The year 1937 met many Soviet people tragically. Imprisonments, exiles, and executions did not discriminate nationalities, stratum, or social position․ The Great Purge referred to folk singers as well. This paper concerns the heritage of an Armenian folk singer named Smbat who lived in Shnogh village of Armenia situated in Soviet Empire, now in the Republic of Armenia. Smbat’s performance was well known in the village and in neighboring places. Each local event was accompanied by his performance, and until now his songs are sung in the village. Being a farmer, Smbat earned rich living by his personal diligence․ While in 1937 he was exiled to Siberia, he was assassinated in the way and never arrived there. Smbat’s heritage is kept in a private archive of his heirs. While it includes poetic texts only, some music materials were possible to find as sung by the fellow villagers. Some songs present political texts with social context, and some are typical folk songs widespread in traditional Armenian folk music. Among them are lyrical songs, joke songs, and duets. My research lead to comparative analysis of those songs and their homologues that have been collected in different regions and are found in different published Armenian folk song collections. It is possible to resume that Smbat was a native of Armenian folklore, and at the same time the creation of definite portion of his heritage was conditioned by the political situation of the purge.

Musicking is labor (Marx 1857-58). Reperforming technologies mediate the labor of musicians, which is inseparable from dynamics of race and class. A media archeology of the player piano exposes these dynamics, as these instrument-machines were marketed to the white middle class as labor-saving devices, which in the case of race rolls mediated the labor of Black pianists within the white bourgeois parlor room.

Several scholars have argued that the player piano erases the body while mediating the soul of the pianist (Wente 2022), giving the white subject access to the Black soul (Dolan 2009; Ellis 2013). I counter such discourse with observations from Black studies, namely theorizations of the nineteenth-century Black body as a soulless object (Moten 2003; McMillan 2015). In this paper I argue that the player piano mediates the mechanical objecthood of the laboring Black body, situating the instrument within a broader history of racialized automata.

19^th-century case studies reveal how Black pianists reappropriated the player piano as a site of resistance. By tracing the self-depressing keys with their fingers, pianists established tactile, transtemporal contact, reshaping notions of subjectivity, temporality, and community central to Weheliye's Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005). Through reappropriating labor and objecthood, Black pianists assume the role of embodied avatars (McMillan 2015), reframing the player piano as a site of Moten's "resistance of the object" (2003). Situated at the intersection of media theory, organology, and Black studies, this paper highlights the nexus between the history of sound recording and the construction of race within U.S. modernity.

This paper uncovers the lost early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English. Habitually associated with the end of the 19^th century, these terms in fact arose during the 1840s. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that folk song and folk music emerged initially as direct translations of the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. Having lived briefly in Heidelberg (a focal point of German Romanticism exemplified by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Howitt would have been aware of Herder’s coinage and the lack of an equivalent word in English. I trace these terms as they begin to circulate across the Atlantic, asking how and why there were first employed. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but an idea. Indeed, it is the concept of the folk that most enchants writers during this period. These terms, then, were a reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that defined modernity—used by writers who were never of the folk they speak about. Ultimately, this story exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.