Conference Agenda

A tender orchestral introduction is followed by a biographical sketch of the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln; then comes a succession of quotations from Lincoln’s most famous speeches, each more impassioned than the last; finally, a soaring crescendo as the orchestra brings the proceedings to a rousing conclusion.

For some, this description will call to mind Aaron Copland’s 1942 work for narrator and orchestra, Lincoln Portrait. For others, it will seem obviously to describe Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an audio-animatronic attraction created by Walt Disney for the 1964 World’s Fair, which was installed at Disneyland the following year. In fact, Copland’s work and Disney’s attraction are so similar in their structure that it is almost hard to believe the parallels have gone unnoticed until now.

In this paper, I investigate the possibility that Disney, who admired Copland’s music, may have modelled Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln on Lincoln Portrait. I document the parallels between the two and argue that they were successful because of the calming, hopeful message they delivered at moments of national crisis (the Second World War and the Cold War, respectively). Finally, I query the relevance of that message to contemporary audiences, as Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln continues to play at Disneyland and Lincoln Portrait remains a fixture of the modern classical music canon, and I consider how theme parks and concert halls alike serve as sites at which middlebrow aesthetics are joined to mainstream political ideals.

“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.

For generations, the Walt Disney Company has symbolized wholesome entertainment, promoting conservative family values in brightly, colored packaging. Post-World War II, many “Golden Age” (1929-1942) Disney fans who grew up during the Great Depression fashioned middle-class nuclear families and their children were primed to be indoctrinated by what is known as Disney’s “Silver Age” of animation (1950-1967), as model products of the American Dream. For such an accomplished era of the company’s growth, there is surprisingly little scholarship on from Disney’s “Silver Age,” which features the largest number of singing child protagonists whose musical desires coincides with the films’ obvious message. This paper examines how Disney’s musical adaptations imbue the 1950 cultural zeitgeist on child-rearing, where the child must be engendered as a model citizen either by discovering proper parental figures or becoming one themselves. Through an analysis of Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), and The Jungle Book (1967), I will explore how the Walt Disney Company capitalized on censorship, themes from the Golden Age of British Children’s Literature and pastoral music techniques to promote conservative values, supporting the healthy, nuclear family as the emblem of the American Dream. In my analysis, I use Megan Messuen’s concept of binary polarization to emphasize the gendered construction of child protagonist songs and domestic expectations of the characters. Through my analysis, I aim to show how Walt Disney composers utilized pastoral music techniques to achieve the Golden Age of Children’s Literature home-away-home narrative, which postulates the nuclear family as the ultimate happily ever after.