Conference Agenda

By the 1950s, mainstream Western canonical pianism had shed many idiosyncratic performance practices that had once been widespread in the nineteenth century. One feature that developed from this shift was an austere, standardizing modernism that intensified amid moral panics surrounding Black-associated jazz, which began to find common ground with classical music. This presentation examines the transnational case of Don Shirley, a Jamaican American mid-century pianist who was classically oriented but systematically pushed into nightclubs due to racial barriers. This paper argues that seemingly extinct features of non-textualist, nineteenth-century Romantic pianism persisted in spaces normally coded as entertainment rather than art, particularly among certain Black performers. Among such co-creative features were improvisation, transcription, and re-composition.

Shirley’s upper-middle-class, British-colonial-era Jamaican habitus shaped his musicianship in Jim Crow America. His artistry opens the case for a historiographical frame of Romanticism representative of a subset of Black performers otherwise misunderstood or illegible. This variety of Romanticism also operated within Afro-diasporic traditions of dexterous subversion, the resourceful outmaneuvering of oppressive forces (see Gates Jr. 1988). Ironically, Shirley would find himself repositioned as a “master” concert pianist reclaiming authentic Romantic performance practices and ethos while pushing against dominant Black sincerity politics (cf. Trilling 1972).

I conceptually apply Carl Czerny’s Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte (1829) to Shirley’s improvised album, Orpheus in the Underworld (1956), which he references in accompanying liner notes. I also consider Shirley’s 1959 transcription of “This Nearly Was Mine” (from Rodgers’ South Pacific), using the Liszt-Wagner transcription of “Isolde’s Liebestod” (1867) as an analytic reference point. Close listening, selected transcription, and piano emulation ground my analyses. By examining such Romantic performance practices in Shirley’s pianism, manifested through his mediation between art and popular/vernacular music spheres, this study opens lines of inquiry that reveal less frequently explored Romantic analogies in relation to Black performers. These include idealist and programmatic aesthetics, exile, Innerlichkeit as cultivated inwardness, and interiority as a personal, inner sanctuary, all of which dialogue with Black musical studies scholarship (Hartman, Brooks, Moten, et al.). This study challenges narrow conceptions of what has counted as “Black” musical expression in mid-century America.