North America has never had any trouble making Shakespeare its own. Since the first American performance of Shakespeare play in 1730, directors, actors, and musicians have been working to locate the works of the Bard in the United States and Canada. I will examine the music for two Shakespearean productions in the context of this Americanization…[Read more]

Recently, international media outlets have celebrated São Paulo for its cosmopolitan musical output and its vibrant street art scenes. That discourse connected the city other generative periods in the histories of so-called “global cities,” such as New York of the 1970s. In those cities, the simultaneous developments of multiple creative scenes…[Read more]

In this essay I explore the use of musical mimesis in the score for D. W. Griffith’s 1921 film Orphans of the Storm. I demonstrate that the score, created by Louis F. Gottschalk and William Frederick Peters, offers coherence through the use of central themes and the employment of several characteristic leitmotivs; provides recognizable musical c…[Read more]

This paper maps Isadora Duncan’s navigation of public and private venues, audiences, and receptions of “Greek” dances from her early career in Paris. I explore Duncan’s relationship with Paris’ lesbian communities and the proliferation of ancient Greek dance in both private and public venues. Through comparisons to her contemporaries I contend…[Read more]

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and
modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and
dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice
Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and
ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and
critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly con…[Read more]

This paper explores the simultaneous eroticization and exoticization of Ancient Greece in the choreography of Madame Mariquita (1830-1922) for the Opéra and the commodification of this exotic ancient Greek eroticism in the popular fashion and music press in fin-de-siècle Paris. Building on work by art historian, Nancy Troy, and musicologist Mary D…[Read more]