Popular

Before ‘Fred and Ginger’, there was ‘Fred and Adele’, a show business partnership and a cultural sensation like no other. It is difficult in our ‘celebrity’-sated era to comprehend what a genuine phenomenon the Astaires were. At the height of their success in the mid-1920s the siblings were seasoned transatlantic commuters, ambassadors of an art form they had helped to revolutionize, adored by audiences, feted by royalty, and courted socially by the elite in just about every field of endeavour. They seemed to define the Jazz Age. They were Gershwin’s music in motion; a fascinating pair who wove fascinating rhythms in song and dance. The story of Fred and Adele Astaire is an extraordinary one and is told here in depth and within its historical and theatrical context. It is not merely the first part of Fred’s long and illustrious career; it holds a significance and a fascination of its own, as well as having implications for Astaire’s subsequent career, which have not been fully appreciated. The story of the Astaires is also the story of an era. Born at the close of the nineteenth century, they, in effect, grew up together with the new century. Manifestly children of their time, they glamorously embodied the interwar style they had partly originated. At the same time, their appeal as performers was based largely on their apparent defiance of the darker aspects of the interwar psyche. They were an affirmation of life and hope in the midst of a prevalent crisis of faith and identity.

This book demonstrates how the history of the Broadway musical is inseparable from the history of U.S. women, and argues that this mainstream, commercial form has been dominated by women onstage as performers and offstage as spectators and fans. Beginning in the 1950s and organized by decade, the book examines women in musicals and in the context of U.S. culture, considering both the representation of women—that is, images of women—and the labor of the female performer—that is, her centrality to the musical as performance. In addition to surveying key ideas around gender and sexuality in each decade of U.S. history, every chapter focuses on a specific convention: the female duet in the 1950s; the single woman as a moving body in the 1960s; the ensemble number in the 1970s; sceneography in the 1980s; the opening number and 11 o’clock number in the 1990s. The final chapters on the blockbuster Broadway musical Wicked returns to the 1950s model and analyzes how the musical Wicked reinvigorates the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula in a feminist and queer musical. This book argues that gender, as a key element of the musical, played a crucial role in the Broadway musical’s formal and structural changes from the 1950s on.

The 1950s saw an explosion in the American musical theater. The Broadway show, catapulted into the limelight in the 1920s and solidified during the 1940s thanks to Rodgers and Hammerstein, now entered its most revolutionary phase, brashly redefining itself and forging a new kind of storytelling. This book gives us a guided tour of this rich decade. With detail, the book highlights the shift in Broadway from shows that were mere star vehicles, showcasing a big-name talent, to the bolder stories, stuffed with character and atmosphere. During this period, subject matter became more intricate, even controversial, and plots more human and complex. The book demonstrates how, in response, musical conventions were polished, writing became more finely crafted, and dance became truly indispensable. Along the way we meet the key players: such greats as Ethel Merman, George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. We get the backstage scoop on why Guys and Dolls is so well-made, why West Side Story is so timeless, why The King and I and Gypsy pushed the envelope, and why no one ever talks about Ankles Aweigh. All this is peppered with a dash of industry gossip—the directorial struggles, last-minute script rewrites and cast replacements, and the power of the poster listings—that made Broadway so nerve-wrackingly vibrant.

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene explores the roles that music, as a sounding phenomenon with culturally specific meanings, played in mediating the experiences of a community of musicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and fans who viewed country music as part of their collective heritage. These same people sought to reclaim the sounds of country music to articulate a distinctively Texan musical counterculture that has had an indelible impact on the production and consumption of country music. Arguing that the sounds of a scene function as relatively stable and extremely powerful signifiers for scene participants, this book explores how music performs important cultural work within a music scene by helping participants to construct personal and collective identities, to imbue music scenes with a sense of place, and to relate to people who are not active within the scene.

Dangdut Stories is a social and musical history of dangdut, Indonesia's most popular music, within a range of broader narratives about social class, gender, ethnicity and nation in post-independence Indonesia (1945-present). The book shows how dangdut evolved from a debased form of urban popular music to a prominent role in Indonesian cultural politics and the commercial music industry. Throughout the book the voices and experiences of musicians take center stage in shaping the book's narrative. Quoted material from interviews, detailed analysis of music and song texts, and ethnography of performance illuminate the stylistic nature of the music and its centrality in public debates about Islam, social class relations, and the role of women in post-colonial Indonesia. Dangdut Stories is the first musicological study to examine the stylistic development of dangdut music itself, using vocal style, melody, rhythm, harmony, form, and song texts to articulate symbolic struggles over meaning in the realm of culture. The book illuminates historical changes in musical style, performance practice, and social meanings from the genre's origins to the present day. Developed during the early 1970s, an historical treatment of the genre's musical style, performance practice, and social meanings is long overdue.

In the 1960s and 1970s, British musicians rediscovered traditional folk ballads, fusing the old melodies with rock, jazz, and blues styles to create a new genre dubbed “electric folk” or “British folk rock.” This revival featured groups such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle, and individual performers like Richard Thompson and Shirley Collins. While working in multiple styles, all were making music based on traditional English song and dance material. After reasonable commercial success, electric folk disappeared from mainstream notice in the late 1970s, yet performers continue to create it today. This multi-layered analysis explores electric folk as a cultural phenomenon, commercial entity, and performance style. Drawing on rare historical sources, contemporary music journalism, and first-hand interviews, the book argues that electric folk resulted from both the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad. In this process, the musicians turned to traditional musical material as a means of asserting their British cultural identity. Yet, they were less interested in the “purity” of folk ballads than in the music's potential for lively interaction with modern styles, instruments, and media. This book also delves into the impact of the movement on mainstream pop, American rock music, and neighboring European countries.

What was the inspiration for Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, or Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel? Why is Marias impassioned final speech in West Side Story spoken, rather than sung? This book offers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of the best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals of Broadways Golden Era. The book provides studies of such all-time favorites as Show Boat, Anything Goes, Porgy and Bess, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story. This book provides a documentary history of fourteen musicals in all—plus an epilogue exploring the plays of Stephen Sondheim—showing how each work took shape and revealing, at the same time, production by production, how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and beyond. The book's particular focus is on the music, offering a wealth of detail about how librettist, lyricist, composer, and director work together to shape the piece. Drawing on manuscript material such as musical sketches, autograph manuscripts, pre-production librettos and lyric drafts, the book reveals the winding route the works took to get to their final form. The book blends this close attention to the nuances of musical composition and stagecraft with trenchant social commentary and lively backstage anecdotes. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, and other luminaries emerge as hardworking craftsmen under enormous pressure to sell tickets without compromising their dramatic vision and integrity. Opening night reviews and accounts of critical and popular response to subsequent revivals show how particular musicals have adapted to changing times and changing audiences, shedding light on why many of these innovative shows are still performed in high schools, colleges, and community theaters across the world, while others, such as Weills One Touch of Venus or Marc Blitzsteins The Cradle Will Rock, languish in comparative obscurity.

This book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. Critical response to music by composers with disabilities has tracked changing conceptualizations of disability, as divine affliction, divine afflatus, medical pathology, and affirmative identity. The same is true for performers with disabilities: disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts. Music itself may convey narratives about disability, including a familiar narrative of disability heroically and inspirationally overcome. The language that music theorists have traditionally used to describe music is pervaded by metaphors of disability and traditional music theory is essentially a normalizing enterprise. Finally, listeners with disabilities may find that their ways of listening are inflected by their nonnormative embodiment, resulting in various forms of disablist hearing.

This book discusses tendencies in popular audiovisual expression since the 1990s that resemble those found in historical surrealism. A variety of current theories are applied to emerging audiovisual practices, including independent cinema, live performances of popular music, cinematic opera, and internet practices such as syncing and audiovisual mash-ups. Neosurrealism in this context is considered more a cluster of loosely related practices than a single determining “code”. In addition to the hermeneutic lens of surrealism, case studies are interpreted with reference to factors such as digital culture, affect theory, changing ideas about cultural identity (including gender), and the proliferation and hybridity of forms and practices in the information age. Chapters address background and theories on historical surrealism, neosurrealist tendencies in recent films, metamusicals, strategies of synchronization in cinematic opera and internet syncing practices, the idea of the virtual band in the digital age, and discursive formations of the digital acoustic. Musicians discussed include Gorillaz, Philip Glass, KT Tunstall and Sigur Rós. Directors and films include Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, Sally Potter’s Yes, and Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Wayward Cloud. A prominent theme in the book is the role of cultural memory in shaping our understanding of creative practices in an age in which the recycling of cultural artifacts is becoming increasingly prevalent. The ghosts of previous eras, it is argued, resonate in many of the expressive forms we routinely think of as ȁCcontemporary”.

George Gershwin is one of the giants of American music, unique in that he was both a brilliant writer of popular songs and of more serious music. This book offers a collection of writings by Gershwin, as well as those about Gershwin, written by a who's who of commentators. More than eighty chapters include the critical debate over Gershwin's concert pieces, especially “Rhapsody in Blue” and “An American in Paris”. There is a complete section devoted to the controversies over “Porgy and Bess”, including correspondence between Gershwin and DuBose Hayward, the opera's librettist, plus unique interviews with the original Porgy and Bess℄Todd Duncan and Anne Brown. Sprinkled throughout the book are excerpts from Gershwin's own letters, which offer insight into the man. Along with a detailed chronology of the composer's life, the book includes informative introductions to each entry.