Black Heritage and English Song: Amanda Ira Aldridge, ‘Domestic’ Music, and Transatlantic Networks (1866–1956)

This article approaches the history of black classical music-making in Britain through a focus on the singer, teacher, and composer Amanda Ira Aldridge (1866–1956), who published songs and piano works under the pseudonym ‘Montague Ring’. Drawing on a range of archival sources, and going beyond a conventional feminist recovery, it addresses Aldridge's entry into the Anglophone sheet music marketplace and her complex self-fashioning as a composer-teacher working across ‘highbrow’ and popular registers, before turning to her development as a composer of English art songs and her encounters with prominent African American concert artists and intellectuals. I argue that a full appreciation of her musical career—including her role in transmuting the legacy of blackface minstrelsy—holds implications for understanding race and gender in the history of English song, and sheds new light on the value of classical music in shaping black experiences of imperial London and transatlantic cultural exchange at the turn of the twentieth century.