Conference Agenda

When Amy Beach (1867–1944) lost her husband and mother within eight months at the age of forty-three, she found herself in a precarious position both personally and professionally. During the previous twenty-five years, she had enjoyed a comfortable life and a brilliant career in Boston thanks to the unwavering support and wide-ranging connections of her husband, Dr. H.H.A. Beach. Rather than stay at home to nurture her local affiliations, however, she took the bold step of sailing for her first European trip on September 5, 1911, her forty-fourth birthday. Over the next three years she parlayed her few connections there into strategic performance opportunities; she challenged her publisher A. P. Schmidt—a medical patient and personal friend of her late husband—to support her efforts beyond what he deemed necessary; and she leveraged the press reviews from Germany to create a national reputation at home before she returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I. The woman who had sailed a broken mourner in 1911 returned a conquering hero in 1914. Beach’s European sojourn was a study in liminal spaces: between her old and new life personally, between the Romanticism of her earlier works and the Modernism she would later explore stylistically, and between the old and new European order politically. Drawing on recently uncovered documents in the Schmidt archives and German newspapers, I will argue that Beach took more active ownership of this inflection point of her career than has previously been acknowledged. She emerged from personal tragedy stronger and better equipped to claim a second career as America’s foremost female pianist/composer. Her refusal to settle for an early retirement in widowhood transformed her from a respectable local composer to a leader of national and international reputation, laying the groundwork for decades of productivity and happiness.

This paper traces the influence of promotion on the career and compositions of American composer and bandleader Duke Ellington. Scholars agree that Ellington and his manager, Irving Mills, developed a clear marketing plan early in his career, one that positioned Ellington as a composer-bandleader who stood apart from the transience of the Tin Pan Alley song factory. What is less known is the extent to which Ellington persisted in promoting this narrative consistently and coherently throughout his career. I claim, however, that it was this persistence that distinguished Ellington from his peers, and facilitated his artistic longevity and eventual rise to icon status.

At the core of my claim is an analysis of over a dozen “publicity manuals” created for Ellington, first under the oversight of Irving Mills, and later updated and revised throughout the rest of Ellington’s career. These manuals, many of which are held in Ellington’s archives, pull back the curtain to give a remarkable look into how Ellington was promoted. They contain pre-written “punch lines” for newspaper ads, stock photos, biographies of band members, and an extensive set of press releases—canned articles that could be submitted to local papers to precede an Ellington concert appearance. What the manuals reveal is an artist who benefitted from clarity and consistency in his promotional materials. Some story hooks in the press releases persisted for more than thirty years, such as the one that labeled Ellington’s music and Walt Disney’s cartoons “the only two original American art forms.” At the same time, Ellington’s marketing plan shifted in key ways over the years, from emphasis on his prowess as a “dance” band leader and exponent of African American music, to an American “composer” of concert music—“America’s genius of modern music,” as one punch line put it. And even though the publicity manuals paint a vivid picture of the strategies used to establish Ellington as an American icon, they have only been analyzed sparsely and largely in isolation (Cohen 2010; Lasker 2017; Woideck 2017). This paper presents the first study of the contents, influence, and development of the manuals over time.

Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882–1961) went to an unusually great effort to control the posthumous narrative of his biography. He preserved and carefully curated many thousands of letters, photographs, writings and other objects, documenting his life through his autobiographical museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Grainger’s materials vividly illustrate his problematic legacy: from his deliberate and artificial construction of an ‘Australian’ musical identity to his views on race, well-documented sadomasochism, and personal eccentricities.

Grainger has long been a subject of fascination for playwrights and filmmakers, with over a dozen stage and screen adaptions of his life story made since his death. This paper aims to untangle the multiple ways that these films and plays construct, present, or even re-invent Grainger—both person and composer. These works are explored in tension with Grainger’s own self-conscious self-depiction, and within the socio-political context of their own time. The paper argues that, since the second half of the twentieth century, the figure of Grainger has been mobilized for a variety of political ends. While some works accept Grainger’s own construction of a ‘democratic’ and ‘Australian’ identity, others critically apply feminist and post-colonial readings to his biography, questioning laudatory representations of male ‘genius’, and problematizing uncritical acceptance of his place in Australian and US music history. Case studies include Thérèse Radic’s 1982 play A Whip-Round for Percy Grainger (a product of the nationalist new wave theatre movement); the film Passion: The Extraordinary Life of Percy Grainger (1999, dir. Peter Duncan, a commercial release conforming to a traditional biopic arc), and Grainger at Home by Karen Van Spall and Lucy Eisdale (first produced 2016, interrogating Grainger’s relationships with women through a intersectional feminist lens).

While there has been much scholarly consideration of the composer biopic and depictions of musicians’ lives on stage, works on Grainger are yet to be analysed. As Grainger remains significant in Australian and North American twentieth-century musical history, the questions about biography, culture and music raised by these works can offer new ways for scholars and performers to engage with Grainger’s music and complex legacy.