| In 1976, the United States commemorated the Bicentennial of the American Revolution with a flurry of patriotic activity that celebrated the nation's past. On stages and screens throughout the country, dramatic representations of the early United States (ca. 1770-1825) brought the past into the present, creating new cultural memories and prompting audiences to reconceive American national identity. Building an interdisciplinary methodology that unites musicology with memory studies, reception history, and semiotics, this dissertation considers the ways musical theater and television represented music in early American life during the Bicentennial decade and in more recent years, transforming the past for a modern audience. The composers involved in these projects had different conceptions of how early America should sound, yet none of them adhered to historical musical sources. The reasons for this departure from music history reflect the ideological nature of cultural memory.;This dissertation enters the world of representations through four case studies that stand out for the quality of their musical scores as well as for the sociopolitical statements they make about vital issues of their times, such as the politics of race, war, and class inequality. These include two Broadway musicals: 1776, by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone (1969), and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, by Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner (1976); the television miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots, with music by Quincy Jones and Gerald Fried (1977); and the HBO television miniseries adaptation of David McCullough's John Adams, with music by Rob Lane and Joseph Vitarelli (2008). This final case study revisits the representation of early America in the context of the mid-2000s. Using archival materials and other primary sources, each chapter discusses the ways the work as a whole was positioned and received in relationship to the past and delves into the ways music both supports and complicates that relationship, showing how music acts as a creator and reflection of cultural memory. The contemporary values embedded through the diverse viewpoints, styles, media, messages, and music of these works reveal how the nation's founding story has been recreated anew in the 1970s and mid-2000s. |
