Now in its 28th year, American Music publishes articles on American composers, performers, publishers, institutions, events, and the music industry, as well as book and recording reviews, bibliographies, and discographies.

Now in its 28th year, American Music is an academic journal dedicated to American music. It publishes articles on American composers, performers, publishers, institutions, events, and the music industry, as well as reviews of books and recordings, bibliographies, and discographies.

《American Music》是一本专注于美国音乐的学术期刊，现已出版28年。期刊内容涵盖美国作曲家、表演者、出版商、机构、事件及音乐产业的相关研究，同时还包括书籍和录音的评论、参考书目及唱片目录。

American Music

Gareth Cordery

Wagner on the Midway: Reassessing Sonic Divisions at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition

瓦格纳在中途岛：重新评估1893年世界哥伦布博览会上的声音划分

Gibb Schreffler

“A Very Ingenious and Superior Invention”: Sailing Ship Windlass Technology and the Burgeoning of Sailors’ Chanties

“一项非常巧妙且卓越的发明”：帆船绞盘技术与水手号子的兴起

Jason Petrulis

From Jonkonnu and Son de los diablos to Congo Square and Son Jarocho: Global Histories of the Jawbone/Quijada as a Black Musical Instrument

从Jonkonnu与《Son de los diablos》到Congo广场与《Son Jarocho》：全球历史中作为黑人音乐乐器的颚骨/Quijada

León F. García Corona

Music, Migration, and Cultural Membership in Close Harmony

音乐、移民与文化归属的和谐共融

Tracy McMullen

The New Jazz Studies Continues

新爵士乐研究继续发展

Alexander Murphy

Transpacific Im/Mobilities: Two Movements in Nisei Musical Practice

《跨太平洋的流动与停滞：二世音乐实践中的两种运动》

Mary Natvig

Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones: Music and the Social Good in Progressive Era Toledo, Ohio

塞缪尔·“金律”·琼斯：进步时代俄亥俄州托莱多的音乐与社会公益

Francis Wong

Moments

时刻

Day of Remembrance is rarely commemorated outside the Japanese American community, so I want to thank Kevin Fellezs for acknowledging this day and celebrating it as part of this symposium. Honoring February 19 is a reminder of the injustice incurred by the signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Allegedly for national security, the order authorized the US army to forcibly remove Japanese American civilians from the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii during World War II. The policy unjustly separated and imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans, stripping them of their civil rights and cascading in the loss of jobs, businesses, homes, and farms. Racially motivated suspicions of “fifth column” sabotage by Japanese Americans were a fiction, and no one of this demographic was ever charged.For readers not familiar with them, the following terms used throughout this essay are generational designations of Japanese Americans.This study is a personal project for me as a Japanese American. My grandparents were Issei, my parents Nisei, and I am Sansei.Nisei George Yoshida's following declaration conveys the salience of music for an American teenager as he headed into a life behind barbed wire: The sign on the telephone pole ordered us to assemble nearby on Saturday with just our bedding and clothes . . . just stuff we could carry. I could not leave my records . . . put about fifty of my favorites—Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington—into a case. Clutching my lifeblood, I sighed a heavy-hearted “good-bye” to East L.A.1Yoshida's resignation captures the rushed and desperate preparations by his peers for their unlawful incarceration. Certainly not singular in his response, Yoshida's anguished unwillingness to leave behind his beloved recordings reveals the unwarranted disruption of Japanese American lives. For Yoshida and many second-generation Nisei, the sound of dance band music of the 1930s and 1940s captured their hearts and minds as they sought to prove their Americanness. Art-making was a stabilizing force for incarcerees as they sought to create beauty in a setting that denied them their humanity.I propose that jazz-making provided a remedy for Japanese American youth against crippling social and psychological damage. The role of musicking was one of spiritual and cultural renewal and, in some instances, resistance.For performers and audiences alike, music ostensibly was a source of jouissance, a created social space that was familiar and where collective memories served to ease the humiliation and hardship.I apply the migration studies notion of immobility to the forced migration of Japanese American prisoners to sixteen desolate locations in the United States during World War II. The use of immobility here is an extreme example defined by the spatial setting of the camps, the geopolitical conflict between the United States and Japan, and the intense discrimination against Americans of Japanese descent. Wartime incarceration immobilized 120,000 people, placing them in ten desolate prison camps: Gila River (Arizona), Granada (Colorado), Heart Mountain (Wyoming), Jerome (Arkansas), Manzanar (California), Minidoka (Idaho), Poston (Arizona), Rohwer (Arkansas), Topaz (Utah), and Tule Lake (California). Twenty-seven Department of Justice camps housed non-US citizens from Japan, Germany, and Italy; individuals considered “dangerous persons”; and citizens of Japanese ancestry from twelve Latin American countries. Issei were denied citizenship in the United States until 1952. Japanese Buddhist priests and community leaders separated from their families were rounded up and taken to prison sites such as Crystal City (Texas), Fort Lincoln (North Dakota), Fort Missoula (Montana), Fort Stanton (New Mexico), Kenedy (Texas), Kooskia (Idaho), Santa Fe (New Mexico), Seagoville (Texas), and Forest Park (Georgia).Within this context of displacement, I advance the idea that jazz-making spawned what I call symbolic mobility, which manifested in the agency that Japanese American youth exercised in reinforcing their identity and creating some sense of normalcy through learning and performing jazz. The element of imagination was at play. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the imagination is closely linked with personal freedom as a means to escape from the world.2 Gail Womersley's notion of “alternative reality” more closely applies to Japanese American youth, as she explores the relation between imagination and trauma, specifically in the context of forced migration and how imagination aids in healing as individuals disengage from their circumstances.3 Further, Alexandra D'Onofrio and Johannes Sjoberg assert that human imagination “is not merely an escape but that it forms an essential part of the continuous process of crafting selfhood and concrete strategies for future mobility.”4 The idea of crafting selfhood for future mobility aligns well with the agency deployed by Japanese American youth in that the co-creative act of performing jazz reinforced their identity as Americans, which they hoped would ease their future mobility.Within the ten primary concentration camps, communities formed around various genres of musicking. A framework for describing these groupings is one based on Kay Shelemay's approach to thinking about musical communities.5 Shelemay writes: Rethinking the notion of community opens opportunities first and foremost to explore musical transmission and performance not just as expressions or symbols of a given social grouping, but as an integral part of processes that can at different moments help generate, shape, and sustain new collectivities.6In defining “musical community,” Shelemay frees the concept of community from conventions of structure, place, or time, although she recognizes that “both structural and local elements” may be significant in the development of a community. Her emphasis is on the process of musical performance and transmission. She proposes that “a musical community is a social entity, an outcome of a combination of social and musical processes, rendering those who participate in making or listening to music aware of a connection among themselves.”7 Shelemay identifies three social processes as integral to the creation of musical collectivities: descent, dissent, and affinity.Musical collectivities based on descent formed around Japanese musicking, both traditional and popular music, echoing groups that were active in prewar Japanese communities. Traditional genres include gidayū-bushi (narrative biwa music), kabuki, nagauta (narrative shamisen music), yōkyoku (nō theater songs), shigin (sung Chinese classical poems), sankyoku (chamber music of koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen), solo biwa (4–5 string lute), shakuhachi (end-blown flute music for meditative practices of Buddhist monks), popular entertainment (shamisen playing, singing, and dancing), and Japanese pop songs of the day. Shared ethnicity facilitated the formation of these groups based on descent and expressions of a Japanese heritage. Traditional arts teachers and their students performed their Japanese collective identity with cultural forms that demonstrated a shared diasporic consciousness.Within the politicized context of the concentration camps, musicking was an important avenue of resistance in dissent communities. Levels of dissent ranged from tacit to overt. Performing Japanese music to express one's heritage and personal preference was a tacit form of resistance that better suited Japanese inclinations toward indirect, less overt responses. Playing Japanese music or dancing buyō (classical Japanese dance) was more than just an enactment of a social process of descent. Many individuals sought “to exercise their ‘cultural citizenship,”8 i.e., the right as American citizens to express and maintain Japanese cultural practices in response to the repressive conditions of the camps that, as a rule, discouraged anything Japanese.9 Choosing Japanese music subverted the War Relocation Authority's policies of “coerced assimilation.” Participation in this collective could be interpreted as engaging in a covert performance of difference. At the other end of the resistance scale in the dissent community were Japanese ultra-nationalists who used the cultural arts to reinforce a Japanese orthodoxy in building communal solidarity and preparing people to expatriate and repatriate to Japan. The political slant of artistic pursuits functioned to construct how inmates were to be represented politically alongside a deliberate aesthetic choice that challenged the dominant culture that oppressed them. Descent and dissent communities seemingly overlap in their choice of music, but their intent differed.An affinity community also materialized in each camp. Its members included mostly Nisei who embraced Western/American music—classical, popular, and vernacular—as their social, cultural, and aesthetic preference. Members of this collective shared a strong affinity with performing, dancing, and listening to American popular music in particular, linking them to American mainstream society and bolstering their identity as middle-class Americans. Age was also a source of affinity shared by members of this social cohort, many of whom were teenagers or college students.Applying these three musico-social categories clearly differentiates the clusters of musicking in the camps. The three designations pinpoint sociopolitical orientations that accommodate a range of identities differing in generation, class, region, and political leanings. They also serve as guidelines for proposing correlations between sociopolitical and musical processes that evolved under repressive circumstances over a three-year period.An important feature of Shelemay's model is the capability of placing the three social categories on a continuum within the larger framework of the camps. This continuum allows for the horizontal movement of members from one group to another in the context of shifting loyalties, attitudes, and/or political and cultural leanings, and the corresponding effect these shifts had on their musicking. This flexibility is particularly important because of the fluid, unstable, and temporary conditions of incarceration.Social affinity among youth softened their experiences of immobilizing circumstances, giving expression to the joys of socializing and creating an “alternative reality.” All camps had some semblance of a music program—some even organized a music department—often in association with school activities. Shared musical activities were a demonstration of the Niseis’ desired assimilation into mainstream US culture. Antithetical to their immobility as incarcerees, camp life offered Nisei opportunities to learn and play music, actualizing dreams denied to many due to a lack of time, resources, or teachers in their prewar communities. Performing American popular music of the day gave Japanese American youth a sense of agency, a means to represent themselves as Americans and counter being regarded as enemy aliens. The racial and political reasons for their imprisonment intensified the efficacy of American popular music for Nisei, enabling them to strongly stamp their American identity.An intensely social activity, performing afforded Nisei a sense of mobility and an avenue that neutralized their sense of loss after having their lives unjustly severed from mainstream society. Dance bands in the camps enlivened the lives of Japanese American prisoners who faced depressing conditions in the camps—uninhabitable homes, poor-quality meals, lack of privacy, and endless lines for meals, showers, toilets, and laundry.The Harmonaire Band from Minidoka Detention Center enjoyed enhanced mobility. Ironically, they were the only dance band in the state of Idaho, traveling to various towns to supply music for war bond drive dances, high school proms, and dinners where they were a smash hit. Prior to the war, the Harmonaire Band was known as the Mikados of Swing; changing “Mikado” was the band's way to avoid correlation with “the enemy.” Popularity in their hometown of Seattle and their successful tour of California delighted youth in Japanese American communities. During the war, the Harmonaire Band reveled in performing for social dances at the Puyallup Assembly Center, an initial evacuation site, and later at more permanent quarters in Minidoka, Idaho.10Swing dance bands flourished in the camps. Nine out of the ten main camps had one or more bands: Jive Bombers in Manzanar, Downbeats and Starlighters in Tule Lake, Music Makers and Rhythmaires in Poston, Harmonaires in Minidoka, Starlight Serenaders and Music Makers in Gila, George Igawa Orchestra in Heart Mountain, four bands in Topaz that included Jivesters, Savoy 5, Topaz Tooters, and Rhythm Kings, Densoneers in Jerome, and Music Makers in Granada. Rohwer incarceration camp lacked a dance band, utilizing deejays instead. The bands provided entertainment for talent revues, graduation celebrations, President's Ball, New Year's Dance, socials for various groups, Winter Carnival, and junior and senior proms. In George Yoshida's words, the dance bands proved to be a lifeline: I think we Music Makers at Poston were a big hit because kids from the farm country, seeing all Japanese American faces—that was really something out of sight! We felt good too. For the first time in my life, to play music that I really loved, it was great, it was great, so enjoyable.11Larry Nobori recalls playing in a dance band at Minidoka Detention Center as liberating: When they [swing bands] were performing at camp, they provided entertainment, but there was a sense of becoming free of the boundaries of being interned, for one, being Japanese for another.12Besides the recreational and social appeal, dances and music served as soothing agents, as the singer Chickie White shared: That was a time to forget you're incarcerated. It was a time to relax and enjoy the hour or two we had listening to the music and dancing. It was a very good thing for everyone. I loved it. I loved the music. I loved the atmosphere, the camaraderie with the musicians. That was my whole life.13Performing jazz gave Nisei the mobility to transcend the War Relocation Authority's prohibitive regulations, assert their identity, and forge a sense of agency against the racism and fear that resulted in their imprisonment. Musicking advanced Niseis’ sense of freedom from within, transmuting their immobility as prisoners. This study challenges the paradox of immobility and mobility occurring simultaneously and reveals how both forms were present among incarcerees.

ISSN	0734-4392, 1945-2349
h-index	12

Publication Information	Publisher: University of Illinois Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2002，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

American Music

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