Examining the rise and fall of a socially democratic Gotham between 1945 and 1985, my dissertation presents a multiracial history of American popular culture. "Syncopating Segregation" links two previously disparate domains of scholarship: studies of postwar urban segregation and cross-cultural mediation. I argue that African American, Latinx, queer, and ethnically white New York musicians served as mediators who sought to rethink and remap the spatial contours of a divided city. In doing so, my work presents a somewhat unfamiliar picture postwar urban life: it moves beyond narratives of cultural appropriation and differs from many historians who posit that rigid patterns of segregation turned cities into racial and ethnic battlegrounds. While acknowledging that cities created new forms of de jure segregation, I show how African American and Latinx New Yorkers spurred musical cross-pollination during an era of mounting racial and ethnic division. Over the course of five chapters, I explore how musicians facilitated cross-cultural exchange in mambo, doo-wop, psychedelic rock, disco, and hip-hop. Each chapter revolves around mediators who used music to bridge racialized boundaries; by creating and popularizing integrated performance spaces premised on racial interaction rather than isolation, artists disrupted—but did not destroy—patterns of segregation in New York. I maintain that they changed the rhythm of the city just as they syncopated their music with off-beat cadences. Dancing at mixed-race clubs allowed New Yorkers to momentarily escape their segregated day-to-day lives. The existence of these venues in a divided landscape speaks to mediators’ successes in syncopating segregation. Although my dissertation serves as one of the first historical studies of musical forms that have traditionally been the purview of record collectors and fans, it is more than a series of genre studies. Instead, I reconstruct a social history of interracial musical scenes in post-World War II New York. Unlike most urban historians, I draw on oral histories, bootleg concert recordings, and fan magazines, in addition to an array of municipal and scholarly archives.

This dissertation considers how music has been heard with American law during an age of mass incarceration. Drawing upon records in legal archives for thousands of cases from the late 1980s to the present, it describes how legal hearings of music have contributed towards the reproduction of racial injustice. The dissertation takes two distinct modes of hearing as objects for analysis: (1) the hearing of music as evidence; and (2) the hearing of music as an offense. The dissertation describes how, since the late 1980s, the American criminal justice system has routinely and selectively heard rap music as evidence within its investigations and prosecutions. It shows how rap has served variously as a clue or lead during investigations, an aggravator of charges filed and sentences pursued during plea bargaining, a support for arguments against bail, a form of proof for elements of a crime or elements of a sentence enhancement allegation, a support for an affirmative defense, a witness impeacher, a form of proof for an aggravating factor in sentencing, and a support for arguments against parole. The dissertation questions whether quick-fix, colorblind policy proposals are likely to halt this selective hearing of rap, suggesting the need for frank discussions to take place about the political contours of problematization. The dissertation then describes how, over the same time period, through both the criminal justice system and the procedures of administrative law, music has been heard routinely as a subfelony offense. It shows how offenses have been heard in music to facilitate narcotics investigations, raise revenue for cash-strapped municipalities, patrol the borders of the nation, and drive residents from neighborhoods. It demonstrates how the academic study of music can become attentive to harms and injustices made possible through hearing that are not reducible to the restriction of musical freedom, including but not limited to harassment, profiling, the imposition of crushing debts, vehicle impoundment, eviction, and deportation, by engaging in fine-grained study of the social life of music’s regulative rules.

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Thesis advisor: Corey Creekmur, Kim Marra. Includes bibliographic references (p. 330-356).

The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz (1992), by Toni Morrison, as indicators of African American identity and racial oppression during the Harlem Renaissance. I analyze the soundscapes of both texts to expose the mobility of language, power, and space, especially as these soundscapes relate to the production of sound (both musical and non-musical) by African Americans, and the surveillance of these sounds by white audiences. Through my analysis of repetitive sound-images and embodied silence in Passing and Jazz, as well as textual representations of oral performance, I argue that there is harm in restricting African American voices to approved modes of audibility and/or limiting African American voices to one a singular narrative. This thesis introduces critics and theories from the disciplines of sound studies and African American studies, and applies the widely known theory of double consciousness, established by critic and author W.E.B. Du Bois, as the foundation for my literary and cultural analysis of sound in print. / Graduation date: 2013

Latinx students are underrepresented among high school music students in the United States, nationally. However, localized demographics in some parts of the country reveal secondary music programs that are comprised nearly entirely of Latinx students. Still, the experiences of such a large and racially marginalized population as Latinx students remain under-researched in the field of music education. To explore how Latinx racial identity may inform the experiences of Latinx music students and their music teachers, I conducted a post-qualitative study of students and teachers in music classes at large secondary schools in which the Latinx population is 95 percent or more. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with music students and their teachers. To guide my thinking on the role of race in the lives of the participants, I incorporated Omi and Winant's (2015) theory of racial formation throughout the data analysis. Overall findings indicated that race informs much of the experiences of the participants in varying, sometimes subtle ways. Through racism, racial resistance, the formation of racial identity, and the incorporation of both colorblind ideology and race consciousness, the participants provided nuance as to how we may regard the role and significance of race in music education. Implications for developing a racial-justice-oriented paradigm in music education are also discussed.

School orchestra programs are overwhelmingly concentrated in suburban districts, which are becoming increasingly racially and economically diverse. Diversifying suburbs lie at the crossroads of race, racism, and whiteness and findings drawn from these settings can have implications for racial dynamics in all educational contexts. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to explore how racially underrepresented students perceive race within an urban characteristic high school orchestra program through the lens of critical race theory. I developed a composite counter-story to examine the racialized experience of school orchestra told from the perspective of students of color with a particular interest on competition. Participants were six students and two teachers affiliated with the same high school orchestra program in Texas. Emergent thematic findings examined students' sense of racial belonging, mechanisms upholding the racial status quo, and fulfilling aspects of students' orchestra participation. Though the lens of critical race theory, I discuss how everyday whiteness, property of whiteness, and meritocracy function to maintain white hegemony in school orchestra.

In this thesis, I explore the careers and songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds—two African American female composers who were part of the Chicago Renaissance. Price and Bonds were members of extensive, often informal, networks of Black women that fostered creativity and forged paths to success for Black female musicians during this era. Building on the work of Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I contend that these efforts reflect Black feminist principles of Black women working together to create supportive environments, uplift one another, and foster resistance. I further argue that Black women's agency enabled the careers of Price and Bonds and that elements of Black feminism are not only present in their professional relationships, but also in their songs. Initially, I discuss how the background of the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances and racial uplift ideology shaped these women's artistic environment. I then examine how Bonds and Price incorporated, updated, and expanded versions of these ideals in their music and careers. Drawing on the scholarship of Rae Linda Brown, Angela Davis, and Tammy L. Kernodle, I analyze Price's "Song to the Dark Virgin," "Sympathy," and "Don't You Tell Me No" and Bonds's "Dream Variation," "Note on Commercial Theater," and "No Good Man" through a Black feminist lens. I contend that although Price and Bonds depicted harsh realities of Black women's experiences, they also celebrated Black women's resistance in spite of intersectional oppression. Ultimately, analyzing Black feminism in these composer's careers and songs opens a path for further exploration of how Black women's agency can facilitate activism through art.

Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.