Buffalo Bill and the Sound of America
Monday, March 31, 2025 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1Online (Zoom)
Within the long nineteenth century that frames the first 100 years of America’s existence as a republic, French writers, artists, and musicians were drawn to describe and depict the young nation’s political experiments, vast landscapes, and diverse culture. Varied images of American freedom, resiliency, power, as well as backwardness appeared throughout the nineteenth century, which showcased to the world America’s arrival on the international stage. Nowhere was this more on display in all of its complexity than during the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, where from May until November, two times a day, French audiences witnessed stage couch robberies, six-gun trick shooting, cowboy roping, Native American dances and the ever-powerful image of Colonel William F. Cody (i.e., Buffalo Bill), held astride a white horse, riding in to save former Europeans from marauding Indians. The music and the live-action scenes of the show successfully captured French notions of l’ouest sauvage, which was fueled by French translations of the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and the Western-themed novels of Gustave Aymard. In this presentation, I will be discussing the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill in France and how such a sonic and visual narrative, often viewed as a cacophony of mass entertainment and crass commercialism, was received by the French and expressed in the music of fin-de-siècle France.
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Mark A. Pottinger is Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Communication, Sound, and Media Arts Department at Manhattan University in New York City. Winner of the Berlin Prize in 2017, Pottinger is the author of numerous publications on the music and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe and the contemporary listening environment. His most recent publications include a book on Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor (Cambridge University Press) and a forthcoming book on nineteenth-century science in relation to the sound and look of nature in romantic opera (Boydell & Brewer). Currently serving as co-chief editor of Sound Studies Review: An International Peer-Reviewed Music Journal (Brepols Publishers), Pottinger’s recent writings examine the concept of ‘soundscapes’ and their connection to political power and technology.
Email: [email protected]