This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.
...MoreBook Kyle Devine; Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (2021) Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media.
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