Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music

Abstract: This essay about Jenny Lind’s mid-nineteenth-century American concert tour is a case study for these ways of thinking about musics embedded in culture and the legacy of historical musical-cultural processes. Lind’s status as “ideal” grew from the cultural discourse about her singing voice as gendered, raced and classed. These aspects of identity help us gain a more complete picture of Jenny Lind’s embeddedness in mid-nineteenth century American culture, as well as her appeal as a musical celebrity.

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MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians

Abstract: This essay examines Edward Macdowell’s borrowing of Native American music in two piano miniatures, “Indian Idyl” from New England Idyls and “From an Indian Lodge” from Woodland Sketches. The composer’s passive treatment of the Native American subject aligns with a cultural shift at the turn-of-the-century, what historians call the “vanishing Indian.” With the violent defeat of Native American resistance at Wounded Knee and the assimilation of tribes under the Dawes Act, Native Americans became reimagined as historical figures that simply “vanished” long ago, and thus became nationalist symbols for an industrializing nation. Through close analysis, this essay suggests how MacDowell’s music was part of a broader cultural embrace of the “vanishing Indian.

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