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"America in Miniature": Constructing White Masculinity Through Imagined Black Performance in Vernacular and Choral Music in the United States
Carsello, Daniel
Carsello, Daniel
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Thesis/Dissertation
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2025-08
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Music History
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https://doi.org/10.34944/2vzz-q276
Abstract
This dissertation examines the construction of hegemonic white masculinity in the United States through performances of imagined Blackness that, through blackface minstrelsy, were created and solidified in the nineteenth century and, through its legacies, have continued to be performed and developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the blackface mask eventually fell out of favor, its embodied sonic legacies persisted, traces that Gage Averill calls “blackvoice” and Matthew D. Morrison calls “Blacksound.” Nostalgia contributed heavily to blackface minstrelsy’s popularity and its subsequent longevity as its listeners yearned for a fabricated past. I consider three musical communities to examine how the legacies of blackface minstrelsy have aided constructions of hegemonic white masculinity in United States vernacular and choral music in these examples, particularly through competition and fraternity. Chapter 2 examines the Barbershop Harmony Society, which, in 1938, codified a version of barbershop harmony that inaccurately credited the genre to white men and thus centered their participation. Chapter 3 focuses on the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, the nation’s oldest folk festival, which has routinely invited controversy throughout its history due to the parade’s syncretic origins of European yuletide customs and American blackface traditions. Finally, Chapter 4 considers choral performances, particularly my experiences as a performer in Pennsylvania Music Educators Association festivals in 2011 and 2012 and as a member (2012–2016) and director emeritus (2018–2024) of the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club. I analyze how these experiences privileged hegemonic white masculinity over nearly all other identities and how, in my role as director, I aimed to combat its continued (re)construction within the Glee Club. I demonstrate the continued construction of hegemonic white masculinity, through the vestigial practices of blackface minstrelsy, in these musical communities by engaging scholarship from a diverse array of fields as well as employing autoethnography, data analysis, examination of historical documents, ethnographic interviews, and (participant) observation. I also offer potential avenues for deconstructing that hegemonic white masculinity through Black feminist resistance, as theorized by Patricia Hill Collins and exemplified in the work of the barbershop quartet, HALO, to hopefully enact lasting change in these genres and, eventually, the United States at large.
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