A01=Sarah Gerk
abolition
african american music
Anglo-Celtic
art music
atlantic monthly
atlantic world
Author_Sarah Gerk
autobiography
ballads
beethoven
biography
blackface
blackface minstrelsy
boston
british empire
canon
Category=AVC
Category=AVLT
Category=AVM
Category=NHD
catholicism
Chauncey Olcott
chicago
civil war
colonization
community
cultural nationalism
cultural trauma
diaspora
emigration
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnicity
exile
famine
fiddle
folk music
folklore
forthcoming
Gaelic revival
gender
Great Famine
Harrigan and Hart
heritage
hornpipe
identity
immigration
indigenous peoples
irish
irish american
irish diaspora
irish famine
irish identity
Irish Melodies
irish music
irish nationalism
irish traditional music
Italian operatic music
jig
jim crow
labor
memory
migration
minstrels
minstrelsy
Mulligan entertainments
music history
musical theater
musicology
nationalism
new york
nineteenth century
opera
oral tradition
parlor song
patrick gilmore
patriotic music
performance
performance practice
piano
popular music
postcolonial
propaganda
publishing
race
racism
reel
romanticism
scots-irish
sentimental song
sheet music
slavery
social class
songster
sound studies
stage irish
stereotypes
theater
Thomas Moore
transatlantic
transnational
trauma
trauma studies
union army
united irishmen
united states
US Civil War
vernacular music
voice
voice studies
war of 1812
whiteness
women musicians
working class
xenophobia
Product details
- ISBN 9780252049606
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2026
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This is a study of how Irish diaspora shaped musical practice in nineteenth-century America. Moving beyond a focus on the transmission of elements of Irish traditional music to music in the US, or the ways in which Irish Americans used US musical practices to negotiate identities in the New World, Sarah Gerk explores the role played by Irish immigration, as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, and by Irish immigrants themselves in shaping the musical life of the United States. This work offers revealing opportunities to understand race – particularly access to white privilege – diaspora, and musical life in the nineteenth century, as well as to understand how particular musical sounds themselves became bound up with certain diasporic communities and spaces.
Gerk opens by considering the popularity of Thomas Moore's iconic collection Irish Melodies in relation to the history of British colonization shared by the US and Ireland, arguing that these songs modeled what the music of an Anglo-Celtic republic could sound like. She considers blackface minstrelsy's complicated relationship with both Irish-American performers and theatrical stereotypes of Irish people, and positions Irish-American performers and audiences as a primary driving force in new musical styles in 1840s sheet music, in which minstrelsy's resemblances to Anglo-Celtic traditional music disappeared. She examines the legacy of the Great Famine in music of the US Civil War, considering how that music's role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory. She explores the increasingly elaborate sketches in the 1870s and 1880s of the variety duo Harrigan and Hart, highlighting ways in which violent conflict between the Black community and the Irish lies at the very heart of the Mulligan entertainments. Finally, she contextualizes the work of Irish-American tenor Chauncey Olcott, showing how a number of confluent trends—the growing wealth and social status of Irish-American middle classes, the Gaelic revival, new immigration patterns, and the consolidation of the US's sheet music industry—allowed Olcott to perform an elevated version of Irish-American musical culture, influenced by superficial elements of Italian operatic music.
Gerk opens by considering the popularity of Thomas Moore's iconic collection Irish Melodies in relation to the history of British colonization shared by the US and Ireland, arguing that these songs modeled what the music of an Anglo-Celtic republic could sound like. She considers blackface minstrelsy's complicated relationship with both Irish-American performers and theatrical stereotypes of Irish people, and positions Irish-American performers and audiences as a primary driving force in new musical styles in 1840s sheet music, in which minstrelsy's resemblances to Anglo-Celtic traditional music disappeared. She examines the legacy of the Great Famine in music of the US Civil War, considering how that music's role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory. She explores the increasingly elaborate sketches in the 1870s and 1880s of the variety duo Harrigan and Hart, highlighting ways in which violent conflict between the Black community and the Irish lies at the very heart of the Mulligan entertainments. Finally, she contextualizes the work of Irish-American tenor Chauncey Olcott, showing how a number of confluent trends—the growing wealth and social status of Irish-American middle classes, the Gaelic revival, new immigration patterns, and the consolidation of the US's sheet music industry—allowed Olcott to perform an elevated version of Irish-American musical culture, influenced by superficial elements of Italian operatic music.
Sarah Gerk is an assistant professor of musicology in the Binghamton University Music Department. Her writing is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and has appeared in The Reputations of Thomas Moore (Routeledge 2019), the Journal of the Society for American Music, and elsewhere.
