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theses

This dissertation investigates the different ways that musical Americans interpreted self-transcendent experiences—that is to say, experiences that involved a merger between subjective identity and forces, agents, or spaces that transcended the individual. Conventional histories of secularization suggest that the elevation of rational thought in modern Western culture inexorably invalidated beliefs in self-transcendent phenomena—or what the English-speaking world variously described as “ecstasy,” “trance,” “rapture,” and “spirit possession,” among other terms. While this dissertation does not completely deny this process of devaluation, it suggests that, during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the process was neither linear nor absolute. Indeed, “Ecstatic Anthems” argues that, during this period, Americans continued to adapt their beliefs in authentic self-transcendence to a variety of secular settings, particularly when they engaged with the highly emotional activities associated with music-making. Certainly, orthodox religion, which in America was primarily associated with Protestant Christianity and African-American syncretic religion, provided one set of cultural contexts for understanding this phenomenon. However, the romantic traditions associated with sentimentality, the sublime, and animal magnetism provided yet another framework; these mystical traditions cast musical rapture as an attunement with spiritual entities that were more natural and earthly than their religious counterparts. Yet another cultural tradition—derived from Carnival festivities and other cognate activities—framed songful self-transcendence in vaguer terms, as an escape from normal subjectivity without a merger with some clearly-defined external object. While the religious, romantic, and Carnival-derived frameworks could be distinguished from each other, they also were not entirely isolated from each other. Not only did they share historical roots, but, during the nineteenth century, they also became partly coopted by bourgeois values, which encouraged the physical restraint of musical ecstasy in communal settings. This process provided opportunities to reinforce social hierarchies based on class, race, and gender, regardless of how one interpreted the specific objects of musical self-transcendence. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, some Americans initiated a more vigorous effort to confine and control musical trance. Equipped with scientific theories that reduced musical rapture to the workings of an individual mind and body, the neurologists, psychologists, and other professionals who supported this movement came close to rejecting conventional notions of transcendent experience altogether. Yet, the possibility of authentic self-loss was never entirely eradicated from American culture. Within the burgeoning commercial music industry of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Americans simultaneously validated experiences of authentic and illusory self-transcendence. This equivocation between belief and disbelief, authenticity and illusion, and transcendence and immanence engendered a play impulse that came to dominate cultural interpretations of musical ecstasy starting in the 1920s. In this manner, musical Americans never abolished the possibility of ecstasy, but instead they continuously adapted it to a variety of different secular settings.

ETD_8580

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Lytton Naegele McDonnell

doi:10.7282/T3GF0XQH

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.