Department of Music

Douglas Shadle, Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, will present a colloquium entitled The Creole Roots of American Classical Music on Friday, April 22nd at 3:30pm in Old Cabell Hall room 107.

Congo Square in New Orleans has long held pride of place as the mythic cradle of jazz. Yet three of the chief local architects of this mythology—pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, journalist Lafcadio Hearn, and novelist George Washington Cable—were all deeply invested in the European classical music tradition. In fact, this unlikely trio wielded considerable influence over the development of an ostensibly “American” classical style informed by Afrodiasporic musics. This presentation sketches the significance of Creole music in efforts to shape a distinctive national musical identity that began in the 1850s and reverberated for decades thereafter

Douglas Shadle is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. He is the author of two books published by Oxford University Press: Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise( (2016) and Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphon  (2021). Currently, he is co-authoring a biography of composer Florence Price with Samantha Ege, a musicologist and pianist at the University of Oxford.