{"id":5536,"date":"2021-10-08T17:03:08","date_gmt":"2021-10-08T22:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/?p=5536"},"modified":"2021-12-13T14:35:16","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T20:35:16","slug":"dancing-through-history-a-political-presentation-of-music-and-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/2021\/10\/08\/dancing-through-history-a-political-presentation-of-music-and-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing Through History: A Political Presentation of Music and Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Content Warning<\/span><\/i>: Racist representation of Black Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our last few class sessions have asked us to consider how history presents Black music and culture and the ways that we can critically evaluate those presentations. Our syllabus assigned us a series of readings about Black music, which were all categorized under the subheading \u201cThe White Hypothesis.\u201d The authors of these articles, Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923) and George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953), each highlight a relatively convoluted set of principles that they saw to be universal truths about the origins of Black music and spirituals. Though Krehbiel and Pullen Jackson\u2019s arguments are different, and even contradict each other on many points, they\u2019re both rooted in inaccurate assumptions about Black culture, identity, and music.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The primary source that I want to focus on today is a political cartoon from the Library of Congress\u2019 Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. \u201cThe Political Quadrille. Music by Dred Scott<\/a>\u201d (1860) paints an interesting picture of the political response to the Dred Scott decision [1].<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The characters in this cartoon represent the four candidates for the 1860 presidential election, each of whom provided commentary on the future of race relations in the United States during their campaign. The cartoon’s central figure is a caricature of Dred Scott playing the fiddle. In the upper right corner, the cartoonist depicts Abraham Lincoln dancing with a Black woman \u2014 potentially a reference to his party\u2019s association with abolitionists. It seems as though the illustrator positions Dred Scott as the orchestrator of the racialized discussions that were the center of the 1860 election.<\/span><\/p>\n

This cartoon has the broader purpose of serving some large political end in the midst of a presidential election, but it also presents an interesting characterization of music making in the mid-nineteenth century:<\/span><\/p>\n

The quadrille was one of the most popular dance forms of the nineteenth century. It is performed by four couples and was danced in a square formation, originally intended for performance by members of the aristocracy.<\/span><\/p>\n