This dissertation examines the ways that various subcultural audiences define themselves through repeated interaction with musical comedy. By foregrounding the role of the audience in creating meaning and by minimizing the "show" as a coherent work, I reconnect musicals to their roots in comedy by way of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of carnival and reduced laughter. The audiences I study are kids, queers, and collectors, an alliterative set of people whose gender identities and expressions all depart from or fall outside of the normative binary. Focusing on these audiences, whose musical comedy fandom is widely acknowledged but little studied, I follow Raymond Knapp and Stacy Wolf to demonstrate that musical comedy provides a forum for identity formation especially for these problematically gendered audiences.

This dissertation proposes that we consider Broadway’s history and genre development to be periodic rather than a singular trajectory of growth and inevitable decline. Situating the structural, musical, and aesthetic changes on Broadway within a periodic model, we begin to see phases of aesthetic cohesion and fragmentation emerge within a recurring pattern taking place every fifteen to twenty years. In reframing the evolution of Broadway as a model of continued regeneration, rather than a model of inevitable decay, we can see how various stylistic and structural elements from previous generations of musicals rematerialize in contemporary shows. More importantly, by removing the “Golden Age” as a fixed point of comparison in our analysis, we can come to understand the significance of shows often overlooked in more traditional analyses.

Each chapter of this dissertation after the introductory chapter supports this view by offering a case study of a significant trend found on twenty-first century Broadway between 2000-2015 and situating that trend within the proposed periodic model. Chapter Two offers a close analysis of the scenographic practices in the output of the Disney Theatrical Group after 2000. I consider how the use of advanced stage technology in their musicals developed, and differs, from the pure technological spectacle of the megamusical. Chapter Three looks at the intersection between popular culture, camp, and the Broadway musical. The chapter traces the shift in camp sensibilities in self-reflexive musicals specifically developed to appeal to mainstream audiences, from being grounded in theater-related humor to being primarily popular culture-based. Chapters Four and Five explore productions from the post-millennium that more directly complicate the traditional “Golden Age” narrative. In Chapter Four, I provide a scenographic and socio-historical comparison of the concept musical with its post-millennium counterpart that I call the “neo-conceptual musical.” And, in Chapter Five, I compare how differently the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the work of Stephen Sondheim are approached and revived in recent years, and offer a reflection on how issues of nostalgia, “Golden Age” preferentialism, and politics of taste play out in the business of reviving (and revising) musicals in the post-millennium.

American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defines the practices of Mormonism—America’s fastest-growing religion? I address these questions in this dissertation by applying methodologies from Musicology, Voice Studies, Performance Studies, and American Studies to the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between Mormonism and American musical theater. In the introduction, I discuss how speaking on behalf of another person is rooted within both Mormonism and musical theater and argue for its critical examination. In Chapter 1, I argue that Mormonism and American musical theater are cut from the same ideological cloth and that musicals are intertwined with Mormon theology. Chapter 2 looks at the ways Mormons used musical theater as an assimilative tool during the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 3 looks at how Mormons used musical theater to “whiten” dark-skinned Polynesians and Native Americans, converting them, in essence, to Mormonism. In Chapter 4 I argue that the Mormon musical Saturday’s Warrior helped Mormons bypass the strict system of order within Mormonism called Correlation. In Chapter 5, I suggest the Broadway musical Book of Mormon can be read as a critique of Correlated Mormonism.

My investigation led to my conclusion that voice and vocal theatricality are deeply rooted concepts in Mormonism, to such a degree that I claim Mormons practice a theology of voice. I argue that analyzing the Mormon relationship with musicals from the mid-nineteenth century to today helps conceptualize the phenomenon of speaking on behalf of another person (or God), a process I call the vicarious voice. By closely examining voice in Mormonism and musical theater, I construct a theoretical approach to the performance of vocal vicarity. I conclude that, in an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness.

“Dissident Vibrations” builds on existing literature within the Black Radical Tradition, Chicana feminisms, and Sound Studies to propose that Chicanas have developed methods of musical political dissidence that, while varied in their style, delivery, and scale of impact, are woven together through a shared radical political imaginary. This imaginary resists containment by national borders, racial divides, or gendered conscriptions, and advances visions of transformative, intersectional liberation. This work expands upon Deborah Vargas's concept of dissonance—an aberration from hegemonic gendered norms, regardless of the political commitments of the performer in question—by centering a commitment to radical political world-making through music.

Using hermeneutic analyses of compositions Felix Mendelssohn wrote during the 1840s as points of departure, this dissertation depicts him as a cultural figure who used music to both underwrite and transform the state and identity politics of Restoration-era Prussia and, more broadly, German-speaking Europe. Four musical case studies point to diverse facets of this sociopolitical engagement, contextualizing it within contemporary Prussian politics and the history of German-speaking Jewry. In Chapter 2, a Sir Walter Scott-inflected examination of the narrative of the Scottish Symphony sheds light on Mendelssohn’s investment in a “politics of reconciliation,” a state-sponsored discourse that advocated the integration of minority groups into Prussian modernity through the historicization of difference. In Chapter 3, a Ludwig Tieck-informed hearing of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals an effort at state-sponsored cultural appropriation that both glorified and critiqued the Prussian monarchical order. In Chapter 4, comparison of Mendelssohn’s Prussian sacred music with the work of contemporary plastic artists August Reichensperger and Philipp Veit suggests that the composer’s use of historical “Catholic” styles was intended as a form of engagement in nationalist politics, both Prussian and pan-German. In Chapter 5, a rehearing of the opening Allegro of the Violin Concerto is used as a metaphor for the leadership role that Mendelssohn assumed in developing a “German” musical canon, building “German” musical institutions, and assimilating Jewish musicians into “German” musical life. The dissertation concludes, in Chapter 6, with a brief look at Weimar-era anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic reactions to Mendelssohn’s oeuvre, an exploration intended to emphasize the sociopolitical stakes of discourse about music and to invite further research on Mendelssohn reception.

In this dissertation I argue for the importance of the film soundtrack as affective archive through a consideration of the horror soundtrack. Long dismissed by scholars in both cinema media studies and musicology as one of horror’s many manipulative special effects employed in the aesthetically and ideologically uncomplicated goal of arousing fear, the horror soundtrack is in fact an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to historicize changes in cultural sensibilities and public feelings about sexuality. I explore the critical potential of the horror soundtrack as affective archive through formal and theoretical analysis of the role of music in the representation of sexuality in the horror film. I focus on films consumed in the Unites States during the 1970s, a decade marked by rapid shifts in both cultural understanding and cinematic representation of sexuality.

My analyses proceed from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework animated by methods drawn from affect studies, American studies, feminist film theory, film music studies, queer of color critique, and queer theory. What is the relationship between public discourses of fear around gender, race, class, and sexuality, and the musical framing of sexuality as fearful in the horror film? I explore this central question through the examination of significant figures in the genre (the vampire, the mad scientist/creation dyad, and the slasher or serial killer) and the musical-affective economies in which they circulate. I argue that attention to the ways in which music interacts with moving images and narrative in the horror genre provides a new way of interrogating the political history of sexuality in the United States, one uniquely equipped to theorize and analyze areas of culture that are often left unanalyzed because of their close engagement with emotions and the body.

This dissertation pairs together two contrasting concert musicians, African American pianist-composer Don Shirley (1927-2013), revived by the 2018 film Green Book, and Russian pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). Both faced aspects of erasure, reducing the likelihood of being heard or understood on their own terms. Rachmaninoff’s erasure stemmed from a Slavic alterity assigned to him outside of Russia and class differences within Russia during the turbulent inter-revolutionary period. Shirley’s arose from anti-Black barriers barring him from performing European classical music on concert stages. Both pianists, facing reductive assumptions, created musical dualities, enabling them to hold onto core, authentic realities as they shaped their careers, even if the public might read their presentations alternatively, perhaps through initial biases.

I study Rachmaninoff’s 1930 recorded performance of Fr�d�ric Chopin’s Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 35, focusing on the first three movements, using Rachmaninoff’s composed sequel Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 36 as a guiding Rosetta Stone. I identify Rachmaninoff’s performance as an artifact of the Russian Revolution’s “losing side”—the aristocracy. I fill a gap surveying wordless instrumental music and identify, through the trope of illness, the Eastern Orthodox hope of recovery—deification—of resurrecting Mother Russia, which embodied Rachmaninoff’s attempt to preserve “true Russianness” during his perpetual exile. Considering selections from his 1955 album, Tonal Expressions, among others, I examine how Shirley, through developing what I term the “Green Book Style,” inched as close as he could to the category of classical music while pushing against the limits of the sonic color line. I consider how Shirley called upon aspects of the Werktreue ideal, putting himself in line with “serious” music-making to stimulate more engaged, idealized listening, even when performing in nightclubs. This dissertation seeks to contribute to dismantling the problematic musical “middlebrow,” a category that consigns racial and ethnic misfits into the category of “all others” relative to the hegemony. My work contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of music performance studies; my assessments move from micro-readings of “data” as concrete performance analysis to corporeal, intertextual, and subject position queries about culture, race, and personhood. [Components: Written Dissertation + Performance Video]

This dissertation investigates musical expressions of temporal alterities in works created by popular music artists, identifying their aesthetic responses as their bodies become ill, disabled, and they become more aware of mortality. I propose a critical, hermeneutic, and theoretical method drawn from Edward Said’s appropriation of Adorno’s expression “late style” that I have designated ill style, a form of creativity within a temporality of illness. Late style is discernable in works produced, paradigmatically, at the end of one’s career in “old age,” but late style may also be understood as an influence on artistic output at any stage of life if the subject is experiencing untimeliness and a disruption in access to the communal understanding of futurity and time, a possible consequence of factors other than age. I contend that late style, accelerated by illness, disrupts Western cultural attempts at ignoring precarious and finite nature of existence; the resulting expressions of lateness ask audiences to do the same. I offer a way in which to think more critically about what scholars consider late style, how it functions in popular music studies and society, and how it intersects with the fields of disability, gender, queer, and critical race studies, and the social sciences.

This work critiques and expands late style as a critical construct, and brings popular music into the lineage of musical traditions where late style has historically been examined. This study focuses on artists for whom late style is contingent upon illness and illness-induced disability, rather than the accepted path of aging and resulting bodily decline. The value of recognizing ill style and the temporality of illness lies in its potential to expand listeners’ understanding of illness as a state inherent to the human condition. If a listener can hear these sounds of illness or suffering in musical works, it helps integrate disability and illness into our concept of normative human experience.