Patchwork Nation: Collage, Music, and American Identity.

Abstract

Collage has emerged as the quintessential art form of the twentieth century through its sustained impact across the arts and through its embodiment of cross-cultural social movements. Drawing on interdisciplinary models that engage with collage’s formal, semiotic, and cultural properties, this dissertation proposes a theory of musical collage, and applies this theory specifically to the construction and iteration of American musical nationalism across the twentieth century. Collage captures this dynamic and contentious process by exposing the seams, thus preserving a tension between the whole and its diverse constituent parts. Furthermore, because collage is polysemic, it can resist narrative/ counternarrative and other binary approaches and better attend to the complex power structures that shape American music’s diversities.

Balancing a top-down theoretical approach with a bottom-up study of collage as cultural practice, the dissertation comprises five case studies that showcase a diverse array of methodologies, musical genres, and cultural debates. Chapter One illuminates how collage underpins theories of nationalism, and how these theories shaped the reception of Edward MacDowell’s, George Antheil’s, and Charles Ives’s divergent strategies for creating a nascent American art music. Turning to the Broadway stage, Chapter Two examines how Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Balanchine collaboratively staked their own claim of musical nationalism by combining ballet, classical music, jazz, and musical theater in On Your Toes (1936). Chapter Three uses Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) to trace the shifting values of folk music in American identity, from the original 1920s commercial recordings Smith used through the Smithsonian’s 1997 reissue of the Anthology. Addressing how collage continues to operate today, Chapter Four examines how collage negotiates between individual, subcultural, and national experiences of AIDS and 9/11 in two musical memorials: John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 (1991) and John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (2002). Finally, Chapter Five demonstrates how multiple collages, including YouTube mashups, hip hop songs, official playlists, and a star-studded Inaugural concert continually reconstructed Barack Obama’s image to navigate crucial social and political issues. To conclude, I reflect on the analytical benefits and challenges posed by the malleable nature of collage.