Conference Agenda

For centuries, wealthy residents of European and American metropoles have decorated their homes with exotic object collections and racist figurines, and incorporated colonial motifs into furniture, wallpaper, and silverware. Tavia Nyong’o (2002) describes such home aesthetics as “racial kitsch” that attempts to make the violence of racial subjection banal and quotidian. This paper situates American mid-century mood music—a genre also dismissed as kitsch—within a history of domestic material cultures related to empire-making. Marketed toward white suburbanites, some mood albums provided background music for mundane activities like cleaning or daydreaming, while travel-themed albums like Capitol Records’ South Seas Honeymoon (1959) essentialized cultures, ethnicities, and geographies as musical moods. Keir Keightley (2012) observes that mood music functioned as a kind of “interior design” through which homeowners could display their individual tastes—tastes shaped, if subconsciously, by the U.S.’s growing role as an imperial world power. As Roshanak Kheshti (2015) and others have established, early twentieth-century sound technologies like the phonograph brought sonic notions of empire and difference into the home. Extending this lineage, mid-century hi-fi stereos and LPs afforded new ways to experience colonized cultures at home as “moods.”

Drawing on research from art history, performance studies, and ethnic studies, I explore how mood music furthered the U.S. imperial project by transforming racial stereotypes into sonic décor. Mood albums “civilized” exotic cultures and environments by rendering them within light classical and cool jazz idioms that put white listeners at ease. Frequently employing slow tempi, enveloping string textures, and new high-fidelity recording quality, mood albums portrayed various world cultures in a self-similar, background-appropriate style. Like collectable figurines or other exotic home furnishings, travel-themed mood albums invited their owners to regularly imagine their participation in (neo)colonial processes like resource extraction and luxury consumption, and to sublimate their fears of racial others into polite entertainment. Simultaneously, the kitschy quality of racialized décor, Anne Cheng (2018) argues, ultimately reinforces beliefs that racialized others are artificial and disposable. This paper contributes to discussions of racialized listening in music and sound studies (Eidsheim 2019, James 2019) and sheds light on the political investments of background listening today.

In 1978, Simon Estes became the first Black man to sing a major role at Bayreuth, as the title character in Harry Kupfer’s new staging of Der Fliegende Holländer. This production famously staged the entire opera as the fever dream of Senta, its female protagonist, and it is for this reading of the piece—a young woman’s doomed attempt to escape the gendered strictures of bourgeois domesticity—that Kupfer’s staging soon gained international attention. Yet Kupfer’s dramaturgy does more than focus on Senta’s dreamscape: it insists (as Kupfer did in subsequent interviews) that the Dutchman had to be Black. This talk asks why—and how.

Kupfer’s casting was neither blind (Estes’s racial presentation was the point) nor a literal manifestation of the libretto (such as Amonasro in Aida, another Estes role). Rather, the casting of Estes stemmed from dramaturgy alone: Kupfer’s reading of the opera in which, he claimed, there is something “Black” about the Dutchman and his appeal to the dreaming Senta. Neither the representation of a Black character nor an irrelevant category color-blind casting seeks to ignore, Estes’s race enabled a series of charged references. At times shown in chains in a bloody tableau with a ship’s hull, at times as a highly sexualized leather daddy, Estes’s body served not as his own, but as a site of fungibility, in Saidiya Hartman’s terms: an interchangeable commodity representing the exchangeability of Black bodies as available vessels for white fantasy. Not unlike the staging of Grace Bumbry as “Black Venus” in Wieland Wagner’s 1961 Tannhäuser, which Kira Thurman has shown to draw on contemporary notions of Black femininity as erotic spectacle, this “Black” Dutchman functions primarily through the logic of white desire: both Senta’s sexual fantasy and Kupfer’s dramaturgical one.

As opera studies begins to think seriously about casting, especially how performers’ identities challenge contemporary debates around Regietheater, Kupfer’s staging—precisely in its complicated reliance on stock images—invites us to think about race in performance not only as embodied representation or something blind casting renders inoperative, but as dramaturgical practice. Moreover, Kupfer's postwar, postcolonial staging alerts us--however inadvertently and however clumsily—to the precolonial fantasy that generated the beginnings of Wagnerian opera: sexual desire as a latent drive for colonial possession.

Contemporary concerns regarding the Western art music tradition increasingly speak to issues of social justice, such as the MeToo movement, abuses of power in the professional world, precarious working conditions, and racism and white supremacy. Existing research on classical musicians in metropolitan areas offer ethnographic descriptions that highlight the importance of musical tradition, social networks, musical practices, and working conditions (Cottrell 2004). More recent work centers issues of class, culture, and economic inequalities to demonstrate how material conditions affect cultural preferences and boundaries (Bull 2019). Other scholarship considers the interplay of multiple social identities as well, highlighting issues such as entrepreneurialism, inequity, and gendered minoritarian classical musicians (Scharff 2018).

These approaches utilize various poststructuralist frameworks in explaining broad social trends. What remains to be seen, however, is an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates intersectional feminist frameworks in specifying the variety of ways in which economic realities are experienced and negotiated. Here, intersectional feminist studies offer new epistemological stances that draw attention to how economic conditions relate to dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or sexual orientation.

In this paper, I will analyze how the negotiation of racial, ethnic, gendered, and entrepreneurial identities manifest in the professional lives of gendered musicians of color based in Los Angeles. Based on ethnographic data—such as interviews, fieldnotes, and personal correspondence—and informed by feminist theories including Hong and Ferguson’s comparative racialization (2011) and Muñoz’s disidentification (1999), my analysis will explain the various ways in which gendered minoritarian subjects’ experiences of musical professionalization are problematized by specific, culturally-informed systemic biases which arise through networking and musical tradition. By applying feminist theory and materialist critique, this paper foregrounds gendered minoritarian perspectives within the context of the Western art music tradition, working conditions, and career building. This research ultimately 1) contributes to the visibility of marginalized populations within the classical music profession and 2) particularizes the experiences of economic realities through highlighting the heterogeneity of minoritarian communities.