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Unequal Temperament:
The Somatic Acoustics of Racial Difference
in the Symphonic Music of John Powell
J.
Lester Feder
You know, composition is only one of my many interests. In
time I hope to do my bit in helping to solve the race problem.
—John Powell, interviewed in the Musical Courier, May 2,
1918 (Kushner 1984, 104)
In 1924 the Congress of the United States passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which
restricted the immigration of "non-white" Europeans such as the Irish, Italians,
and Slavs. This was one of many events that laid the groundwork for the
creation of a pan-"ethnic" whiteness under the rubric "Caucasian" and the
redrawing of racial divisions along a black/white color line (Jacobson 1998).
In that same year, in its statehouse only a hundred miles south of the nation's
capital, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act as part of the eugenic
approach to segregation that the Old Dominion pioneered. This law provided
a legal definition of whiteness in state law for the first time. Restricting
admission to this category to people who have "no trace whatsoever of any
blood other than Caucasian," the Racial Integrity Act sought to make racial
difference absolute by shoring up the boundaries of racial categories through
the prevention of miscegenation (Racial Integrity Act, 1924).
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