at St. Vincent College in Mister Rogers’s hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, this paper traces the evolution of Josephine from short story to composition to television production. It will examine Rogers’s compositional style as it was adapted to suit a children’s audience and explore the impact and emotional resonance that the story of Josephine the Short Neck Giraffe had both for its author and composer and for its audience.