Music

In fourteen years of collaboration beginning in 1957, composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick wrote seven Broadway musicals together: The Body Beautiful (opened in 1958), Fiorello! (1959), Tenderloin (1960), She Loves Me (1963), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), The Apple Tree (1966), and The Rothschilds (1970). This book presents a thorough examination of each of these shows, along with a survey of the many other smaller projects Bock and Harnick undertook as a team. It also discusses the work they did separately, before they met in the 1950s and after they went their separate ways in the early 1970s. Drawing from extensive archives of drafts, manuscripts, and lyric sheets, and new personal interviews and communications with the songwriters and many of their collaborators, the book explores the history and reception of each show and its place in the public consciousness. It documents myriad details of each show’s songs, explaining their dramatic impact and artistic vitality. Placing the work of Bock and Harnick in its historical context—within a pivotal era in the history of musical theater—the book demonstrates that they were expert craftsmen, who came to master the integration of music with drama,

Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music examines how music functioned as a narrative agent during the first 50 years of American television broadcasting. While television has always used music to entertain its audience, music also took on the role of conveying aspects of narrative characters and action in television programs and commercials. This use of music was derived early from music in radio dramas and later from an influence of music in the cinema. Adopting the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Morris, and John Fiske, the book describes the narrative and other functions of music in television by identifying three semiotic “spaces” of television: the extradiegetic, the intradiegetic, and the diegetic. In the extradiegetic space, music structures the “flow” of television, serving to demarcate units of television programming, such as programs, commercials, station identification, and so on. In the intradiegetic and diegetic space, music serves to convey meaning within a particular television program or commercial. Tuning In traces these three modes of signification of music in television through an exploration of the narrative genres of the anthology drama, the situation comedy, the western, the sci-fi fantasy, and the police drama, as well as in musical commercial devices such as the jingle. In these spaces, music “correlates” with the visual images and sounds of television to convey meanings that can be interpreted by the viewing audience familiar with the broadcasting codes of television.

If Benny Goodman was the “King of Swing”, then Fletcher Henderson might be considered the power behind the throne. Not only did Henderson arrange the music that fueled Goodman's success, he also helped to launch the careers of several other key figures in jazz history, including Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, and their work, in turn, shaped Henderson's. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including sound recordings, stock arrangements, and score manuscripts available only since Goodman's death, this book traces Henderson's life and work from his youth in the deep South, to his early work as a New York bandleader, to his pivotal role in building the Kingdom of Swing. Henderson, standing at the forefront of the New York jazz scene in the 1920s and 1930s, assembled many of the era's best musicians, forging a distinctive jazz style within the stylistic framework of popular song and dance music. Henderson's style grew out of collaboration with many key players. It also grew out of a deft combination of written and improvised music, of commercial and artistic impulses, and of racial cooperation and competition, and thus stands as an exemplar of musical activity in the Harlem Renaissance. As Henderson's career stalled in the midst of the Depression, record producer John Hammond brought together Henderson and Goodman in a fortuitous collaboration that shaped the history of American music.

This book examines how the British Broadcasting Corporation mobilized popular music to support the war effort on the home front and among the forces overseas. To an unprecedented degree, the wartime BBC programmed popular music and studied its audiences in order to build national unity, boost morale, and increase industrial production. The BBC also used popular music and jazz to promote the wartime values of virile masculinity, greater public participation for women, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common British culture. At the same time that it developed special programming for women factory workers and male soldiers, however, the BBC also came into uneasy contact with the threats of (ef)feminized sentimentality, Americanization, and new representations of nonwhite, racialized “Others.” It responded by regulating and even censoring popular music repertories and performers while listeners, the press, and Parliament energetically debated its decisions. Throughout the war, broadcast performances by singers like Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton; bandleaders including Geraldo, Victor Silvester, Harry Parry, and Glenn Miller; and theater organists like Sandy Macpherson helped reshape and reframe prewar understandings of gender, race, class, and nationality for the nation at war. This book argues that, rather than providing the soundtrack for a unified “People’s War,” popular music broadcasting at the BBC exposed the divergent ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation.