Struggling to define a nation: American music in the twentieth century (Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Ani DiFranco)

To capture the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in twentieth-century America, this dissertation is organized as a set of case studies that involve struggles to define American music and to define America through music. Approaching the field of American music as a vital site of cultural debate, my work is designed to highlight the musical, historical, and discursive traditions of contesting America. To illustrate how thoroughly the theme of contestation permeates musical life and to probe neglected spheres of American music that nevertheless play critical roles in national self-fashioning, the five case studies address a wide spectrum of musical genres and involve both individual musicians and American musical institutions. By foregrounding key moments of cultural debate through which the nation becomes fashioned we can gain a more thorough understanding of the ongoing musical struggles to construct, challenge, and transform American identity.; The early-twentieth-century debates surrounding the creation of a distinctly American music form the backdrop for Chapter One, which views the composer Charles Ives's incorporation of ragtime and Protestant gospel hymns in light of tensions between high and low culture as well as between races. Shifting to the world of jazz, Chapter Two centers on the musician Jelly Roll Morton to explain what his Creole background, his relationship to Latin music and culture, and his creolized musical blend reveal about the nature of American music. Chapter Three establishes how Tin Pan Alley composers produced songs that envisioned a nation demarcated along racial lines by relying on techniques of musical orientalism to mold ideas of Asia and Asian America. To account for how musical nation-building continues to operate today, often outside the traditional boundaries of the music world, Chapter Four tackles the convergence of popular music, professional sports, and corporate culture, using as its primary example the nationalistic musical programming at the Super Bowl. Finally, Chapter Five explores the music of Ani DiFranco, an independent artist working outside the corporate music industry, to demonstrate how today's musicians continue the struggle to define a nation in response to an age of global capitalism and a post-national world.