Through the example of Jenkins’ choices for Moonlight (2016), this chapter argues that pre-existing musical cues can link a film’s themes to other minority filmmaking traditions. The song at the center of this chapter, “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” exemplifies the kinds of cultural translations common in transnational queer cinema. It was originally a Me…[Read more]

Review-essay of Yuval Sharon’s staging of La Boheme for Detroit Opera. Situates the opera company within the broader urban cultural politics in the Motor City.

A short consideration of the dueling dance parties at the Philadelphia Convention Center during the counting of votes for the 2020 presidential election. Analytical frameworks from popular music studies are used to consider the political implications of the uses of music on right and left.

This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi’s Aida. While scholars have explored the opera’s resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined ‘East’, Aida’s etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 pre…[Read more]

Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular son…[Read more]