Conference Agenda

Queer culture poses a fraught relationship with the hegemonic mainstream. Queer community spaces, once necessarily underground, are now frequented by straight and LGBTQ+ people alike; queer vernacular, fashion, and media now have a profound influence on mainstream cultural expression, but these roots often become obscured in the process. As a result, queer expression today is more visible to non-LGBTQ+ folks than ever before, yet these watered-down queer cultural artifacts inadvertently become a generalized representation of queerness to those who experience it from the outside. Queer artists are thus forced to negotiate complex waters between the self-sufficiency of queer communities’ radical roots and the assimilationist aesthetics and affordances of mainstream success.

Central to these negotiations are issues of identity, self-expression, safety, autonomy, and the preservation/dilution of queer culture, which we address in this panel. “Singing ‘Out:’ Radicalism and Assimilation in Queer Community Choirs” contrasts the activist history of LGBTQ+ choirs with the current practices of one such ensemble in Michigan, blending auto-ethnography and queer theory to demonstrate the choir’s importance for queer community-building while also interrogating their assimilationist tactics. “It’s Funny, Honey: Gender Identity and the Performance of Drag in Musical Theatre” centers the perception of man-in-a-dress humor by queer and straight audiences, linking this to actor/character gender identity and the harm perpetuated against trans+ folks by uncritical stereotypes in musical theatre. “‘Doing Something Unholy:’ Mainstreaming Queer Subculture on TikTok” explores the ways in which the popular social media app has coded drag practices into its main functions, tracing users’ interactions with Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ viral hit “Unholy” through siloed digital neighborhoods known as “Queer” and “Straight” TikTok to consider how the app at once propagates and dilutes queer culture.

As members of the queer community, we intimately understand the perks and pitfalls of mainstream co-optation of our hard-won cultural capital. Our panel brings this ubiquitous topic into dialogue with central musicological and social theory perspectives, seeking to make crucial interventions in communal and commercial performances of queer identity, both onstage and onscreen.

Many community choirs facilitate localized amateur musical performance as a form of community engagement, but LGBTQ+ community choirs also carry out a unique political legacy. Many such groups started as an act of reclamation of visibility (and audibility) in the face of the AIDS crisis and its rampant homophobia, but today are far less politically radical. For instance, the LGBTQ+ community choir Out Loud Chorus (OLC) in Ann Arbor, Michigan creates a thriving subsection of the local queer community, but also exemplifies this trajectory from radical protest to assimilationist politics.

My research on Out Loud Chorus is founded on extensive and ongoing field work, including active participation in the choir and interviews with members. Following Thomas Turino’s articulation of four main fields of musical practice, I discuss OLC’s use of presentational and participatory performance modes, and argue that the choir’s unique methods break down the distinction between these two categories and enable community building through the process of choral music making itself. Additionally, music director Saleel Menon’s use of popular music and a performatively camp (after Susan Sontag) demeanor constitute inclusive pedagogy, encouraging holistic confidence and musical engagement.

Despite these merits, the choir’s ongoing activities, including a recent activism-themed concert, tend towards an assimilationist politics which contrasts with its radical roots. For, as Jodie Taylor (2012) argues, “Queer as a verb – to queer something – is to unsettle that which is normalized: particularly, but by no means exclusively, sex, gender, and sexual norms and the manner in which they relate to one another” (Taylor 605, emphasis my own). Not only does OLC intentionally seek to normalize queer subjects in the eyes of the public, but many interviewees who embraced the identity label queer also defined it solely as an “umbrella term” for LGBTQ+ subjects. Although Out Loud Chorus successfully uses the communal practice of choral music to build a welcoming space for the queer community that it serves, their assimilationist tendencies beg the question—who is this community space actually built for?

From Shakespearean times to the present day, bending gender roles has long been fair game on stage, and especially so in musical theatre. Yet the specific ifs, hows and whys of cross-dressing on stage have changed over the years. Many of today’s musical theatre performers, creatives and aficionados bring different values before the proscenium arch than they did five, ten, and fifty years ago, but we continue to see huge variation in the ways in which drag roles are played. Is drag always a gag, and who gets to decide?

I argue that drag performance in musical theatre falls into two categories: diegetic (where the characters themselves are aware that they, or others, are in drag), and non-diegetic (where only the audience is aware of the drag). Building on work by Judith Peraino (2006) and Raymond Knapp (2006), I examine elements of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, contrasting them with examples from Chicago and Matilda to show that drag performances can demonstrate or lack nuance whether diegetic or not – neither is automatically more sensitive than the other. Alongside, I consider the identities of notable performers who have played Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Hedwig, Mary Sunshine and Agatha Trunchbull in these shows, interrogating the “man-in-a-dress” trope to elucidate upon the complicated margin between stereotyping and representation, and to determine who gets to be in on the joke in each case. I also reference insight given by actors and theatre creatives who are members of the trans+ and non-binary communities about such representation on Broadway today (Paulson 2022), to build a case for a fundamental rethink of the diegesis of drag in musical theatre.

Nuanced discussion of gender non-conformity in musical theatre has rarely been more important, given the rapidly increasing visibility of trans+ and non-binary actors on our stages. In this paper I question what makes drag funny in musical theatre, reflecting on the kinds of harm that the queer community can often suffer at the hands of clumsy drag.

In August of 2022, Sam Smith shared a snippet of an unreleased song in a TikTok video; Smith and collaborator Kim Petras were seen dancing and lipsyncing at a mix console to their sexy new song, “Unholy.” The song quickly went viral on the platform, and when Smith and Petras released it in September that same year, it became the first single by trans and non-binary artists to reach no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

TikTok virality has been a reliable predictor of Billboard chart success for the last few years, but “Unholy” is uniquely situated to illustrate the ways in which queer subcultures have influenced mainstream popularity on the short form video app. Using Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s model of platform studies, as well as Michael Warner’s theory of publics and subcultures, I examine the ways in which TikTok’s platform has encoded queer cultural touchstones, including drag practices like lipsyncing and dramatic transformations, into its functionality.

I also explore how TikTok’s algorithm creates siloed neighborhoods like Queer TikTok, where queer community and culture are propagated. In this space, “Unholy” was celebrated as a joyous queer banger and evoked queer desire, while on Straight (meaning both mainstream and non-LGBTQ+) TikTok, the song’s sexiness turned hetero, obscuring its drag subcultural aesthetics. I consider whether this mainstreaming of queer subcultures amounts to their death, as Warner suggests, or if their transformation in new networked publics and digital subcultural spaces allows them to thrive in new forms.

Organized by the AMS Ibero-American Music Study Group

In 1993, the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society took place in Montreal. On that occasion, a small group of Hispanist musicologists—the then-current term for scholars who research music of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world—launched a new Study Group under the Society’s auspices. They recognized that with the exception of medieval and Renaissance studies, Iberian and Latin American repertories were largely marginalized in the broader musicological community. To be sure, a handful of pioneers such as Gilbert Chase, Robert M. Stevenson, Gerard Béhague, and Robert Snow, defied the status quo. But beginning scholars interested in this repertory surveyed a dismal landscape. For example, the Journal of the American Musicological Society featured only five full-fledged articles on Iberian or Latin American music between its inaugural issue, in 1948, and 1991. As recently as 2000, some Ph.D. programs in musicology refused to accept Spanish for the language requirement.

In 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas was widely observed. Yet not a single paper on encounter-related music was accepted for that year’s Annual Meeting. Galvanized by this omission, Study Group founders organized the session in Montreal under the able leadership of William J. Summers. Thirty years later, it is still flourishing. More important is the broader picture: a plethora of new scholarly perspectives, several textbooks, course offerings in postsecondary U.S. institutions, concert series, and additional study groups in the Americas and Europe attest to the impact of Ibero-American music research and the vitality of transnational exchange.

The proposed session will mark this anniversary by (1) surveying the historical context of the Study Group’s founding, (2) addressing new scholarly trends, and (3) looking to the future. Participants will include founding members such as Professor Summers, who will detail the group’s initial objectives, and Walter A. Clark, who will focus on Robert M. Stevenson and his numerous contributions to our sub-discipline. Alejandro L. Madrid will detail the enormous growth in publications on this repertory. Representatives of a younger generation will illuminate a wide range of topics: convent life in New Spain, trans and drag musical performers in Cuba, music and politics in Brazil, and digital musicology in Spain. Moderators will be Carol A. Hess and Bernard Gordillo.

Writing and publishing a book with an academic publisher is not a mysterious process, although it usually feels that way for first-time authors. This panel features a number of recent or soon-to-be authors that will walk participants through some of the necessary steps in how to move from dissertation to academic book. Lauron Kehrer, author of Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2022) will address how to cultivate relationships with editors and prepare a proposal. Darren Mueller, author of At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz (Duke University Press, 2024) will discuss a few different approaches to preparing a manuscript for peer review, including the logistics of self-record keeping. Kimberly Hannon Teal, author of Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History (University of California Press 2021) will discuss understanding and responding to reader reports by seeking out mentors and taking advantage of institutional resources like campus offices for scholarly communication. Kelsey Klotz, author of Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford University Press 2023), will explore the various waiting periods that occur in the process of writing the book (waiting for reviews, copyright clearances, copyedits, etc.), focusing particularly on approaches to mental health during these periods of loss and powerlessness. Kira Thurman, author of Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell University Press, 2021) will discuss the mistakes that many first-time authors make when first submitting their book. Our session will be conversational in nature. Each presenter will offer perspective on a specific aspect of the process, sharing their experience and taking questions from the audience.

Since the 1980s, cultural transfer has been an important research subject in the Humanities, focusing not only on one-sided reception but on the deliberate transfer and circulation of (inter)national knowledge (Espagne/Werner 1985ff.). In the field of operetta studies (a relatively young, but very active one), cultural transfer has gained more attention in recent years (e.g., Gänzl 2011; Senelick 2017; Scott 2019). However, much is still to be carried out as scholars have only recently started shifting their focus from the analysis of well-known centers of operetta production, such as Paris or Vienna, to more “peripheral” geographical market areas.

As an essentially comedic genre, which was highly commercial and very much influenced by contemporary trends, media, and market dynamics, operetta was subject to a wide range of transfer practices. Because of their liminal status between art and entertainment, operettas (their music, libretti, casting, and other features) were often changed, adapted, and appropriated without much protest or concern (e.g., Sorba, 2006; De Lucca, 2019).

This study session focuses on three case studies illustrating various degrees and practices of operetta transfer. They all pay special attention to the role diverse cultural actors and agents played in the transfer process and the means they used to make the genre a success in their specific contexts. Through these case studies, we also want to promote research on urban contexts which, despite their impact on global phenomena, are easily overlooked by the scientific discourse on operetta. Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Milan each knew a vibrant, but very different operetta culture, and insights into these cultural landscapes can teach us about the many ways the cultural transfer of popular music theater functioned in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Finally, our papers also emphasize the tight, yet not always evident connections between various European cities, influencing local developments in the “periphery” and also revealing strategic reactions of individuals to their surroundings.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam theater-goers could marvel at spectacular performances of various operettas night after night. Even though the Netherlands never knew its own national operetta tradition, operettas by foreign composers such as Jacques Offenbach and Charles Lecocq were all the rage. However, since any theater could produce any operetta, theatre directors and other historical actors strategically applied different techniques to entice people to choose their productions over others. In this paper, I will analyze these strategies of transfer, providing insight into the Amsterdam theatrical landscape and the ways in which foreign operettas, written in a different cultural context, were adapted to fit a new and specific urban context.

Even though operetta transfer has gained more attention in the academic debate in recent years, the Dutch case was never considered. However, as the Netherlands cannot be categorized as a context of operetta production, but only as a context of operetta reception and adaptation, the case is a very compelling one. In Amsterdam especially, audiences could experience a wide array of operetta performances, adapted specifically to suit their tastes.

Using a variety of sources, including libretti, translations, memoires and journal and newspaper articles, I will analyze the transfer strategies used in three different theatres in Amsterdam: the Grand Théâtre, the Salon des Variétés and Theater Frascati. Important aspects include language, style and commerciality. Linking my findings to quantitative data regarding the popularity of operettas in Amsterdam and scholarship about the specific social, political and cultural characteristics of and societal debates in The Netherlands in general, will enable me to demonstrate how foreign ideas about norms, values and social relations were molded to fit a specific Dutch context, and by whom.

In 1935, the operetta star Max Hansen celebrated a triumphal success with his staging of Värdshuset vita hästen in Stockholm, a Swedish translation of the German popular music theater piece Im weißen Rössl (world premiere: 1930 in Berlin).

Hansen had made himself a striking career in Germany in the 1920s as a cabaret artist, singer, and operetta performer. Being of Jewish descent, he moved to safer places in Europe after Hitler came to power, finally arriving in Stockholm and continuing to perform his repertoire there. By working with operettas he already knew from his years in Germany, Hansen could continue his success in Sweden. But he didn’t only help operetta to another heyday in Stockholm: With his stagings, he also functioned as a beacon of hope for persecuted operetta artists. As letters to Hansen show, German and Austrian artists begged him to get an engagement in Hansen’s stagings and hence find a way to escape from the National Socialists.

In this paper, I will examine the impact of Max Hansen on the operetta transfers from Berlin to Stockholm in the 1930s, with a special focus on the musical theater work Im weißen Rössl. Even though Stockholm had a thriving operetta scene for over 100 years (Paavolainen, 2020), there has been little research on this subject. The 1930s are an interesting decade to look at, with its fateful developments in Europe and especially Germany causing the mobility of many operetta artists. Therefore, this paper wants to shed light on the impact of people like Max Hansen and their role in the transfer of popular music theater at a time of persecution.

Since its foundation in Milan in 1874, the Casa Sonzogno focused rather programmatically on the expansion of the operatic experience on a national and international/transnational scale. For both ideological and commercial reasons (the latter, dictated by the suffocating music-publishing market in the Lombard capital) Edoardo Sonzogno (1836-1920) and his nephews Riccardo (1871-1915) and Lorenzo (1877-1920) systematically expanded both the repertoire and the system for the production and dissemination of music theatre. In doing so, they continuously experimented with networks, media, formats, adaptations and audiences, also showing an extraordinary agency in and receptivity towards a rapidly changing market. It is within this process of expansion that we can frame many policies implemented by the Casa Sonzogno, for instance the importation of French and (later) Austro-German operettas and other pieces of “lighter” musical theatre, the concorsi (competitions) established to stimulate the local production of new works and genres, and the numerous operations of transfer, translation and adaptation of musical material across media, venues and audiences.

Using a varied array of sources and outputs, as well as a detailed reconstruction of the commercial and ideological context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy, this paper will explore relevant case studies within the experience of the Casa Sonzogno, from its first importations and adaptations of French works in the 1870s to the impresariato and concorsi of the 1890s, until the operetta films produced by Lorenzo Sonzongo’s “Musical Films'' company in the 1910s. This exploration will hopefully not only reveal a plethora of forgotten musical experiences, but also cast new light on the impact of a frequently undermined agent within a changing and complex cultural landscape and market.

Few composers have been lampooned as much as Richard Wagner, both during his lifetime and after his death. Known for his arrogant personality and his uncompromising artistic vision, Wagner made many enemies in his attempts to impose his revolutionary framework for opera all over Europe. But, for all the criticism coming his way, he also inspired a high number of spoofs, parodies and comic imitations that paid homage to his outsized influence. This phenomenon, which mostly baffled him, began with the stage parodies of Tannhäuser in the 1850s, and reached its apex by the mid-twentieth century, with the new media of animation and cinema. American films like Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) spread an exaggeratedly Teutonic imagery—helmets, horns and bear hides—to an increasingly larger audience, who would revel in the more incongruous aspects of the Wagnerian grand epic. But, in the aftermath of World War II, making fun of Wagner also carried its own special power. It was as a form of exorcism that could address the lingering trauma of Wagner’s and, by extension, of German high art’s association with Nazism.

If we are to accept Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody as ‘a form of imitation but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text’ (1985: 6), the dual nature of parody—criticism as well as acknowledgment of a work’s success—is evident in the examples this panel has chosen to examine. Our exploration of Wagnerian parodies goes across the lines of media, time periods, and national borders. It begins in France in the 1880s, with two complementary papers on instrumental and literary parodies of Wagner, and ends in the second half of the twentieth century, with Anna Russell’s comedic analysis of the Ring cycle. Throughout, we will seek to tease out common strategies in deflating the more problematic characteristics of Wagnerian works, from monumentalism to nationalism. We will also pay special attention to the fact that parody may in fact not be so much the language of the detractor as that of the admirer.

A little man with disheveled gray hair and a deranged look on his face is hammering a quarter-note-shaped spike through an innocent eardrum. The blood spilling over seems to bring him much satisfaction. This 1869 caricature by André Gill has become one of the most famous visual representations of Richard Wagner, arguably even more so than the more realistic depictions available to us. With the enduring success of this parodic image comes the question: why was Wagner such a prized target for caricaturists? And also, why does many a modern listener still associate the Ride of the Valkyries with its cartoon parody “Kill the wabbit”? From Johann Nestroy to Tristanderl und Süssholde, many of Wagner’s works have been lampooned with the view of capitalizing on their success (Borchmeyer 1983, Rowden 2017). In France, while there were stage parodies that followed a similar model around the time of the 1861 premiere of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, composers like Emmanuel Chabrier, who genuinely admired Wagner, also wrote instrumental works that simultaneously mocked and paid homage to the composer (Huebner 1999, Taruskin 2009).

It is this particular mixture of reverence and irreverence that I propose to examine here. As of yet, there is no proper study of French parodies of Wagner in literature, a neglect this paper proposes to remedy. Having selected examples from the Symbolist writers Édouard Dujardin, Jules Laforgue and Teodor de Wyzewa, I show that literary parodies of Wagner are filled with the same ambiguity as their musical counterparts: at once deeply devoted to the cause of Wagnerism and critical of Wagner’s lofty ambitions. Ultimately, I argue that these parodies were instrumental in forging the doctrine of French Wagnerism, a movement that exalted Wagner just as much as it was willing to reinterpret his aesthetics creatively.

French caricatures of Wagner’s works and his artistic ambitions are mostly to be found in literature and in the theater. When it comes to instrumental music, this phenomenon is more marginal. Debussy famously mocked the lyricism of Tristan und Isolde in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner (1908), but he did so in such an understated manner that the pianist who premiered the work, Harold Bauer, did not recognize the quotation of the longing motif to which the composer was referring. The parody is more obvious, however, in two quadrilles for piano four hands: one by Chabrier, entitled Souvenirs de Munich and published posthumously in 1911, and the other by Fauré and Messager, entitled Souvenirs de Bayreuth and published in 1930, also after the death of the two composers. The paratext provides us with humorous instructions that the music alone cannot give: “fantaisie en forme de quadrille” (“fantasy in the form of a quadrille”), mocking Tristan und Isolde and the Ring cycle. While these pieces in the rare genre of Wagnerian instrumental parody have been studied by Taruskin (2005) and Picard (2010), several key aspects remain unexplored, especially concerning both their production and their reception in Wagnerian circles from the 1880s. This paper proposes first to deepen the understanding of the parodic motivations of these two pieces by defining what is imitated from Wagner and how the quotations are transformed. Second, these two Souvenirs seem to have carried different meanings for each of the composers involved: in both cases, if there is parodic intention, it is not certain that one can speak of caricature, especially when considering the piece as a whole. It is notable that, in some passages, the mocking nature of the parody is toned down. Finally, several historical questions emerge. First, the publication of these scores was not a given, as they were salon pieces circulating in manuscript form for many decades. Second, these two Souvenirs are not only parodies but they also illustrate several strands of French Wagnerism in the 1880s, their meaning having changed considerably with their publication several decades later.

English-born comedian, singer, pianist and composer Anna Russell (1911-2006), who described her career as ‘finding the comical in serious music’ (1985: 1), is best known for her send-up of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, a routine she performed on five continents from the early 1950s until her ‘farewell’ tour in the mid-1980s. In her unique style, Russell deftly summarised opera’s biggest canonical work, guiding her audience through the mythological intricacies of Wagner’s plot complete with musical excerpts and commentary. The subtitle of her autobiography confirmed her reputation as ‘the Queen of Musical Parody’, and her Wagner routine has even been discussed in scholarly literature as part of a longer history of Wagner parodies and satires (see Baker 2013, Goehr 2016, Daub 2020). But is it in fact a parody? If so, in what sense? Who, or what, is the object of Russell’s ridicule?

To answer these questions, my paper seeks to go beyond mere analysis of Russell’s script (memorably quotable as it is) to consider her routine as a kind of theatrical performance, the production and reception of which may be pieced together via autobiography, press criticism, fandom and audio(-visual) recordings. Among other things, I want to explore the question of ‘camp’ in Russell’s theatrical persona and the role of camp within the discrimination of social hierarchies of taste (serious/comic, elite/popular etc.), while at the same time bringing into dialogue various, often contradictory strands of her reception. Russell’s routine, I suggest, may be regarded less as a parody in any straightforward sense than as an informed piece of music appreciation for a general audience.

Organized by the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group

Archives and archival work hold a contested position within music studies, especially given recent attempts to redress the forms of exclusion that have traditionally structured the field’s intellectual commitments. As much as they have functioned as the guarantors of scholarly legitimacy and objectivity, archives present a fruitful site to reflect on the larger historiographic, epistemological, and political aporias that accompany their existence. To this end, a growing body of literature has theorized “the archive” to better account for the ways that minoritized lives and practices have been obscured, rendered unruly, or simply forgotten within hegemonic narratives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Diana Taylor, Ann Laura Stoler, Ann Cvetkovich, and Robin Gray have thus articulated new critical perspectives on and from within the archive that productively sit alongside previous accounts from the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. This panel seeks to continue these efforts with papers that that conceptualize, critique, or generally reflect on archives or archival theory in relationship to music studies. Given the multiple “archival turns” that have been staged across the humanities, our contributors engage myriad critical traditions and engage both the theory and praxis involved in archival work.

Do archives need humans to exist? Recent archival studies (e.g., post/decolonial studies, media archaeology) highlight the significant gaps caused by the various political and social contexts in which they were established. But even in these critiques of archival ontologies, humans play a central role in establishing and maintaining archives and their holdings. Yet in this moment of anthropocenic reckoning, it seems equally viable to reflect on archives beyond the human, and particularly what historian of science David Sepkoski has called “the earth as archive.” In this paper, I consider three different instances of geological listening in which the earth functions as a kind of sound archive: first, the noise of boulders being pushed by mountain rivers until they become sand in the ocean, an auditory experience Charles Darwin used to conceptualize the deep time of the earth; second, the emission of sound from bubbles in glacial ice which have recently been recorded and analyzed as a way to measure the rate of ice melt (Tegowski et al, 2014); and finally, in a slightly different configuration, the increasing use of sound (and ultrasound) waves in oil extraction, both to query the earth-as-archive in order to locate oil wells and also to extract oil more efficiently. Listening to the earth-as-archive offers affective and geological insight, yet it also suggests the ways listening itself can easily become co-opted as a tool of environmental destruction, contrary to a long history of sentimental listeners from the Romantics to the World Soundscape Project.

Throughout the early modern period, Spanish overseers of the city of Naples maintained a fleet of galley ships that provided military protection to its busy port and patrolled the coasts of the wider kingdom. As was typical throughout the Mediterranean, these ships relied on rowing labor from enslaved men (mostly north Africans and Ottoman Turks) and local convicts, identified collectively by contemporaries as galeotti. Given the constant provisioning these ships required, Spanish bureaucratic officials called veedores kept meticulous records of rations, munitions, equipment, and the crews themselves. Today held in the military section of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, the archive of this fleet preserves traces of musical life in a maritime carceral space. Alongside contents ranging from cannons to coils of rope, surviving inventories document the presence of musical instruments and the galeotti musicians who would have played them.

This paper examines how Spanish state agents monitored the movements of people and objects within an internal economy dependent upon forms of unfree labor, including music-making. Drawing from recent discussions in early modern studies, I consider these inventories as subjective records of space that index contemporary material associations between objects and their functions. The organizing principles of veedores allude to idiosyncratic notions of material and aesthetic value that temper the Foucauldian vision of panoptic state surveillance. Taking up Ann Stoler’s call to think along as well as against the archival grain, I argue that the maritime archive of the Mediterranean galley reveals music’s circulation within a fluid, contingent space.

The music archive has long favoured collections produced by a single creator, be it a composer, performer, collector. However, continuing to produce archival collections based on the primacy of individual creators is not enough to record the complex assemblages of many musical experiences of the last century. This paper mobilizes the concept of post-custodial archival paradigms, community ownership and long-term sustainability of these models in the case of the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) ideated by Pauline Oliveros, Leif Miller and Jackie Heyen in the early 2000s and the consortium created around AUMI (http://aumiapp.com/).

The diversity and dispersion of AUMI documentation (e.g., coding of various versions of the program; paper-based and digital documentation such as meeting minutes, email exchanges; performance documentation such as video; and traces of online presence) makes it a perfect candidate to apply post-custodial archival principles. Indeed, the post-custodial archive, theorised by Terry Cook (1994), articulates ‘a turn from “archives” as collection or location to “archiving as practice”’ (Zavala et al. 2017, 204). The work presented in this paper is based on interviews with members of the consortium and a survey of existing materials and it will propose possible ways forward on how to archive an experience such as the AUMI consortium. This case study can offer a paradigm for many other musical experiences since WWII in which the communal aspect is paramount (e.g., the Deep Listening community also started by Pauline Oliveros, improvising collectives, the live-coding community).

In 2008, a massive fire tore through Building 6197 of the Universal Music Group in Hollywood, a building known to employees as the “Video Vault.” This structure was a storage facility containing over a half-million master tapes recorded by luminaries of American music. While reports vary, the blaze likely destroyed over one hundred thousand tapes, a devastating loss of cultural artifacts documenting American popular music. The list of artists affected is sobering: Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, Mary J. Blige, Elton John, Slayer, on and on. Yet this was hardly the first tragedy of its kind. Earlier fires had destroyed storage facilities of Atlantic and MGM Records, and in other instances record executives have intentionally destroyed archival materials in order to save money on storage costs.

This presentation considers what it means to preserve massive holdings of cultural history in the storage facilities of commercial record companies, facilities that have been repeatedly shown to be both inaccessible and fragile. In particular, it examines the fuzzy epistemological boundary between archives and vaults. While the two are often conflated in news stories about tape losses, in practice their missions can differ widely in regard to user access, preservational priorities, and conceptions of perceived value (economic, cultural, and otherwise). The presentation draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to ruminate on the status of vaulted tapes, as objects which are perceived as having tremendous value, yet are intentionally shunted away from listening ears for decades, until they are (sometimes) destroyed.