“Strange What Cosmopolites Music Makes of Us”: Classical Music, the Black Press, and Nora Douglas Holt's Black Feminist Audiotopia

Flipping page by page through the Chicago Defender, an early twentieth-century reader would eventually reach the penultimate “Woman's Page,” a busy panorama of everyday life. On November 3, 1917, the page was, as usual, crowded with tidbits: reports on local clubs and fraternities, a reminder to put postage on one's mail, the alarming tale of a woman who “dropped dead while ironing clothes.” Sandwiched among these items was an announcement whose inconspicuous appearance belied the remarkable nature of its content: a woman named Nora Douglas Holt was to become the newspaper's classical music critic.¹ Holt's column, which ran in the Chicago Defender for six years, was the first regular feature in an African American newspaper dedicated exclusively to classical music. In 1921, Holt also founded a monthly magazine titled Music and Poetry. In both venues, she wrote from a marginalized standpoint. Her race and gender located her at the periphery of a music-critical tradition dominated by white men. Further, although Holt was not the first nor the only critic to write about classical music in the black press, she distinguished herself among a mostly male coterie of early twentieth-century black cultural critics as an exceptionally insightful participant in a vibrant conversation about music, race, and gender.² Holt merits attention not simply because she was atypical, but rather because of the conceptually and socially ambitious substance of her work.

In this article, I make two claims regarding the force and impact of Holt's ideas. First, by writing about classical music in the black press, Holt advanced a model of embodied listening that rejected racist attempts to keep African Americans out of the concert hall and embraced a communal approach to knowledge production. Second, Holt was a black feminist intellectual who refuted dominant notions of classical music's putative race- and gender-transcending universalism; instead, she acknowledged the generative possibilities of racial difference in general and blackness in particular. The impact of Holt's bold thinking was heightened by its appearance within the black press, a key outlet for public discourse and community formation during an era otherwise marked by the repressive constraints of Jim Crow and the diminishment of black legal and political power. Ultimately, Holt's criticism worked toward the creation of a black feminist