Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago

Description

In Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago, the authors re-publish Hull House Songs (1916), together with critical commentary. Hull-House Songs contains five politically engaged compositions written by the Hull-House music educator, Eleanor Smith. The commentary that accompanies the folio includes an examination of Smith's poetic sources and musical influences; a study of Jane Addams's aesthetic theories; and a complete history of the arts at Hull-House. Through this focus upon aesthetic and cultural programs at Hull-House, the author-editors identify the external, and internalized, forces of domination (class position, racial identity, patriarchal disenfranchisement) that limited the work of the Hull-House women, while also recovering the sometimes hidden emancipatory possibilities of their legacy. With an afterword by Jocelyn Zelasko.

Graham Cassano is an associate professor of sociology at Oakland University. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1991. He is the author of A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935-1948 (Brill, 2014). Rima Lunin Schultz's website, Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods 1889-1963 interprets the history of Jane Addams's settlement house. Formerly assistant director at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, she is the editor, with Adele Hast, of Women Building Chicago 1790 1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2001). Jessica Payette is an associate professor of musicology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in musicology and humanities from Stanford University in 2008. Her publications focus on fin-de-siecle Vienna and twentieth-century opera and ballet.