Conference Agenda

Following its founding in 1931, the Stephen Foster Memorial in White Springs, Florida became the site of multiple annual events dedicated to preserving and enhancing Foster’s legacy. These events were all staged by the middle- and upper-class white women of the Florida Federation of Music Clubs (FFMC)—a group uniquely invested in Foster as a representative of their ideal social and musical values. They regarded Foster as the first great American composer, a progenitor of American folk music, the foremost musical chronicler of the antebellum Southern way of life, and a champion of Florida's heritage.

Among the many events staged by the FFMC to celebrate Foster, the most prominent and revealing was the annual Jeanie Auditions and Ball, founded in 1951. The participants were young, unmarried Florida women who had earned sponsorship from their local music clubs. Each contestant appeared in a replica 1854 ball gown and was evaluated on her vocal ability, deportment, and beauty. The winner was crowned “Jeanie” and obliged to appear at social, educational, and political functions throughout the coming year. During 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the contest served to uphold the FFMC’s nostalgic vision of white Protestant Southern womanhood. The women of the FFMC took a militant stand when it came to the modernization of lyrics, disqualifying any contestant who made changes to Foster’s racist terminology. They also excluded non-white and non-Christian participants, changing their policy only after the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission intervened in 1976 to require that no contestant be denied entrance on the basis of “race, creed, color, or ethnic background.” Close examination of the Jeanie Auditions underscores the role of Foster’s music as a mediating agent in this period of conflict over segregation and Southern identity.

This presentation will position the Jeanie Auditions and Ball within the intersecting contexts of women’s music clubs, Southern beauty pageants, and debates over Foster’s legacy in connection with the civil rights movement and Lost Cause ideology. This research draws on archival materials held at the Florida State Archives and the Stephen Foster Memorial.

As Ruth Solie (2004), among others, has shown, “‘girling’ at the piano” was a crucial part of nineteenth-century bourgeois musical culture across Europe and in North America. But the same was also true of nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, where girls and young women from elite white families were avid pianists. As one visitor from New England remarked in 1831, “the greater part of the Spanish ladies do nothing but play upon the piano or harp, dance and dress” (in Prados-Torreira 2021, 9). Likewise, and exaggerating only slightly, an 1857 satirical newspaper article claimed that in Havana “there was a piano in every house” as it lampooned some girl pianists’ shortcomings: “Mothers who have daughters…and pianos! Make the first study…or sell the second.”

By the middle of the century, two local dance forms, the contradanza and danza, had become the métier of these young musicians, who practiced them as both performers and composers. But the social origins of these varieties of “creolized contradance” (Manuel 2009) could not have been further from the bourgeois sala. Associated with the instrumental virtuosity of black and mixed-race men and the inimitable dancing of black and mixed-race women, creolized contradance wore its hybrid African-European constitution on its sleeve. This made it controversial with conservative white cultural elites and irresistible for their sons, who were notorious for surreptitiously attending parties called bailes de cuna where they could listen to bands of black and mixed-race musicians and dance with black and mixed-race women.

This paper examines the surprising “domestication” of this controversial and racialized dance music by and for white bourgeois girl pianists. Following Solie, I draw out the multiple functions of their pianism, which by turns disciplined their brothers’ sexuality, bolstered their marriageability, and produced demand for an emerging colonial print capitalism. What united these functions of domesticated contradance, I argue, was a new relation between music and value (cf. Morcom 2020, Taylor 2024) in which music became value’s guardian and guarantor.

The country music industry is rife with gendered expectations and demands conformity to a singular, heterosexual model of country womanhood in exchange for acceptance and radio play. Country singers have historically had to walk a fine line between being a stereotypical ‘good girl’ and expressing distinctive personalities that country audiences often relate to. The straddling of this fine line often comes out musically through vocal delivery and lyrics. But what about those women who conform enough to stay welcome in the industry but subtly push against this model? In this presentation, I take Miranda Lambert as a case study to investigate how she communicates white country femininity lyrically and musically in two of her songs, “If I Was a Cowboy” (2021) and “Mama’s Broken Heart” (2013). Lambert presents a rebellious yet relatable persona, which allows her to connect authentically with her listeners.

In “If I Was a Cowboy” Lambert combines transgressive lyrics with traditional vocality. The song’s lyrics consider how life might be different as a cowboy, concluding the chorus with “If I was a cowboy, I’d be the queen,” thus floating the idea that women can be cowboys, too. Yet even as she presents a rough, masculine character through the lyrics, her vocal timbre remains soft and feminine. Lambert sings mostly in head voice, a marked characteristic which can signify femininity or even weakness (Lavengood 2020, Nobile 2022). If the lyrics and vocal timbre in “If I Was a Cowboy” suggest different expressions of femininity, the lyrics and vocal delivery in “Mama’s Broken Heart”—which is structured as a conversation between a mother and daughter—highlight a tension between rebelliousness and repression. The contrast between the daughter’s natural vocality and the mother’s forced vocality is at odds with the lyrical opposition of rebellion and repression. Where the mother’s actions are repressed, her vocality is not, and the daughter’s rebellious actions are paired with a conflicting subdued vocality. Considering songs like these offers a model for understanding how Lambert and other female country artists both conform to and push subtly against the boundaries of the genre and its gendered norms.

La Tempesta (1778) is a four-movement secular chamber cantata for soprano and orchestra portraying the inner turmoil of a would-be lover grappling with unrequited love. Composed by Marianna Martines (1744–1812) as a setting of poetry by her friend and mentor Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), the musical drama closely follows the style and conventions of the 18th-century Italian chamber cantata. Renowned commentator Charles Burney lamented that this rich tradition of music-making was practically lost by the end of the century—a general neglect likely linked to the genre’s association with (feminine-coded) private spaces, which precluded (masculine-coded) public prestige. Yet, this relative lack of critical recognition obscures vital music-historical knowledge. As Matthew Head has demonstrated, women creators were essential drivers of Enlightenment values as well as influential members of some of the period’s most prominent artistic movements. Studying Martines’s cantata, then, revives an oft-overlooked musical tradition while offering valuable insight into an important aspect of Enlightenment life.

Analyses by Rebecca Cypress and others interpret La Tempesta as depicting an unfolding romantic relationship between initially sheepish lovers. However, Martines’s use of sudden interruptions, shifting key areas, and motivic exchanges seem to point the drama away from romance altogether, suggesting the need for an alternative reading. Indeed, the cantata’s thematic and intertextual connections to other Metastasio-penned poems serve to (re)situate La Tempesta within a larger body of literary works espousing the virtues of chaste intimacy over passionate physicality. Ultimately, I argue that word and music combine to unsettle straightforward meaning, instead revealing a narrative based on joyful affirmation of what gender and sexuality scholar Jennifer Nash calls nonheterosexual (or, Queer) forms of love.

In providing a more nuanced view of La Tempesta, this study imagines new ways of engaging with this music by drawing on a cross-disciplinary collection of embodiment research by Elisabeth Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Sara Ahmed. Along with bringing Martines and Metastasio’s cultural environment into clearer focus, this scholarly re-orientation toward embodied knowledge encourages musicologists to critically examine intellectual genealogies within the field, posing the important question: how can researchers better account for “erotic agency” in the 18th-century (and beyond)?