Conference Agenda

Between 1958 and 1981, Columbia Records producer and performing artist Mitch Miller (1911-2010) established a sing-along brand that encompassed LPs, television programs, and in-person tours. Television appears to have been his preferred medium, yet Miller never had the small-screen success that he felt he deserved. His syndicated program on NBC, which broadcast from 1961 to 1964, was cancelled after three seasons, and his two attempts to get back on the air, in 1965 and 1981, were both ultimately unsuccessful. Miller’s efforts and frustrations suggest that the television industry was fundamentally uncomfortable embracing musical participation as a premise, while Miller himself was inconsistent in framing his own programs. On the one hand, he often centered participatory values in his planning and marketing, making musical, casting, and production decisions intended to facilitate widespread participation. On the other, he repeatedly fell back into presentational patterns, allotting the bulk of each episode to vaudeville-style performances and struggling to define a role for the studio audience.

When Miller invited participation, he never verbalized limits regarding who might constitute the singing community. However, his attempts to facilitate participation often had the effect of excluding or silencing vast swaths of his potential dispersed choir. This presentation will focus on gendered limitations. Miller, for example, attempted to facilitate a participatory ethos by casting songleaders who “look like the man at home,” yet repeatedly rejected the possibility of admitting women to his Sing Along Gang. When women appeared onscreen with the Gang during closing sing-along sequences, their voices were inaudible as a result of his approach to recording. Women at home were silenced as well; while Miller stated that he selected keys with great care, in practice they favored men’s voices, often relegating the amateur female singer to an uncomfortable range. This research puts theories of musical participation into conversation with archival materials held at the New York Public Library. These include television episodes, internal NBC memoranda, ratings service reports, promotional materials, and a manuscript proposal for a 1965 reboot of Sing Along with Mitch that was never filmed.

Music of the Hollywood Bowl, pops concerts, white wine socials, and lounges—often amalgamated in nature—is frequently slotted into the “middlebrow,” a reductive catch-all that has frustrated queries into its cultural function and implications. Often consigned to this problematic catch-all, the Black American pianist Don Shirley—reintroduced by the film Green Book (2018), which emphasized 1960s politics—necessarily invented his own genre by inflecting American sources, such as popular standards, folk music, and spirituals, with European classical techniques and quotations. In Green Book, his music plays a tributary role, ultimately suggesting inconsequentiality. His sizeable recorded legacy, however, connects the politically disengaged “middlebrow” to the Civil Rights Movement.

This paper considers previously inaccessible interviews, including uncut director’s footage from Black Omnibus (1973), a television series hosted by James Earl Jones that celebrated Black culture. The series hearkens back to Omnibus (1952-1961), which strove to cultivate the masses. Suggesting older assimilationist, racial uplift ideology, Shirley’s appearance would appear to evince middleclass, upwardly mobile sensibilities reinforced by his music’s conservatism relative to more progressive Black genres. On closer examination, however, Shirley aimed not to “elevate” other Black Americans or to establish retrograde, Victorian adjacency to white listeners. His music leaned rather toward direct intervention: rehabilitation, reclamation, and thought-reform of racially discriminating listeners.

Examining Shirley’s Negro spiritual settings from Black Omnibus, among other performances, I situate his insider’s, coded double-speak in the context of his classical orientations and intertextual leanings. Shirley was forced to perform in nightclubs—or “toilets” as he called them—after being denied classical concert management, notably by impresario Sol Hurok, who remarked, “America isn’t ready for a colored pianist.” He navigated this situation of audile discrimination, employing what I term his “Green Book Piano Style,” which musically mirrored the Negro Motorist Green Book as part of his alignment with Paul Robeson, Ralph Bunche, Robert Kennedy, and Soviet philosophy. With his conscientiously constructed pianism, Shirley recasts the musical “middlebrow” as a more direct activist arm of the Civil Rights Movement, psychologically stimulating idealized, engaged, “serious” listening of an otherwise inaudible Black performer within racially restrictive concert music culture.

Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera The Little Sweep (1949) emerges from an accepted if timeworn postwar perspective on representations of childhood. Albeit rare, even when the subject of childhood — as discrete from children — in Britten’s operas is discussed at length and examined critically (Bridcut, 2006; Mitchell, 2004; Allen, 1999), The Little Sweep remains curiously othered. I propose it is revelatory of the composer and his upbringing, offering a lens exclusively into the world of the child. Britten is invested in providing the opera’s children with agency. This is in sharp relief to depictions of children elsewhere in Britten’s operatic output, who exist in the realm of adulthood. Correspondence and interim drafts between the composer and librettist Eric Crozier reveal their desire to center the child’s voice, their experience, and their worldview. The children of Iken Hall, Suffolk, and their visiting cousins — whose lives suddenly intersect with the sweep-boy — have their nursery idyll fractured. The opera engages directly with the theme of forced child labor and its consequent abuses, specifically the trauma inflicted upon the eponymous Sammy. The action occurs in 1810, more than two decades before child labour legislation (Factory Act, 1833; Mines Act, 1842). If the distance softens the industrial pallor of children’s plight it also resonates in the postwar era, likewise, signaling Britten’s pacifistic beliefs. Britten and Crozier craft a realm in which the physical space of the nursery — projected as a uniquely safe, nurturing space — supports existing metaphors of innocence and youth. Yet this idealized interior space occupies a fixed binary to its exterior realities. Therein, the children themselves also exist as binaries: naïve occupants of the nursery introduced to the chimneysweep’s societal ill-treatment. His experience — “torn from play and sold for pay” by his downtrodden father to a depraved and abusive sweep-master — is wildly divergent from their own. The cousins actively engage in problem-solving skills, situational discernment, and exhibit a prescient level of emotional intelligence that nevertheless retains its playfulness (signifying still another binary). The exploration of Britten’s intent to envoice childhood and imbue children with agency marks a new area of study in his operas.