Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Disney and Musical Representations of American Identity Location: Greenway Ballroom B-I Session Chair: Jeremy J. Peters, Wayne State University | |
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“At the End of the Street”: The Marching Band as a Sonic Marker of U.S. American Identity University of Texas at Austin “At the end of the street, the marching band appears in full regalia!” describes Walt Disney on the long play (LP) Walt Disney Takes You to Disneyland as he guides the listener through the soundscapes of Main Street, U.S.A. at the Disneyland Resort located in Orange County, California. Once the listener reaches the “end of the street,” a march reminiscent of John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever begins to play. Intriguingly, the Disneyland Band performs the actual march every day at the Flagpole on Main Street U.S.A. during the Flag Ceremony. Main Street, U.S.A. is Walt Disney’s vision of “a typical American town” set between 1890-1910 boasting Victorian architecture, lush gardens, a train station, and other carefully and strategically designed symbols of American identity. This assumed “typicality” makes Disneyland an important site for the construction of an imagined U.S. American cultural identity that is linked to the sounds of marching bands. The LP features original music, specially composed by George Bruns, that evokes the sounds of the theme park’s various lands, further supported by Walt Disney’s narration. This music does not play in the theme park yet serves as a valuable referential marker to the production of a U.S. American identity that transcends Disneyland’s borders, bolstered by live performances currently found in the theme park. Dialoguing with double-diegesis (Camp 2017) and pop nostalgia (Dwyer 2015), I argue that Disneyland reifies the marching band sound as a sonic marker of U.S. American identity both in the physical location of the theme park and the imagined soundscape of the hyperreal physical space. Through semiotic and hypertextual analyses, I examine two sites of meaning making: 1) the sonic relationship between Sousa marches and the original music of the LP that evokes the soundscapes of Main Street, U.S.A. and 2) the role of the marching band in the dissemination of U.S. American identity in and out of Disneyland. By analyzing the soundscape of Main Street, U.S.A., I demonstrate the prominent role that Disneyland and its music have had on the intricate production of U.S. American national identity in contemporary culture. | |