2025 Society for American Music Conference

Spoken Paper Presentation | Tacoma, Washington

This presentation is abstracted from Chapter 7 of my book, Symphonic Spectacles

For the public and the critical press, the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—a mixed-race, African-Anglican composer—became an instant sensation with the premiere of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1898, as well as upon its dissemination to American audiences. Perhaps his adaptation of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a factor in this reception history, as the borrowed scenes foreground musical spectacle. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast spotlights three performances by three characters of American Indigenous identity: a dance, a song, and a storytelling. Revivals of the cantata enhanced the spectacle quality of these performances: the stage was specially painted and accompanied by strobe lighting, and 500 singers appeared in the hall costumed as Indigenous Americans (wearing makeup to darken their complexion). In the context of the cantata, the three performances seem to form the bulk of the dramatic action, and they tend to draw the focus of conventional analytical and critical commentary. This paper considers a revisionary perspective, imagining the work as a hybrid symphonic form in which the dramatic focus shifts away from the performances and toward the perspective of the diegetic spectators. By reconceiving Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in this way, the experiences of the narrator and the observational perspective of the wedding-goers become associated with the work’s primary thematic material and tonal drama. In reimagining the spectacle within the spectacle, this interpretation reframes Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast to imagine it as an allegory for the African-American experience, in which histories of blackface minstrelsy and enslavement find resonances in the story of Hiawatha.