ABSTRACT
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the ravages of racism and segregation effectively denied most black Americans the right of access to the cultivated music tradition, either as consumers of that tradition, or as performers or students.2 For even with the critical success of a few black concert celebrities, the dominant white population successfully wielded its prerogative of exclusive entitlement to art music for its own consumption, while simultaneously purporting that the majority of black Americans were incapable of appreciating, comprehending and interpreting that tradition. Yet black musicians – especially women – successfully challenged exclusive white access to and consumption of cultivated music, and vehemently rejected white male ownership and definition of the European musical canon. In this paper I argue that art music assumed activist significance for black musicians, especially during the 1880s and 1890s, when minstrel shows proliferated a degrading image of the black musician as an incompetent buffoon. I will consider how a relatively unknown African-American musician, Amelia Tilghman (1856-1931), used her gifts
1The essay is an abridged version of the article, Juanita Karpf, ‘ ‘‘As with Words of
Fire’’: Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist Discourse,’
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24:3 (Spring 1999), pp. 603-32. Used
by permission. #1999 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 2Throughout this essay I employ terminology codified by the American musicologist
H. Wiley Hitchcock and now quite standard in musicological discussion. ‘Classical’
music can accurately be referred to as ‘cultivated’ or ‘art’ music interchangeably; folk
or popular music as ‘vernacular’ music. The cultivated tradition in the United States
was derived from European models; see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United
States, 3rd edn (New York, 1988), pp. 53-5.
