‘La nostra Accademia di Musica’: New York Italians at the Opera Before the Panic
Society for American Music Annual Meeting, Tacoma, Washington, USA, 19-23 March 2025
According to music historians (Preston, Bentley), the high-priced ticket policy imposed by the operatic “star” system, or the importation of famous European artists, was one of the main reasons middle-class Americans became increasingly dissatisfied with foreign-language opera after the 1850s. This trend was only exacerbated by the financial crisis known as the Panic of 1873. In New York, many Italian opera companies disbanded or suffered severe financial losses because of the crisis, and prestigious theaters such as the Academy of Music, which had been one of the city’s main venues for Italian opera, struggled to offer regular seasons for several years. The shifting cultural impact of Italian opera in New York and other cities during those years has been usually described from the standpoint of U.S.-native critics and operagoers as it can be glimpsed through reviews and articles that appeared in the contemporary mainstream press (Ahlquist, Preston, Ceriani). In this paper, I discuss Italian opera’s cultural and political significance in the Italian American community of New York from the perspective of L’eco d’Italia, the first Italian-language paper ever published in the U.S. I show that decades before the start of the great immigration wave in the 1880s and the revival of Italian opera’s popularity in the new century thanks to the marketing of home phonographs (Agugliaro), Italian elites viewed the Italian operatic repertoire and the venues in which it was performed as public platforms that they (re-)appropriated to claim Italy’s primacy in the arts and increase their own political influence.
Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Making of Historical Narratives: The Case of Italian Opera Singing
Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Annual Meeting, 17-26 October 2024
In December 2023, the “practice of opera singing in Italy” was officially inscribed on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In its final resolution, the UNESCO Committee stated that this practice was worthy of inscription because of the central place that opera and opera singing occupy in contemporary Italian culture. However, the slippery terminology used to identify the object of UNESCO’s recognition calls for further investigation: What exactly is Italian opera singing? Are there any sets of pedagogical rules that distinguish it from foreign styles of opera singing today? And what is the specific contribution of Italy and Italian musical institutions to the promotion of its current practice internationally?
Based on about thirty interviews with Italian music historians, singing teachers, theatre managers and opera singers, this paper explores how musical pasts are constructed in today’s Italy. I show that opera artists and theater administrators are committed to promoting what they believe to be the authentically Italian musical tradition of opera singing, and they rely on opera scholars to back up their claims. Italian musicologists, for their part, are often aware of the cultural sustainability issues involved in UNESCO’s support of musical practices (Chocano, Grant, Seeger, Schippers, Titon) and remain skeptical about the possibility of even arriving at a univocal definition of Italian opera singing. Nevertheless, many of them, along with opera artists and Italian music institutions, endorsed the UNESCO nomination, hoping to gain direct and indirect support for their discipline through state funding and international tourism.
Compare Turiddu Lands in America: Cavalleria Rusticana, Columbus Day, and the (Self-) Representation of Italian Americans
Royal Music Association Annual Meeting, Nottingham, UK, 14-16 September 2023
On 12 October 1892, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ landing in the Americas, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first-ever national celebration of Columbus Day to improve diplomatic relationships with Italy after eleven Italian Americans had been lynched in New Orleans in March of the previous year. In between these two events, America’s musical world was rattled by the national premiere of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. First performed in Philadelphia in September 1891, Mascagni’s opera was seen as a commercial opportunity by American impresarios, who hoped to rekindle middle classes’ interest in Italian opera after years of relative stagnation. But the arrival of Cavalleria in the country was highly anticipated also by Italian American political leaders, who intended to leverage the success of a new Italian opera with American audiences to counter contemporary anti-immigration feelings. In my paper, I draw upon trade journals, English- and Italian-language newspapers, and secondary literature (Rindom, Luconi, Ceriani, Basini, Barbata Jackson, Gabaccia) to investigate the early American performances of Cavalleria Rusticana in the light of Italian Americans’ processes of national mythmaking and of contemporary debates regarding the racial desirability of Italian immigrants. I argue that while Cavalleria revealed to Italian American leaders the political significance of opera as a tool for social uplift, it also acted as a double-edged sword, because its plot encouraged comparisons with the underclass described in crime news and press reports on “Italian life” appearing in the same years.
From Grinder to Nipper: Opera, Music Technology, and Italian American Identity
American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Society for Music Theory Joint Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10-13 November 2022
Since its origins in the early seventeenth century, opera has been persistently associated with Italian culture, becoming the most recognizable Italian musical export. As immigration from Italy increased in the United States in the 1870s, newspapers occasionally commented on the positive cultural impact Italian newcomers would bring thanks to their supposed love of music. Yet curiously, the “opera-loving Italian” stereotype emerged relatively late: while caricatures of Italian Americans as organ grinders and fruit peddlers had been commonplace in popular songs and vaudeville shows since the 1860s, dozens of opera-loving Italian street peddlers and barbers only began appearing in Tin Pan Alley songs in the early 1900s. This paper examines why Italian opera began to index actual Italian immigrants living in America only at this later moment. Drawing on archival documents, trade journals, secondary literature, and popular songs about Italian Americans published between the 1880s and 1920s, I argue that the emergence of this stereotype was a consequence of recording entrepreneurs’ strategic use of Italian opera in the commercialization of home phonographs in the early twentieth century. While scholars have discussed the imperialistic thought underpinning the use of recording technology in ethnographic expeditions, my paper sheds new light on the racial implications of the phonograph’s commercialization as domestic entertainment and on the shifting cultural significance of Italian opera in American society during this marketing process.
How Fruit Peddlers Learned to Sing: Home Phonographs, Tin Pan Alley, and the Emergence of the Opera-Loving Italian Stereotype
Society for American Music Virtual Annual Meeting, 11-13 March 2022
In the early 1900s, dozens of opera-loving Italian street peddlers and barbers began to appear in Tin Pan Alley songs ridiculing Italian Americans (Hamberlin). The timing of this occurrence raises some questions about the history of the representation of Italian immigrants: if a long tradition of novels, travel diaries, and short stories had associated opera with Italian culture for more than a century, why did Italian opera begin to be used to index actual Italians living in the country so late in time? After all, caricatures of Italian Americans as organ grinders and fruit peddlers had been commonplace in popular songs and vaudeville shows at least since the 1860s, but never in association with Italian opera. In this paper, I show that the emergence of the “opera-loving Italian” stereotype was a consequence of recording entrepreneurs’ strategic use of Italian opera in the commercialization of home phonographs in the early twentieth century. I build this argument on a variety of sources including archival documents, trade journals, secondary literature (Luconi, Kenney, Preston, Suisman, and Zucchi), as well as on the analysis of several examples of popular songs about Italian Americans published between the 1880s and the 1920s. While scholars have discussed the imperialistic thought underpinning the use of recording technology in ethnographic expeditions (Brady, Hochman), my paper sheds new light on the racial implications of the commercialization of the phonograph as a form of domestic entertainment and on the shifting cultural significance of Italian opera in American society during this marketing process.
The Phonograph and the American Dream
Society for American Music Virtual Annual Meeting, 9-12 June 2021
At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. recording companies leveraged the American origin of recording technology and the technical skills and methods associated with it to stake a claim in the definition of an autochthonous form of art. As several music scholars (Katz, Leppert, Seifert, Suisman) have discussed, recorded music could be presented as an authentic American product because it operated on an ontological level separate from that of live performance. This separation has often been described as the result of an aggressive marketing strategy planned by recording industrialists and implemented by distributors and dealers acting on the local level. Yet, at a time when the market for home phonographs had just begun to consolidate in the country, the success of such a strategy largely depended on the personal investment of local actors in the recording business and on their “improvisational” capacity to seize profit opportunities (Ospina Romero) and communicate with the management of recording companies in a relationship of mutual exchange. In this paper, I investigate the personal stakes of record dealers and distributors in the nationalistic project crafted by American recording companies in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing upon archival resources, trade publications, and secondary literature in sociology and developmental psychology, I argue that different individuals who entered the music business as record and phonograph dealers used this professional experience to integrate their own personal life stories into the narrative of the phonograph as an American cultural product.
The Thing with Vaporwave: Reassessing Deconstruction
Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Annual Meeting, 22-31 October 2020
Emerged in the early 2010s, the avant-garde microgenre known as vaporwave has since received growing critical and scholarly attention. Some authors have interpreted the genre’s reliance on highly recognizable samples, synthesized sounds, and visual elements from the last two decades of the past century as a critique of capitalism (Tanner), or as a reflection on the changing status of personal and collective memory in the digital age (Trainer). Yet other scholars have considered the social and aesthetic implications of the internet-based production and circulation of vaporwave (Born and Haworth) and have examined this genre’s association with techno-Orientalist fantasies and its malicious appropriation by far-right supporters in the U.S. (McLeod). In this paper, I build on this scholarship and on other contributions in critical theory (Brown, Certeau) and music studies (Eidsheim, Feld, Ochoa Gautier, Stokes, Villegas Vélez) to advance a new argument. If vaporwave encourages a critique of past and present globalized consumerist fantasies by adopting and distorting their sonic and visual components, I suggest that it also uncovers the limits of a deconstructionist analysis that reduces previous emotional attachment to those same audiovisual worlds to a mere byproduct of neoliberalism. In opposition to this deconstructionist approach, I argue that vaporwave, while exposing the possible risks connected with the global circulation of music, images, and ideas allowed by the internet, also demonstrates how acts of cultural appropriation and fabrication (what Martin Stokes has called “the making of ‘worlds’”) are inevitable for the emergence of strategies of cultural and political resistance.
Siel Agugliaro 