History, American : oso

Show Boat

Todd Decker — 2013-01-24

Author:: Todd Decker
ISBN:: 9780199759378
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759378.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

Drawing on archival research and including much new information, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created the Broadway musical Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, plus five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage—revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy—Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical and, more broadly, with popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound social transformations.

The Music of James Bond

Jon Burlingame — 2013-01-24

Author:: Jon Burlingame
ISBN:: 9780199863303
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199863303.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the songs and scores written for the movie adventures of Ian Fleming's Agent 007 of the British Secret Service. The book looks at many aspects of the 50-year saga including the following: How the “James Bond Theme” was written at the last minute for Dr. No and how it became the subject of controversy, ending in a libel trial 40 years later in London's High Court. How Bond composer John Barry invented a new kind of action-adventure music for movies, and how despite writing immensely popular scores for Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and eight other Bond films, he never received a single Academy Award nomination for his Bond music. Why Monty Norman preceded Barry, and why Paul McCartney, Marvin Hamlisch, Bill Conti, Michael Kamen, Eric Serra and David Arnold succeeded him as composers (and details of the Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand scores for the “unofficial” Bond films). How top artists like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Carly Simon, Madonna and others were convinced to record for 007, and how Frank Sinatra and Amy Winehouse almost did. How changes in the Bond sound reflected what was happening in pop and rock circles, from the twangy guitar of the Sean Connery era to a more sedate sound for Roger Moore, synthesizers for George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton, and a more contemporary approach for Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. Each chapter also contains a “score highlights” box that examines each Bond score in detail, especially as relates to the commercially available soundtrack albums.

Marc Blitzstein

Howard Pollack — 2013-01-24

Author:: Howard Pollack
ISBN:: 9780199791590
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791590.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This is a study of the life and work of one of America’s most brilliant and inspiring composer-dramatists, Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964). A piano student of Alexander Siloti, and composition student of Rosario Scalero, Nadia Boulanger, and Arnold Schoenberg, Blitzstein innovatively combined serious and popular techniques and traditions in order to reach the large audience for radio, film, and Broadway shows, producing work, conditioned by Marxist perspectives, that spoke to the concerns of workers, immigrants, women, and minorities. His most successful works include the operas The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Regina (1949, adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes), for which he wrote both the words and music, and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which helped popularize that piece in English-speaking countries, and which yielded the hit song “Mack the Knife.” Other notable works include the opera No for an Answer, the Airborne Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the ballet The Guests, and two late stage works, Reuben Reuben and Juno. Such works had, according to Leonard Bernstein, an “incalculable” influence on the American musical theater, and remain particularly noteworthy in terms of their musical prosody, their formal novelty, and their amalgam of serious and popular elements. This study considers other aspects of the composer’s life: his Jewish-Russian background and his childhood in Philadelphia; his activities as a pianist, critic, and translator; his marriage to the writer Eva Goldbeck and his relations with friends and colleagues; his involvement with various progressive social causes; his service in the Army as an entertainment specialist during World War II; his brush with anti-communist attacks; and his violent death in Martinique at age fifty-eight.

Hard Times

Elizabeth L. Wollman — 2013-01-24

Author:: Elizabeth L. Wollman
ISBN:: 9780199747481
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199747481.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

One legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution was the “adult” musical of the 1970s. Influenced by the overwhelming success in 1968 of Hair, as well as by a series of rulings on the nature of obscenity, adult musicals proliferated in New York's theaters at a time when the city was teetering toward bankruptcy and tourism was on the decline. Typically structured like old-fashioned revues, shows like Let My People Come, The Faggot, and the long-running Oh! Calcutta! relied on nudity and simulated sex to attract audiences. Adult musicals disappeared almost entirely by the early 1980s, as the city's economy improved and the country grew more socially conservative; they have since been largely dismissed as a silly fad befitting a silly decade. Yet adult musicals reflect aspects of 1970s American culture at their messiest and thus at their most honest. Specifically, they emulate the country's rapidly changing, often contradictory attitudes about gender and sexuality at a time when the sexual revolution had given way to the gay and women's liberation movements. Hard Times examines adult musicals as reflective of the socioeconomic mood of New York City in the 1970s, the socio-sexual mores of the country in the decade following the sexual revolution, and contemporary debates about obscenity and art.

Martha Graham in Love and War

Mark Franko — 2012-09-20

Author:: Mark Franko
ISBN:: 9780199777662
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Dance, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777662.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Using newly discovered archival sources this book examines the major works of Martha Graham between 1938 and 1953, arguably her most productive period. Graham’s artistic maturation overlaps the global crisis of fascism, the conflict of World War II, and the post-war period that ushered in the Cold War. It also corresponds to the trajectory of her personal and professional relationship with dancer Erick Hawkins who first appeared with the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1938 when her art was taking on new dramaturgical complexity, political commitment and mytho-graphic dimension. As a relationship between a young man and a mature woman as well as between an established and a fledgling artist, the Graham-Hawkins story was a tormented one. The vicissitudes of this relationship and its emotional tone will be an integral part of the description of Graham’s work undertaken in this study. The sociological axes of seven major works are Graham’s involvement with anti-Fascism prior and during World War Two and her involvement with post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Jungian psychoanalysis in the postwar period. This book relates Graham’s original and groundbreaking use of myth to both anti-fascism and psychoanalysis, before and after the war respectively, and thus brings her choreography into direct relationship both to the key events of her time and to her personal life.

Loverly

Dominic McHugh — 2012-09-20

Author:: Dominic McHugh
ISBN:: 9780199827305
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199827305.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the genesis and performance history of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Using more than 500 previously unpublished letters from the papers of the producer Herman Levin, it traces the background of the show, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion to the opening night of the musical on Broadway in 1956. It also uses more than 3,000 archival manuscripts and a rehearsal script to propose a reappraisal of the ambiguous relationship between Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews). Finally, the book explores conflicting aspects of the reception of the show, both in critical writings and in performance.

Playing Along

Kiri Miller — 2012-05-24

Author:: Kiri Miller
ISBN:: 9780199753451
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Ethnomusicology, World Music
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199753451.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

This book is about play, performance, and participatory culture in the digital age. It shows how music, video games, and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, creating dispersed communities who forge meaningful connections by “playing along” with popular culture. Miller reveals how digital media are brought to bear in the transmission of embodied knowledge: how a Grand Theft Auto player uses a virtual radio to hear with her avatar’s ears; how a Guitar Hero player channels the experience of a live rock performer; and how an amateur guitar student translates a two-dimensional, pre-recorded online music lesson into three-dimensional physical practice and an intimate relationship with a distant teacher. Through ethnographic case studies, Miller demonstrates that our everyday experiences with interactive digital media are gradually transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and participation.

Off the Record

Neal Peres da Costa — 2012-05-24

Author:: Neal Peres da Costa
ISBN:: 9780195386912
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195386912.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Early piano recordings provide audible evidence of the performing practices of late-Romantic pianists, practices that often differ radically from the present. Comparing these practices with descriptions in contemporaneous written texts reveal that important features of recordings are not faithfully conveyed by the written texts. The style of the recordings could, therefore, seldom have been envisaged from the written texts alone. The recordings examined here include those of a generation of pianists who were trained, in some cases, 150 years ago. These include Carl Reinecke, Theodor Leschetizky, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Johannes Brahms, and those of a later generation have also been considered. Their recordings preserve vital information about general performing practices of the era, as well as the idiosyncrasies of their playing. The Introduction outlines the significance of early recordings for appreciating lost traditions. Chapter 1 explores the early recording processes and the value of the preserved evidence. Chapter 2 to 5 investigate dislocation (playing one hand after the other), unnotated chordal arpeggiation, metrical rubato and various types of rhythmic alteration, and tempo modification. Each chapter compares written references with numerous recorded examples provided on the companion website. This reveals, in many cases, striking inconsistencies between theory and practice and suggests that descriptive language and musical notation have hidden meanings for which the recordings provide an indispensable key. An important implication is that any attempt at historically informed performances must acknowledge the gulf between current aesthetics of performance and those of earlier eras.

Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater

Jeffrey Magee — 2012-05-24

Author:: Jeffrey Magee
ISBN:: 9780195398267
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195398267.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

“The mob is always right” was the idea that charged Irving Berlin’s career in American popular music. Taking off from that claim, this book represents a wide-ranging exploration of America’s greatest songwriter and his role in creating twentieth-century musical theater. Drawing on past scholarly efforts and a vast store of recently released archival material, the book strives to break new ground in focusing on Irving Berlin’s half-century of work for the Broadway stage—a career that tracks the development of American musical theater itself. The book traces a fundamental paradigm shift from early twentieth-century values of variety entertainment, manifested in Berlin’s revues and revue-like comedies, to an increasing emphasis on coherent, well-crafted scripts for musical comedy, in which songs were more thoroughly integrated into the plot. Throughout, Berlin maintained a unique balance by fitting musical numbers tightly to their show contexts, and addressing their historical moment, while preserving their integrity as individual songs that could have their own lives in the musical marketplace as jazz and cabaret standards, and as popular classics whose sheet music enjoyed pride of place in the piano benches of American homes. Like Berlin’s songs and shows, the book is designed for a wide readership of musical theater aficionados as well as serious students of music, drama, and popular culture—and anyone interested in the story of a poor immigrant boy whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.

Transnational Encounters

Alejandro L. Madrid — 2012-01-19

Author:: Alejandro L.MadridUniversity of Illinois - Chicago
ISBN:: 9780199735921
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199735921.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

This volume maps out the continuous transnational dialogues that have informed culture and life at the U.S.‐Mexico border through the study of a wide variety of musical practices from the area. Without neglecting border musics that have been privileged in music scholarship (such as Tejano, corrido, and norteña) this book focuses on neglected indigenous, popular, and alternative musical practices in order to challenge biased understandings of the border as a homogeneous cultural area. The book’s multi‐disciplinary perspective offers a unique perspective to answer questions about the performativity of music within a politically and culturally contested geography.

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It

Jeremy Grimshaw — 2012-01-19

Author:: Jeremy Grimshaw
ISBN:: 9780199740208
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Theory, Analysis, Composition
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199740208.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

La Monte Young, generally regarded as the father of musical minimalism, is one of America’s most important contemporary composers--and one of the most elusive. Early on Young eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns. At the same time, however, he exercised profound influence on such varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and entire branches of pop music. For half a century he and his partner and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality. Because of this seclusion, his importance as a composer has heretofore not been matched by a commensurate amount of scholarly scrutiny. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young stands as the first monograph to examine Young’s life and work in detail. The book is a culmination of a decade of research, during which the author gained rare access to the composer and his archives. The book takes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music analysis, and illuminates such seemingly disparate aspects of Young’s work as integral serialism and indeterminacy, Mormon esoterica and Vedic mysticism, and psychedelia and psychoacoustics. The book is a long-awaited, in-depth look at one of experimental music’s most fascinating figures.

Writings on Music 1965–2000

Steve Reich and Paul Hillier — 2011-10-03

Author:: Steve ReichPaulHillierIndiana University, Bloomington
ISBN:: 9780195151152
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151152.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind. This book documents the creative journey of this thoughtful, groundbreaking composer. These sixty-four short pieces include Reich's 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process,” widely considered one of the most influential pieces of music theory in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent essays, articles, and interviews treat Reich's early work with tape and phase shifting, showing its development into more recent work with speech melody and instrumental music. Other essays recount his exposure to non-western music—African drumming, Balinese gamelan, Hebrew cantillation—and the influence of these musics as structures and not as sounds. The writings include Reich's reactions to and appreciations of the works of his contemporaries (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti) and older influences (Kurt Weill, Schoenberg). Each major work of the composer's career is also explored through notes written for performances and recordings.

Schoenberg

Malcolm MacDonald — 2011-10-03

Author:: Malcolm MacDonald
ISBN:: 9780195172010
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195172010.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book takes advantage of 30 years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and deeper understanding of Schoenberg’s aims and significance to produce a newly revised guide to Schoenberg’s life and work. The book demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg’s musical language (particularly the enigmatic and influential 12-tone method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a revolutionary composer. Exploring influences on the composer’s early life, the book offers a new perspective on Schoenberg’s creative process and the emotional content of his music. For example, as a previously unsuspected source of childhood trauma, the book points to the Vienna Ringtheater disaster of 1881, in which hundreds of people were burned to death, including Schoenberg’s uncle and aunt, whose orphaned children were then adopted by Schoenberg’s parents. The book brings such experiences to bear on the music itself, examining virtually every work in the oeuvre to demonstrate its vitality and many-sidedness.

Samuel Barber

Barbara B. Heyman — 2011-10-03

Author:: Barbara B. Heyman
ISBN:: 9780195090581
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195090581.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Samuel Barber (1910–81) was one of the most important and honoured American composers of the 20th century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms—symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, chamber music—he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this book covers Barber's entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber's creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. The book also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education, how he built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, his relationship to musical giants like Serge Koussevitzky, and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of the new Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.

Recorded Music in American Life

William Howland Kenney — 2011-10-03

Author:: William Howland Kenney
ISBN:: 9780195171778
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. This book is in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. It offers a full account of what the book calls “the 78 rpm era” from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, this book addresses such issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the “hit record” phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.

The Power of Black Music

Samuel A. Floyd — 2011-10-03

Author:: Samuel A. Floyd
ISBN:: 9780195109757
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195109757.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and of appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths, and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the author advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself.

A Life in Ragtime

Reid Badger — 2011-10-03

Author:: Reid Badger
ISBN:: 9780195337969
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337969.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In 1919, the world stood at the threshold of the Jazz Age. The man who had ushered it there, however, lay murdered—and would soon plunge from international fame to historical obscurity. It was a fate few would have predicted for James Reese Europe; he was then at the pinnacle of his career as a composer, conductor, and organizer in the black community, with the promise of even greater heights to come. This book captures this fascinating life, tracing a critical chapter in the emergence of jazz through one man's remarkable odyssey. After an early start in Washington, Europe found his fame in New York, the entertainment capital of turn-of-the-century America. In the decade before the First World War, he emerged as an acknowledged leader in African-American musical theater, both as a conductor and an astonishingly prolific composer. This book reveals a man of tremendous depths and ambitions, constantly aspiring to win recognition for black musicians and wider acceptance for their music. He toiled constantly, working on benefit concerts, joining hands with W. E. B. Du Bois, and helping to found a black music school—all the while winning commercial and critical success with his chosen art. In 1910, he helped create the Clef Club, making it the premiere African-American musical organization in the country during his presidency. Every year from 1912 to 1914, Europe led the Clef Club orchestra in triumphant concerts at Carnegie Hall, winning new respectability and popularity for ragtime. He went on to a tremendously successful collaboration with Vernon and Irene Castle, the international stars who made social dancing a world-wide rage. Along the way, Europe helped to revolutionize American music—and the book provides fascinating details of his innovations and wide influence. In World War I, the musical pioneer won new fame as the first African-American officer to lead men into combat in that conflict—but he was best known as band leader for the all-black 15th Infantry Regiment. As the “Hellfighters” of the 15th racked up successes on the battlefield, Europe's band took France by storm with the new sounds of jazz. In 1919, the soldiers returned to New York in triumph, and Europe was the toast of the city. Then, just a few months later, he was dead—stabbed to death by a drummer in his own orchestra.

King of Ragtime

Edward A. Berlin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Edward A. Berlin
ISBN:: 9780195101089
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195101089.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In 1974, the academy award-winning film The Sting brought back the music of Scott Joplin, a black ragtime composer who died in 1917. Led by The Entertainer, one of the most popular pieces of the mid-1970s, a revival of his music resulted in events unprecedented in American musical history. Never before had any composer's music been so acclaimed by both the popular and classical music worlds. His opera Treemonisha was performed both in opera houses and on Broadway. In this book, the author redefines the Scott Joplin biography. Using the tools of a trained musicologist, he has uncovered a vast amount of new information about Joplin. His biography truly documents the story of the composer, replacing the myths and unsupported anecdotes of previous histories. He shows how Joplin's opera Treemonisha was a tribute to the woman he loved, a woman other biographers never even mentioned. He also reveals that Joplin was an associate of Irving Berlin, and that he accused Berlin of stealing his music to compose Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1911. The author paints a vivid picture of the ragtime years, placing Scott Joplin's story in its historical context. The composer emerges as a representative of the first post-Civil War generation of African Americans, of the men and women who found in the world of entertainment a way out of poverty and lowly social status. This book recreates the excitement of these pioneers, who dreamed of greatness as they sought to expand the limits society placed upon their race.

Hard Bop

David H. Rosenthal — 2011-10-03

Author:: David H. Rosenthal
ISBN:: 9780195085563
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195085563.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Hard bop was a brand of post bebop jazz that enveloped many of the most talented American musicians in the period between 1955 and 1956. These were years unrivalled in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records issued—including Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, and Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus. This book is devoted entirely hard bop, combining a narrative of the movement's evolution, from its beginnings as an amalgam of bebop and R&B to its experimental breakthroughs in the 1960s. With close analyses of musicians' styles and recordings, as well as specific tendencies within the school, such as “soul jazz”, it offers a much needed examination of the artists, milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's greatest musical epochs.

Great God Aʼmighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds

Jerry Zolten — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jerry Zolten
ISBN:: 9780195152722
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195152722.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

From the Jim Crow world of 1920s Greenville, South Carolina, to Greenwich Village's Café Society in the 1940s, to their 1974 Grammy-winning collaboration on “Loves Me Like a Rock,” the Dixie Hummingbirds have been one of gospel's most durable and inspiring groups. This book tells the Hummingbirds' fascinating story and with it the story of a changing music industry and a changing nation. When James Davis and his high-school friends starting singing together in a rural South Carolina church they could not have foreseen the road that was about to unfold before them. They began a ten-year jaunt of “wildcatting,” traveling from town to town, working local radio stations, schools, and churches, struggling to make a name for themselves. By 1939, the a cappella singers were recording their four-part harmony spirituals on the prestigious Decca label. By 1942, they had moved north to Philadelphia and then New York where, backed by Lester Young's band, they regularly brought the house down at the city's first integrated nightclub, Café Society. From there the group rode a wave of popularity that would propel them to nation-wide tours, major record contracts, collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon, and a career still vibrant today as they approach their seventy-fifth anniversary. Drawing on interviews with Hank Ballard, Otis Williams, and other artists who worked with the Hummingbirds, as well as with members James Davis, Ira Tucker, Howard Carroll, and many others, this book aims to bring vividly to life the growth of a gospel group and of gospel music itself.

Drumminʼ Men

Burt Korall — 2011-10-03

Author:: Burt Korall
ISBN:: 9780195157628
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157628.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In the 1930s swing music was everywhere—on radio, recordings, and in the great ballrooms, hotels, theatres, and clubs. Perhaps at no other time were drummers more central to the sound and spirit of jazz. Benny Goodman showcased Gene Krupa. Jimmy Dorsey featured Ray McKinley. Artie Shaw helped make Buddy Rich a star while Count Basie riffed with the innovative Jo Jones. Drummers were at the core of this music; as Jo Jones said, “The drummer is the key—the heartbeat of jazz”. An oral history told by the drummers, other musicians, and industry figures, this book is also Burt Korall's memoir of more than fifty years in jazz. Personal and moving, the book is a celebration of the music of the time and the men who made it. Meet Chick Webb, small, fragile-looking, a hunchback from childhood, whose explosive drumming style thrilled and amazed; Gene Krupa, the great showman and pacemaker; Ray McKinley, whose rhythmic charm, light touch, and musical approach provided a great example for countless others, and the many more that populate this story. Based on interviews with a collection of the most important jazzmen, this book offers an inside view of the swing years that cannot be found anywhere else.

Clifford Brown

Nick Catalano — 2011-10-03

Author:: Nick Catalano
ISBN:: 9780195144000
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195144000.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Although he died in a tragic car accident at the age of twenty-five, Clifford Brown is widely considered one of the most important figures in the history of jazz, a trumpet player who ranks with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, and a leading influence on contemporary jazz musicians. This book gives us a major biography of this musical giant. Based on extensive interviews with Clifford Brown's family, friends, and fellow jazz musicians, here is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable musician. The book depicts Brown's early life, showing how he developed a facility and dazzling technique that few jazz players have ever equalled. We read of his meteoric rise in Philadelphia, where he played with many of the leading jazz players of the 1950s, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; his tour of Europe with Lionel Hampton, which made him famous; and his formation of the Brown-Roach Quintet with prominent drummer Max Roach—one of the most popular hard bop combos of the day. In an era when most jazz players were either alcoholics or addicts, Brown was clean living and drug free. Indeed, he became a role model for musicians who were struggling with drugs and had great influence in this area with one prominent colleague, tenor sax player Sonny Rollins. This book not only provides a colorful account of Brown's life, but also features an informed analysis of his major recorded solos, highlighting Brown's originality and revealing why he remains a great influence on trumpet players today.

Chicago Jazz

William Howland Kenney — 2011-10-03

Author:: William Howland Kenney
ISBN:: 9780195092608
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092608.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book offers a wide-ranging look at jazz in the Windy City, revealing how Chicago became the major centre for jazz in the 1920s, one of the most vital periods in the history of the music. It describes how the migration of blacks from the South to Chicago before and after World War I set the stage for the development of jazz in Chicago, and how nightclubs and cabarets became the social setting for aficionados and musicians, black and white. In an examination of such well known greats as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, the book sheds new light on the musical and cultural context in which jazz developed. And it travels beyond the South Side of Chicago to examine the evolution of white jazz and the influence of the South Side school on young players. Drawing on the personal recollections of many who experienced the influence of the Jazz Age, as well as historical texts, the book presents a new interpretation of Chicago jazz that shows the influence of race, culture, and politics on its development.

Bebop

Thomas Owens — 2011-10-03

Author:: Thomas Owens
ISBN:: 9780195106510
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106510.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Created in the jazz clubs of New York City, and initially treated by most musicians and audiences as radical, chaotic, and bewildering, bebop has become, this book states, “the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians.” It takes an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities—among them Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis—with deft musical analysis, this book offers an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations.

The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908–1923

Bryan R. Simms — 2011-10-03

Author:: Bryan R. Simms
ISBN:: 9780195128260
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195128260.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In the years from 1908 to 1923, Arnold Schoenberg developed a compositional strategy that moved beyond the accepted concepts and practices of Western tonality. Pieces from this period such as Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung remain masterpieces of the modern repertoire. The lasting importance of Schoenberg's atonal music is reflected in the very large but fragmented critical and analytical literature that surrounds it. This book synthesizes and advances the state of knowledge about this body of work, building up a comprehensive description from close analytical study.

Schoenberg’s New World

Sabine Feisst — 2011-09-22

Author:: Sabine Feisst
ISBN:: 9780195372380
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, History, Western
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372380.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

The first full-length study dedicated to Schoenberg’s life and music in the United States, this book dispels many myths and fills significant gaps in the existing literature on Schoenberg. Drawing on much new information, the book traces early American Schoenberg champions, who set the stage for Schoenberg’s arrival in 1933. The volume addresses in detail how Schoenberg, while coming to terms with his German and Jewish identities, developed an American identity both privately and professionally. New light is cast on Schoenberg’s relations with Americans, his interest in American culture, and changes in his religious and political thinking and lifestyle. As Schoenberg was committed to the advancement of American music and composed music inspired by and composed for American musicians, his American works are examined anew with regard to their contexts and the history of their performance and publication. Schoenberg’s many interactions with performers and publishers in the United States are explored as well. Illustrating how Schoenberg adjusted to the American educational system, the book delves into Schoenberg’s American teaching career, teaching methods, and materials and features some of the many remarkable students he taught in Boston and Los Angeles. Finally the impact of Schoenberg’s music and ideas on American performers, composers, and scholars after World War II is gauged in the light of major political and cultural changes during the Cold War era.

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks

Travis D. Stimeling — 2011-09-22

Author:: Travis D. Stimeling
ISBN:: 9780199747474
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199747474.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

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.

Changed for Good

Stacy Wolf — 2011-09-22

Author:: Stacy Wolf
ISBN:: 9780195378238
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195378238.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

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.

Orpheus in Manhattan

Steve Swayne — 2011-05-01

Author:: Steve Swayne
ISBN:: 9780195388527
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, History, Western
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195388527.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

The musical landscape of New York City and the United States of America would look quite different had it not been for William Schuman. This book, the first objective and comprehensive biography of Schuman, portrays a man who had a profound influence upon the artistic and political institutions of his day and beyond. The book draws heavily upon Schuman's letters, writings, and manuscripts as well as unprecedented access to archival recordings and previously unknown correspondence. The winner of the first Pulitzer Prize in Music, Schuman composed music that is rhythmically febrile, harmonically pungent, melodically long-breathed, and timbrally brilliant, and the book offers an astute analysis of his work, including many unpublished music scores. Swayne also describes Schuman's role as president of the Juilliard School of Music and of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, tracing how he both expanded the boundaries of music education and championed the performing arts. Filled with new discoveries and revisions of the received historical narrative and published in Schuman's centenary year, Orpheus in Manhattan confirms Schuman as a major figure in America's musical life.

Bright Star of the West

Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire — 2011-05-01

Author:: Sean Williams, Lillis Ó Laoire
ISBN:: 9780195321180
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195321180.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

This book explores the life and performance practices of the Irish sean-nós singer Joe Heaney (1919–1984). Born in Connemara, Ireland, as an autonomous state was about to be created, Heaney grew up speaking the Irish language on a windswept coastal landscape, where he absorbed a rich oral heritage in Irish and in his second language, English. Circumstances took him abroad, and eventually to the United States; he performed and sang his way through life, seeking to accomplish his quest of recognition for an art that was understood as such by only a few. His ability to enthrall and mesmerize his audiences in North America became legendary. That the songs and stories he presented in performance were rooted in a Gaelic culture strange to most of his audiences made his capacity all the more remarkable. This book traces the trajectory that led Heaney to present certain songs and stories to his audiences while excluding others. It offers song texts, translations, and musical transcriptions, together with a detailed discussion of their function and significance for the song man. The authors highlight issues of masculinity, language, religion, history, authenticity, and identity as part of their work in uncovering one Irishman's presentation of self, region, and nation. Many of the works can be heard on a web site constructed as an accompaniment to this book. The book makes for a rich feast of material, exposing the often-thorny decisions made by a stellar performer to forge a professional repertoire from material he had absorbed in his youth.

This Life of Sounds

Renee Levine Packer — 2010-09-01

Author:: Renee Levine Packer
ISBN:: 9780199730773
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730773.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This book portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of the Center, the years 1964–1980. Foss's plan called for the Rockefeller Foundation to provide annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to be based in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult—often controversial—new work. The now legendary group of musicians who participated in the Buffalo group included George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, Julius Eastman, David Tudor, and many more. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings For New Music, its renowned recording of Terry Riley's In C, the political activism of the time, and the intersection between academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. As Life magazine, reporting in 1965 on the Festival of the Arts Today stated, “Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York….”

South Pacific

Jim Lovensheimer — 2010-09-01

Author:: Jim Lovensheimer
ISBN:: 9780195377026
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377026.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This book explores the development of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic Broadway musical South Pacific. In particular, it notes how the team balanced the creation of a commercially successful work with the desire to make a passionate statement against racial intolerance that they knew would almost certainly be controversial. Through the examination of archival materials, many of which are heretofore unexplored in the literature on Rodgers and Hammerstein, the book reveals the creative processes of two masters near the peak of their craft. In addition, this book explores the musical as a cultural, social, and political text of the postwar and early cold war eras. Using contemporaneous sources as well as recent scholarship, it analyzes South Pacific in terms of how it deals with, or reflects, postwar constructs of race, gender, colonialism, and the then new prototype of the rising young business executive. Moreover, each subject is examined from a unique perspective. For instance, Nellie Forbush’s racial intolerance is viewed through the lens of literature about race during the prewar era, the time when her ideas would have developed; and the chapter on gender reveals how Hammerstein altered the gender constructs of his principal characters from how they appeared in James A. Michener’s novel Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical was based. Through exploring the work’s development and reading it as an open text revealing of its time and of contemporary American society, this book offers new insight into South Pacific and its creators.

Pick Yourself Up

Charlotte Greenspan — 2010-09-01

Author:: Charlotte Greenspan
ISBN:: 9780195111101
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195111101.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

Dorothy Fields was best known as a lyricist, one of the few women who played a central role in the great period of American popular song from 1920 to 1960. Fields first became prominent writing the lyrics for Cotton Club shows in Harlem in the late 1920s and 1930s, and her most successful collaboration was with the great songwriter Jerome Kern. Her role as a music creator in a world dominated by men makes a fascinating and unusual story — with particular interest for woman today. Dorothy Fields first famous lyrics for the Cotton Club show songs include “I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Her most successful collaboration with the great songwriter Jerome Kern was on three 1930s films, including the incomparable Swing Time with Rogers and Astaire, which produced such classic songs as “The Way You Look Tonight” and “A Fine Romance.” Fields also collaborated with such prominent composers as Sigmund Romberg, Fritz Kreisler, Harold Arlen, Burton Lane, Arthur Schwartz, and Cy Coleman. Her lyrics were colloquial and urbane, sometimes slangy and sometimes sensuous. Her role as a music creator in a world dominated by men makes a fascinating and unusual story—with particular interest for woman today. This book further discusses Fields in relation to other women songwriters and lyricists of the time.

Listening through the Noise

Joanna Demers — 2010-09-01

Author:: Joanna Demers
ISBN:: 9780195387650
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195387650.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

Electronic music since 1980 has splintered into numerous genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the differences separating academic, popular, and avant-garde electronic musicians, how can aesthetic theory account for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture? This book explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to noise, and from dub to drones and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely known. The book proceeds from this starting point to consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not only to music but to sound itself. The common trait among all variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of previously undesirable materials such as noise, field recordings, and extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music’s destruction of the “musical frame,” the conventions that used to set music apart from the outside world. Different philosophies for listening have emerged in the wake of the musical frame’s disappearance. Some electronic-music genres insist on the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the work. But all share an approach toward listening that departs fundamentally from the expectations governing music listening in the West for the past five centuries.

Tuning In

Ronald Rodman — 2010-02-01

Author:: Ronald Rodman
ISBN:: 9780195340242
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340242.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

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.

Tap Dancing America

Constance Valis Hill — 2010-02-01

Author:: Constance Valis Hill
ISBN:: 9780195390827
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American, Dance
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390827.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

This is the first comprehensive, fully documented, intercultural history of tap dance, a uniquely American art form, that explores all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of contemporary tap luminaries. Tap dance evolved from the oral traditions and expressive cultures of the West Africans and the Irish that converged and collided in America, and was perpetuated by such key features as the tap challenge—any competition or showdown in which dancers compete against each other before an audience of spectators or judges. The book begins with an account of a buck dance challenge between Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn’s Bijou Theatre, in 1900, and proceeds decade by decade through the twentieth century. Vividly described are tap’s musical styles and steps—from buck-and-wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century; jazz tapping to the rhythms of hot jazz, swing, and bebop in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels (high and low) from the 1990s up to today. Tap dancing has long been considered “a man’s game,” and this book is the first history to highlight such outstanding female artists as Ada Overton Walker, Kitty O’Neill, and Alice Whitman, at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium.

That Moaning Saxophone

Bruce Vermazen — 2010-01-01

Author:: Bruce Vermazen
ISBN:: 9780195372182
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372182.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

This book is about the Six Brown Brothers, a musical act on the burlesque, vaudeville, minstrel, and Broadway stages (1911-33) that was once reputed to have initiated the “saxophone craze” of the 1910s and 1920s. Ontario-born circus musician Tom Brown (1881-1950), the group's leader, founded a saxophone quartet c.1906 within the Ringling Brothers' show that included two of his brothers, Verne (1887-1964) and Percy (1883-1918). By 1908, the quartet had become the Five Brown Brothers, also including brothers Alex (or Alec, 1882-1974) and Fred (1890-1949). Their brother William (1879-1945) joined later, as did many unrelated musicians. The act is placed in the context of the introduction of the saxophone into North American popular music. The early part of the saxophone craze is described and the act's role in it assessed. The shows in which they appeared are described. Tom's life is detailed, and those of the other brothers are sketched. A discography of their recordings for U-S Everlasting, Columbia, Victor, Emerson, and Vitaphone is incorporated, and the recordings are discussed.

Swing Along

Marva Carter — 2010-01-01

Author:: Marva Carter
ISBN:: 9780195108910
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195108910.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

Renowned today as a prominent African-American in music theater and the arts community, composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook was a key figure in the development of American music from the 1890s to the 1920s. This book looks at his life’s story, drawing on his unfinished autobiography and his wife Abbie’s memoir. A violin virtuoso, Cook studied at Oberlin College (his parents’ alma mater), Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik with Joseph Joachim, and New York’s national Conservatory of Music with Antonín Dvořák. Cook wrote music for a now-lost production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and then devoted the majority of his career to black musical comedies due to limited opportunities available to him as a black composer. He was instrumental in showcasing his Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the prominent concert halls of the United States and Europe, even featuring New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who later introduced European audiences to authentic blues. Once mentored by Frederick Douglas, Will Marion Cook went on to mentor Duke Ellington, paving the path for orchestral concert jazz. Through interpretive and musical analyses, the book traces Cook’s successful evolution from minstrelsy to musical theater. Written with his collaborator, the distinguished poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Cook’s musicals infused American musical theater with African-American music, consequently altering the direction of American popular music. Cook’s In Dahomeym was the first full-length Broadway musical to be written and performed by blacks. Alongside his accomplishments, Cook’s contentious side is revealed—a man known for his aggressiveness, pride, and constant quarrels, he became his own worst enemy in regards to his career. The book also sets Cook’s life against the backdrop of the changing cultural and social milieu: the black theatrical tradition, white audiences’ reaction to black performers, and the growing consciousness and sophistication of blacks in the arts, especially music.

Making Music Modern

Carol J. Oja — 2010-01-01

Author:: Carol J. Oja
ISBN:: 9780195058499
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195058499.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

New York City witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920s. This artistic renaissance is examined from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music who, along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. The book also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Marion Bauer, and Dane Rudhyar were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies—such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts—to promote the performance of their music, and nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. This book provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the “Machine Age” and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitism, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Freedom Sounds

Ingrid Monson — 2010-01-01

Author:: Ingrid Monson
ISBN:: 9780195128253
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195128253.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.

Terry Riley's in C

Robert Carl — 2009-09-01

Author:: Robert Carl
ISBN:: 9780195325287
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195325287.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

This book examines Terry Riley's In C as a new paradigm of “classical” composition. In C is only one page long, consists of fifty-three compact modules, is of open instrumentation and length, and generates itself through a set of simple and direct rules. At a time when contemporary concert music was pushing the limits of complexity and information density, In C is an essay in economy; it explores how much can be gotten out of what seems to be so little. Riley's 1964 work is also important in the way it sets the standard for American minimalist repetitive practice, for the use of modality and slow harmonic progression for the acceptance of world music and non-“classical” models, and for the use of structured improvisation to create a new idea of form and development. The book explores the history of In C, in terms of Riley's development as a composer in California in the early 1960s; of the story of the 1964 San Francisco premiere; of the history of the “second premiere” in New York in 1968, when the piece was recorded for Columbia records; and of its influence and legacy as described by subsequent experts and a close examination of later recordings. Throughout there are extensive original interviews with Riley and most of the participants in the 1964 concert and 1968 recording.

From Serra to Sancho

Craig H. Russell — 2009-09-01

Author:: Craig H. Russell
ISBN:: 9780195343274
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195343274.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

Music in the California missions was a pluralistic combination of voices and instruments, of liturgy and spectacle, of styles and functions—and even of cultures—in a new blend that was nonexistent before the friars made their way to California beginning in 1769. This book explores the exquisite sacred music that flourished on the West Coast of America when it was under Spanish and Mexican rule; it delves into the historical, cultural, biographical, and stylistic aspects of California mission music during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Aspects of music terminology, performance practice, notation, theory, sacred song, hymns, the sequence, the mass, and pageantry are addressed. The book explores how mellifluous plainchant, reverent hymns, spunky folkloric ditties, “Classical” music in the style of Haydn, and even Native American drumming were interwoven into a tapestry of resonant beauty. The book examines such things as style, scribal attribution, instructions to musicians, government questionnaires, invoices, the liturgy, architectural space where performances took place, spectacle, musical instruments, instrument construction, shipping records, travelers' accounts, letters, diaries, passenger lists, baptismal and burial records, and other primary source material. Within this book one finds considerable biographical information about Junípero Serra, Juan Bautista Sancho, Narciso Durán, Florencio Ibáñez, Pedro Cabot, Martín de Cruzelaegui, Ignacio de Jerusalem, and Francisco Javier García Fajer. Furthermore, it contains five far-reaching appendices: a Catalogue of California Mission Sources; Photos of Missions and Mission Manuscripts (with more than 150 color facsimiles); Translations of Primary Texts; Music Editions (that are performance-ready); and an extensive bibliography.

Cajun Breakdown

Ryan André Brasseaux — 2009-09-01

Author:: Ryan André Brasseaux
ISBN:: 9780195343069
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, American
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195343069.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

This book examines Cajun music’s social and cultural evolution through 1950. Since the ethnic group’s inception, the Cajun community constantly adapted and incorporated select elements of the American musical landscape. French North American songs, minstrel tunes, blues, New Orleans jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom’s synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture that extinguishes the myth that Cajuns were an insular folk group astray in the American South. Musical exchange and the pervasive pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty are used to demonstrate the extent of Cajun interaction with members of English-speaking United States. Cajun Breakdown is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music ever put into print. It raises broad questions about the ethnic experience in North America and the nature of vernacular American music.