In the early twentieth century, the publishers of Tin Pan Alley revolutionized American music. Focused on the dissemination of a constantly changing set of attention-grabbing songs, leading companies dramatically expanded the market for popular compositions, generating hits that sold millions of copies of sheet music to customers across the country. While publishers aimed at this continental audience, their output was shaped by the urban context in which their businesses first emerged. During these years, local popularity was crucial to national success. As a result, firms sought to engage with new audiences throughout Manhattan, incorporating a host of social and ethnic groups into the structures of commercial entertainment. Over time, Tin Pan Alley’s relationship to these groups—and the distinctive leisure spaces in which they gathered—would define its musical production. It was not simply that publishers molded songs to fit public taste. Rather, the industry and the broader world of commercial entertainment developed together. By exploring this business-influenced process of cultural change, it is possible to gain new perspective on the emergence of American popular song, as well as the consumption-driven dynamics remaking society in the Progressive Era in the United States.

Music historiography has traditionally understood and described collective singing in the early modern era as an almost exclusive prerogative of Protestant communities. Recent and less recent studies, however, have recorded numerous occurrences of Catholic communal singing, for instance during processions, pilgrimages or popular missions. In spite of this, and even though several traditions (such as the Italian lauda) have been investigated in some depth, a comprehensive assessment of such singing practices and of their role in the surrounding soundscape is still wanting. Starting from a discussion of the causes of this ‘selective deafness’ in historiography, and moving on to a case study of late-fourteenth- to early-seventeenth-century Milan, the present article aims to start filling the lacuna and to demonstrate that communal singing was an important (if not always uncontroversial) element of Catholic sonic cultures in the early modern era.

On September 28, 1673, Catalina de los Reyes declared before the Royal Tribunal Court that she refused to surrender her property in Oaxaca's provincial capital of Antequera. Her land dispute with the bishop of Oaxaca shows how African-descended women navigated the court system in colonial Mexico and negotiated their social status in this Spanish colonial society. This article examines race and gender in colonial Mexico. It focuses on the ways in which local authorities attempted to confiscate one of the most valuable properties in Antequera from an African-descended woman named Catalina, as well as the strategies she used to challenge the social hierarchy in the city. By analyzing judicial records along with parish and census data, I argue that colonial women such as Catalina contested elite expectations of gender and race to redefine or secure their social status in colonial Oaxaca. My findings show that although colonial authorities marginalized African-descended women such as Catalina, these colonial women understood the judicial system in colonial Mexico, confronted authorities, and fought to retain their properties and their place in the social order. This article thus advances our understanding of the wide range of roles, experiences, and subjectivities of African-descended women in Spanish America.

This article examines Sanctus melodies from the tenth and eleventh centuries with special attention to the division of the first verbal phrase. The melodies with circulation in all regions of the Roman rite fall into two groups, an earlier one with ternary division and a later one with binary division. This picture is further enriched by the analysis of melodies connected in some way with these widespread melodies, by the simple melodies of the Sundays and weekdays and by an overview over northern French melodies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

This introduction to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s special issue, “New Approaches to Music and Sound,” provides a historical sketch of American music and the American soundscape at the turn of the twentieth century. It also offers a discussion of relevant historiography, taking stock of recent work in sound studies and its influence on research on music and sound of the period. Finally, it introduces the four research articles featured in this special issue and marks their contributions to our understandings of listening practices, normative understandings of audition and speech, and the sonic dimensions of politics and capitalism, race and national identity, imaginings of the past and visions for the future in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.