This colloquy emerged from a group of music scholars who have been in conversations that engage questions around race, specifically Blackness, and gender. The first published efforts from these conversations resulted in a colloquy for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, “Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography.”1 Dr. Josephine Wright belongs to this group and contributed to that colloquy. At the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for American Music held in Detroit, the city of Dr. Wright’s birth, the group’s members presented a session to honor her; the energy in that session led us to expand those thoughts into this colloquy.2 Our goal is to celebrate Professor Wright’s legacy, to provide future scholars with a quick entry point into her work, and to acknowledge her continuing impact.

Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon was a Black, queer musician active from the 1910s through the 1930s. His work is characterized by captivating transformations of both musical elements and the gender and sexual dimensions of songs. A discussion of his recording of “My Daddy Rocks Me” reveals Jaxon not only reimagining the song but also raising the voice of the sissy character in the blues and presenting queer desire as rapturous and transgressive. While studies of queer aspects of the blues have focused on female musicians like Ma Rainey, this article is the first to examine the music of a queer Black male musician.

Recent studies claim that a progression of two major triads a minor third apart, perhaps with additional specifications, often accompanies heroism in American movies of the past seventy-five years. However, unlike the progression of two minor triads a major third apart and its frequent association with malevolence and darkness, these studies offer no nineteenth-century precedent for this signification. The conclusion of Liszt’s symphonic poem Les préludes contains two instances each of this heroic progression: flat-VII-V and flat-VI-IV. Moreover, these final measures correspond to the final line and the only reference to heroism of the Lamartine-inspired prefatory text that accompanied the initial publication of the work. Both the radio program The Lone Ranger (1933–56) and the movie serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) feature these final measures as cliffhanger music. Each serves as an important precedent for subsequent Hollywood harmonic heroics. The use of flat-VII-V in The Lone Ranger is ten years before the earliest published example of this succession in a western film. Flash Gordon’s use of flat-VII-V anticipates its reappearance in the Main Theme for Star Wars, a film heavily modeled on Flash Gordon, and its use of flat-VI-IV anticipates its reappearance throughout the Marvel and DC universes, movie serials themselves. When considering flat-VII-V and flat-VI-IV as different tonal orientations of a directed harmonic progression, the conclusion of Les préludes also anticipates another tonally multifarious theme that accompanies heroism throughout the Star Wars franchise.

Taking multigenerational communities of South Los Angeles musicians as case studies, this article extends Kevin Quashie’s formulation of “black aliveness” from literary study to music study to help make sense of the perceived historical contiguity of race and genre in Black musics. Black aliveness names an ecology of being evidenced in expressive practices conditioned by—but not foreclosed upon—the outcomes of anti-Black racism in the US. This poetics of relation may be understood as the ontopoetic condition of possibility for analyses of formal structure, historiographies, or performative strategies. Participating in the discourse related to Afropessimism, black aliveness responds to the claims of an overdetermined racialized necropolitics. Rather than objectifying persons racialized as Black, this approach considers the socially distributed apparatus that produces and animates the concept of “blackness” as much as its boundless modes of expression. Beginning with the Central Avenue scene of the mid-twentieth century and moving to South Central Los Angeles, this article draws connections between communitarian art ecologies of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, the Watts Prophets, the Multi-School Jazz Band, and contemporary genre-expanding artists Thundercat, Terrace Martin, and Kamasi Washington. Building upon insights related to the aesthetic figuring of race and genre from Black Studies, black aliveness is a relational mode of being-as-becoming that demonstrates the necessity for studies of raced music to consider intrapersonal poetics as much as the social, cultural, and ideological.