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This dissertation pairs together two contrasting concert musicians, African American pianist-composer Don Shirley (1927–2013), revived by the 2018 film Green Book, and Russian pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943). Both faced aspects of erasure, reducing the likelihood of being heard or understood on their own terms. Rachmaninoff’s erasure stemmed from a Slavic alterity assigned to him outside of Russia and class differences within Russia during the turbulent inter-revolutionary period. Shirley’s arose from anti-Black barriers barring him from performing European classical music on concert stages. Both pianists, facing reductive assumptions, created musical dualities, enabling them to hold onto core, authentic realities as they shaped their careers, even if the public might read their presentations alternatively, perhaps through initial biases.
I study Rachmaninoff’s 1930 recorded performance of Frédéric Chopin’s Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 35, focusing on the first three movements, using Rachmaninoff’s composed sequel Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 36 as a guiding Rosetta Stone. I identify Rachmaninoff’s performance as an artifact of the Russian Revolution’s “losing side”—the aristocracy. I fill a gap surveying wordless instrumental music and identify, through the trope of illness, the Eastern Orthodox hope of recovery—deification—of resurrecting Mother Russia, which embodied Rachmaninoff’s attempt to preserve “true Russianness” during his perpetual exile. Considering selections from his 1955 album, Tonal Expressions, among others, I examine how Shirley, through developing what I term the “Green Book Style,” inched as close as he could to the category of classical music while pushing against the limits of the sonic color line. I consider how Shirley called upon aspects of the Werktreue ideal, putting himself in line with “serious” music-making to stimulate more engaged, idealized listening, even when performing in nightclubs. This dissertation seeks to contribute to dismantling the problematic musical “middlebrow,” a category that consigns racial and ethnic misfits into the category of “all others” relative to the hegemony. My work contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of music performance studies; my assessments move from micro-readings of “data” as concrete performance analysis to corporeal, intertextual, and subject position queries about culture, race, and personhood.