Conference Agenda

At the turn of the twentieth century, barbershop harmony was in its “golden era.” Though close-harmony singing at the time was largely a racially segregated practice, both white and Black barbershop quartets experienced commercial success and cultural cachet. What’s more, many white barbershoppers acknowledged the influence of Black Americans on the style, with one prominent white barbershopper even insisting that “the American Negro is the very fountainhead of barbershop harmony singing.” Yet beginning in the 1940s, the narrative changed: white Americans opposed racial integration in barbershop singing not only on social grounds, but musical grounds as well. A growing population of practitioners believed that barbershop harmony was “not instinctive or natural to [Negroes],” whose musical talents were supposedly limited to spirituals and jazz.

How did Black Americans go from being recognized as an essential part of barbershop history to being viewed as fundamentally—culturally, even biologically—incompatible with the style? In this paper, I argue that the answer lies in barbershop’s entrenchment in biological racism, eugenics, and other white supremacist ideologies prevalent in the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival documents, I interrogate the logics attempting to limit Black expression: for example, the positive stereotype that “the Negro alone has [the spiritual] in his blood” invokes the language of race pseudoscience (Pascoe 2009, Koza 2021), and consequently is used to justify the negative stereotype that Black Americans “lack some little touch that [white barbershoppers] have.” Indeed, some white barbershoppers proclaimed that Black bodies could not produce the sounds of barbershop, or at least their white ears would not accept it as such (Eidsheim 2019). These beliefs, rooted in eugenics, informed approaches to preserving this whitewashed barbershop style: efforts to propagate the style had to be “natural events,” guided by barbershop’s past history and traditions, lest the style become “diluted” or a “crossbreed.”

Barbershop’s history speaks to issues of deep-seated racial bias that musicologists are still grappling with today. As we continue to unearth instances of biological racism informing musical thought (Christensen 2019, Ewell 2021), this case study demonstrates the fraught relationship between musical styles and the bodies allowed to perform them.

American guitar music from the antebellum period has been the subject of very little scholarship, perhaps due to this repertoire’s domestic rather than concert function and its largely popular rather than classical aesthetic orientation. Although some valuable research on related topics does exist (such as Richard Wetzel on music publisher William C. Peters and Philip Gura on the early Martin guitar company), almost no scholarly literature is primarily concerned with the era’s prolific guitar composer-arrangers and their music. This paper focuses on Philadelphia conductor, composer, and publisher Leopold Meignen (1793-1873), who published more than 200 guitar works from 1830-70. Meignen was a conductor of several high-profile concert music ensembles and a composer of concert works, but there is little if any evidence that he was active as a guitar performer or guitar teacher. I thus attempt to answer the following research question: Why would a busy musician whose primary musical activities lay elsewhere produce so much music for guitar? I argue that Meignen used guitar music to generate a reliable and easy source of income that helped finance his concert music activities. During an era of low orchestral salaries and little publisher interest in concert music genres, Meignen published guitar music that accommodated popular taste and provided essential additional income. I will demonstrate several strategies that Meignen used to facilitate the economic viability of his guitar music, including: 1) Production of guitar arrangements of already successful piano songs in much greater numbers than original compositions; 2) Modest technical difficulty, ease of arrangement, explicit marketing to amateurs, and self-publication; 3) Textual references (in work dedications and lyrics) to prominent musical and non-musical individuals and groups; and 4) Exploitation of popular cultural and political trends. In short, Meignen was “classical” in his primary musical pursuits but largely “popular” in his publication and business practices, a description applicable to many of the era’s most prominent American musicians. This research enhances the historical picture of a sizable and poorly understood repertoire, the diverse musical careers economically necessary during this era, the business practices of the sheet music industry, and the preferences of contemporary consumers.

Studies of music in the United States during the Early Republic (ca. 1780–1830) have long cast the Mid-Atlantic and New England states as the nexus of emerging “American” music and musical culture, while presenting cities like Charleston and New Orleans as exceptional bastions of cosmopolitanism in an otherwise rural South. The American North and a very few cities in the American South are seen as musical centers and sites of innovation; other geographic areas are, at best, emulators of their more advance cultural counterparts.

In this paper, I challenge these assumptions by examining the 1815 Virginia Personal Property Tax Records, a unique tax assessment that inventoried the ca. 700 keyboard instruments and harps in homes throughout the state. I argue that existing paradigms of “musical centers” ill fit the process of urbanization in Virginia or its effect on musical culture. In 1815, owning keyboard instruments and harps was a decidedly urban phenomenon—one consistent from the smallest towns to the largest cities. A broad spectrum of middle-class and upper-class urban families and individuals owned these instruments. Particularly well represented were recent immigrants of French, Scottish, Jewish, and German descent, many of whom established themselves as merchants, doctors, and lawyers. Conversely, in most rural areas, owning a keyboard instrument or harp was a rarity, even for the wealthiest families.

The 1815 tax record captures multiple divisions in Virginia. Rural areas clung to the older paradigm of harps and keyboard instruments as luxuries; urban areas showed the establishment of a cosmopolitan cohort of middle- and upper-class families that enjoyed access to multiple musical markets. Even as this emerging musical culture challenged the social authority of the old-Anglo-American elite, it created new divisions by remaining all but closed to Virginia’s growing urban population of free people of color.