Popular : oso

The Sounds of the Silents in Britain

Julie Brown and Annette Davison — 2013-01-24

Author:: JulieBrownRoyal Hollyway, University of LondonAnnetteDavisonUniversity of Edinburgh
ISBN:: 9780199797615
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, Western
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199797615.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This book explores the sonic dimension of film exhibition in Britain, from the emergence of cinema through to the introduction of synchronized sound. With contributions from many of the acknowledged experts on British silent film, as well as specialists on film music, the chapters provide an introduction to diverse aspect of early film sound: vocal performance (from lecturing and reciting to voicing the drama), music (from the forerunners of music for visual spectacle, to the impact of legislation and the development of an aesthetic), and performance in cinemas (from dancing and singalong films to live stage prologues, and even musical performances captured in British Pathé’s early sound shorts). Other topics include the sonic eclecticism of performances at the Film Society, British International Pictures’ first synchronized sound films, and the role of institutions such as the Musicians’ Union and the Performing Right Society in relation to cinema music and musicians.

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.

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.

Hermes Pan

John Franceschina — 2012-09-20

Author:: John Franceschina
ISBN:: 9780199754298
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Dance, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754298.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book tells the story of a boy from Tennessee who, armed with only an 8th grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing becomes the most prolific and popular choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. As luck would have it, Pan’s movie career began and ended working with Fred Astaire, the most famous dancer on film. The pair made nearly two dozen movies and television shows together and in Astaire, Pan found an artistic soul mate with whom he would develop a symbiotic relationship for the rest of his life. A devout Roman Catholic, Hermes was interested in perfecting the souls as well as the physical technique of his dancers and the book explores the profound effect he had on the lives of stars such as June Haver, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Grable. The book examines each of Pan’s eighty-nine films offering a panoramic view of Pan’s choreography from Flying Down to Rio in 1933 to Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream) in 1980 and comments on the development of Pan’s art throughout his fifty-year career. Although Pan lived what many considered a “blessed” life without scandal or controversy as a Catholic, homosexual, Tennessee gentleman living as one of the “A-List” of Hollywood’s elite, the book explores Pan’s personal conflicts and doubts, his uneasiness with the film community, his spiritual vocation as well as his artistic philosophies.

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.

The Astaires

Kathleen Riley — 2012-05-24

Author:: Kathleen Riley
ISBN:: 9780199738410
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Dance, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199738410.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

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.

Off Key

Kay Dickinson — 2012-03-22

Author:: Kay Dickinson
ISBN:: 9780195326635
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326635.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2012-03-22

This book offers a study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, the book also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged “failures” have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself.

Victory through Harmony

Christina L. Baade — 2012-01-19

Author:: Christina L. Baade
ISBN:: 9780195372014
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372014.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

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.

An Eye for Music

John Richardson — 2012-01-19

Author:: John Richardson
ISBN:: 9780195367362
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367362.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

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”.

The Songs of Hollywood

Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson — 2011-10-03

Author:: Philip Furia, Laurie Patterson
ISBN:: 9780195337082
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337082.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

From “Over the Rainbow” to “Moon River,” and from Al Jolson to Barbra Streisand, this book traces the fascinating history of song in film, both in musicals and in dramatic movies such as High Noon. Illustrated with 200 film stills, the book sheds light on some of Hollywood's best-known and loved repertoire, explaining how the film industry made certain songs memorable, and highlighting important moments in film history along the way. It focuses on how the songs were presented in the movies, from early talkies where actors portrayed singers “performing” the songs, to the Golden Age in which characters burst into expressive, integral song—not as a “performance” but as a spontaneous outpouring of feeling. The book looks at song presentation in 1930s classics with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and in 1940s gems with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The authors also look at the decline of the genre since 1960, when most original musicals were replaced by film versions of Broadway hits such as My Fair Lady.

Show Tunes

Steven Suskin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Steven Suskin
ISBN:: 9780195314076
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314076.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book fully chronicles the shows, songs, and careers of the major composers of the American musical theater, from Jerome Kern’s earliest interpolations to the latest hits on Broadway. Legendary composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter, Berlin, Bernstein, and Sondheim have been joined by more recent songwriters like Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Flaherty, Michael John LaChiusa, and Adam Guettel. This book covers their work, their innovations, their successes, and their failures. This book discusses almost 1,000 shows and 9,000 show tunes and features the entire theatrical output of forty of Broadway’s leading composers, in addition to a wide selection of work by other songwriters. The listings include production data and statistics, extensive information on published and recorded songs, and lively commentary on the shows, songs, and diverse careers. The book also uncovers dozens of lost musicals—including shows that either closed out of town or were never headed for Broadway—and catalogs hundreds of previously unknown songs, including a number of musical gems that have been misplaced, cut, or forgotten.

Rocking the Classics

Edward Macan — 2011-10-03

Author:: Edward Macan
ISBN:: 9780195098884
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098884.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Few styles of popular music have generated as much controversy as progressive rock, a musical genre best remembered today for its gargantuan stage shows, its fascination with epic subject matter drawn from science fiction, mythology, and fantasy literature, and above all for its attempts to combine classical music's sense of space and momumental scope with rock's raw power and energy. Its dazzling virtuosity and spectacular live concerts made it hugely popular with fans during the 1970s, who saw bands such as King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull bring a new level of depth and sophistication to rock. This book illuminates how progressive rock served as a vital expression of the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with a description of the cultural conditions which gave birth to the progressive rock style, it examines how the hippies' fondness for hallucinogens, their contempt for Establishment-approved pop music, and their fascination with the music, art, and literature of high culture contributed to this exciting new genre. It explores the conventions that govern progressive rock, including the visual dimensions of album cover art and concerts, lyrics and conceptual themes, and the importance of combining music, visual motif, and verbal expression to convey a coherent artistic vision. It argues that the critics' largely negative reaction to progressive rock says far more about their own ambivalence to the legacy of the counterculture than it does about the music itself.

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!

Ian Bradley — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ian Bradley
ISBN:: 9780195328943
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328943.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book explores the world of Gilbert and Sullivan over the last four and a half decades, looking at the way the ‘phenomenon’ they started was passed from generation to generation. Taking as the starting point the expiry of copyright on the opera libretti at the end of 1961, and using hitherto unpublished archive material, the book reveals the story of the last years of the old D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, the guardian of Savoy tradition for over a hundred years, and the troubled history of its successor. The book explores the rich vein of parodies, spoofs, and spin-offs of the songs, as well as their influence on 20th-century lyricists and composers. It analyzes professional productions across the world, looks at the unique place of G & S in schools, colleges, and universities, and explores the culture of amateur performance. The book also uncovers the largely male world of the obsessive fans, those collecting memorabilia, the myriad magazines, journals, websites, and festivals devoted to G & S, and the arcane interests of some of the faithful ‘inner brotherhood’.

A Most Ingenious Paradox

Gayden Wren — 2011-10-03

Author:: Gayden Wren
ISBN:: 9780195301724
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195301724.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Written more than a century ago and initially regarded even by their creators as nothing more than light entertainment, the fourteen operas of Gilbert and Sullivan emerged over the course of the 20th century as the world’s most popular body of musical-theater works, ranking second only to Shakespeare in the history of English-language theater. Despite this resounding popularity and proven longevity, most books written about the duo have focused on the authors rather than the works. This detailed examination of all fourteen operas finds the key to the operas’ longevity, not in the clever lyrics, witty dialogue, or catchy music, but in the central themes underlying the characters and stories themselves. Like Shakespeare’s comedies, this book shows, the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan endure because of their timeless themes, which speak to audiences as powerfully now as they did the first time they were performed.

Lorenz Hart

Frederick Nolan — 2011-10-03

Author:: Frederick Nolan
ISBN:: 9780195102895
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195102895.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book presents the public triumphs and personal tragedies of Lorenz Hart, a true genius of the American musical theatre. It is based on many years of research, and interviews with Hart's friends and collaborators one by one, including a remarkable conversation with Richard Rodgers himself. A veritable who's who of Broadway's golden age, including Joshua Logan, Gene Kelly, George Abbott, and many more, recall their uncensored and often hilarious, sometimes poignant memories of the cigar-chomping wordsmith who composed some of the best lyrics ever concocted for the Broadway stage, but who remained forever lost and lonely in the crowds of hangers-on he attracted. A portrait of Hart emerges as a Renaissance and endearing bon vivant conflicted by his homosexuality and ultimately torn apart by alcoholism. This book pulls together the chaotic details of Hart's remarkable life, beginning with his bohemian upbringing in turn-of-the-century Harlem. Here are his first ventures into show business, and the twenty-four-year-old Hart's first meeting with the sixteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. But while success made Rodgers more confident, more musically daring, and more disciplined, for Hart the round of parties, wisecracks, and most of all drinking began to take more and more of a toll on his work. When Hart's unreliability forced Rodgers reluctantly to seek out another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, and their collaboration resulted in the unprecedented artistic and commercial success of “Oklahoma,” Hart never truly recovered.

Jazz Changes

Martin Williams — 2011-10-03

Author:: Martin Williams
ISBN:: 9780195083491
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195083491.001.0001
Published in print:: 1993
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This collection of record notes, interviews, portraits, and reviews recalls the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie Dial Record sessions, Langston Hughes reading poetry to the sound of jazz, and Thelonius Monk recording for the Library of Congress. In addition, in this book there are profiles of such legendary performers as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller, and chapters on the importance of jazz history and a jazz-view of The Beatles.

Ira Gershwin

Philip Furia — 2011-10-03

Author:: Philip Furia
ISBN:: 9780195115703
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195115703.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In this book, the older and less flamboyant of the Gershwin brothers at last steps out of the shadows to claim his due as one of American songwriting's most important and enduring innovators. The book traces the development of Ira Gershwin's lyrical art from his early love of light verse and Gilbert and Sullivan, through his apprentice work in Tin Pan Alley, to his emergence as a prominent writer during the golden era of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. This book reveals how Gershwin took the everyday speech of ordinary Americans and made it sing.

The Hearing Eye

Graham Lock and David Murray — 2011-10-03

Author:: GrahamLockUniversity of NottinghamDavidMurrayUniversity of Nottingham
ISBN:: 9780195340501
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340501.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. This book makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this collection explores the more allusive—and elusive—references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists. There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well as an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet, and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom. With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, this book reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.

Gilbert and Sullivan

Michael Ainger — 2011-10-03

Author:: Michael Ainger
ISBN:: 9780195147698
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195147698.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

“A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan”—with those words, W. S. Gilbert summed up his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. In fact, this book suggests that the pair's success is a direct result of their personality clash, as each partner challenged the other to produce his best work. After research into the D'Oyly Carte collection of documents, the author offers a detailed account of Gilbert and Sullivan's starkly different backgrounds and long working partnership. Having survived an impoverished and insecure childhood, Gilbert flourished as a financially successful theatre professional, married happily, and established himself as a property owner. His sense of proprietorship extended beyond real estate, and he fought tenaciously to protect the integrity of his musical works. Sullivan, the product of a supportive family who nourished his talent, was much less satisfied with stability than his collaborator. His creative self-doubts and self-demands led to nervous and physical breakdowns, but also propelled the team to break the successful mode of their earliest work to produce more ambitious pieces of theatre, including The Mikado and The Yeoman of the Guard. This double biography offers previously unpublished draft librettos and personal letters.

The George Gershwin Reader

Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson — 2011-10-03

Author:: RobertWyattCape Cod Conservatory of MusicJohn AndrewJohnsonSyracuse University
ISBN:: 9780195327113
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327113.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Enchanted Evenings

Geoffrey Block — 2011-10-03

Author:: Geoffrey Block
ISBN:: 9780195167306
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167306.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Coming up Roses

Ethan Mordden — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ethan Mordden
ISBN:: 9780195140583
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195140583.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Seeing Through Music

Peter Franklin — 2011-09-22

Author:: Peter Franklin
ISBN:: 9780195383454
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, History, Western
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383454.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

Critical theorists have noted a regressive discourse of gender running through much modernist cultural commentary; they have highlighted ways in which its value-laden language is often attached to discussion of entertainment film, as a powerful branch of mass culture. It has similarly attached itself to film music, as a supposedly overemotional and manipulative remnant of European late romanticism. The purpose of this book is to interrogate some of the implications of the opposition between film music and serious “classical music,” drawing the former into closer historical alignment with the latter. It therefore reflects as much upon ideas about music and musical values as about film, analyzing the implications of gender-related ideas about music alongside those about film. It consequently proposes a history of twentieth-century music that would include the scores of a number of the major Hollywood movies discussed here, like The Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong, Rebecca, Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane, or Psycho.

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.

Radio's Civic Ambition

David Goodman — 2011-05-01

Author:: David Goodman
ISBN:: 9780195394085
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394085.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

The book argues that the civic ambition of American radio in the 1930s and 40s centered on the production of self-governing and opinion-forming individuals – a cluster of ideas that the book names radio's civic paradigm. A range of programs, from classical music broadcasts to multi-opinion radio forum discussions of public affairs, were designed to promote both civic engagement and individualization. The “public interest” regulation of radio, and continuing broadcaster anxiety about further political reform to broadcasting, meant that at least until the end of WW2, American radio did not just create popular entertainment, but also fostered programs of high civic ambition, aimed at changing not just pleasing citizens. The civic paradigm was also however, the book argues, divisive. Not all Americans shared its values of openness to change and acknowledgement of diversity, and radio researchers discovered that radio had a class-divided audience. The 1938 War of the Worlds panic exposed this division, most clearly between those who wanted radio simply to speak the truth, and those who understood it as a medium whose primary virtue was that it could expose citizens to different perspectives and allow them to try out different ways of thinking. For these and other reasons, the civic paradigm was waning by the end of WW2. But the ambitions of radio's golden age have not been well remembered in radio history.

The Making of Cabaret

Keith Garebian — 2011-05-01

Author:: Keith Garebian
ISBN:: 9780199732494
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732494.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

This book is the most detailed production history to date of the original Broadway version of Cabaret, showing primarily how the show evolved from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories (especially the Sally Bowles novella), into John van Druten's stage play, a British film adaptation, and then the Broadway musical, conceived and directed by Harold Prince as an early concept musical or metamusical. The book shows how Prince was able to find his central metaphor that was appropriate to Weimar society as well as to American society in the sixties. It places this cabaret metaphor within a contextual history of cabaret. Tracing the gradual evolution of Joe Masteroff's libretto (through three versions), the book analyzes the musical's main metaphor, structure, music and lyrics (John Kander and Fred Ebb), design (sets by Boris Aronson, lighting by Jean Rosenthal, costumes by Patricia Zipprodt), choreography (Ron Field), casting, and rehearsals, arguing that though the original version was limited by social and political mores of its day, it set a new standard and path for the American musical, drawing attention to its own theatrical artifice (including camp). The book ends with an examination of the first London version (1968), Bob Fosse's 1972 film version, Hal Prince's 1987 Broadway remount, Sam Mendes's stunning 1998 production, Rufus Norris's London reimagining (2006), and Amanda Dehnert's new investigation for the Stratford Festival of Canada (2006), and it speculates on what the future holds for this musical. The book contains forty illustrations, full cast credits, and a bibliography.

Extraordinary Measures

Joseph N. Straus — 2011-05-01

Author:: Joseph N. Straus
ISBN:: 9780199766451
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular, Philosophy of Music
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199766451.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

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.

To Broadway, To Life!

Philip Lambert — 2011-01-01

Author:: Philip Lambert
ISBN:: 9780195390070
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390070.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

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,

Tin Pan Opera

Larry Hamberlin — 2011-01-01

Author:: Larry Hamberlin
ISBN:: 9780195338928
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Opera, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338928.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

The years between 1900 and 1920 mark a moment of change in the relations between opera and popular music in the United States, a midpoint between the intimate connection of the nineteenth century and the widening gulf of the later twentieth century. This book describes Tin Pan Alley songs that quote operatic melodies, describe opera singers or operatic characters, or in other ways allude to operatic culture. These verbal and musical allusions illuminate social issues that the songs address either indirectly or directly in a comical way, as novelties. Part 1 considers songs that use Italian opera, and especially singers such as Enrico Caruso, to comment on the period's massive wave of immigration from southern Italy. Part 2 treats songs that respond to first-wave feminism either by satirizing female opera singers or appropriating the heroines of two operas that premiered in the first decade of the century, Strauss's Salome and Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The songs in part 3 use opera and its lowbrow opposite, ragtime, to debate the cultural aspirations of African Americans, expressing the era's growing awareness that America's most valuable musical contribution might be not its symphonies and operas but its vernacular music, rooted in black ethnicity but emblematic of the nation as a whole. Tin Pan Opera demonstrates how opera's role in the popular culture of the early twentieth century was only scarcely less extensive than in the nineteenth.

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….”

Special Sound

Louis Niebur — 2010-09-01

Author:: Louis Niebur
ISBN:: 9780195368406
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368406.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This book chronicles how in the late 1950s, the BBC established Britain's own electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in opposition to famous academic studios in Continental Europe and America. Rather than compete with these other studios, however, the BBC built a studio initially to provide its own avant‐garde dramatic productions with “special sound,” experimental sounds that were “neither music nor sound effect.” Very quickly, however, from the ashes of highbrow BBC radio drama emerged a popular lowbrow kind of electronic music in the form of quirky tonal jingles, signature tunes such as the one for Doctor Who, and incidental music for hundreds of programs lasting until the studio's closure in 1998. These influential sounds and styles, heard by millions of listeners over decades of operation on television and radio, have served as a primary inspiration for the use of electronic instruments in popular music. This history focuses on engineers, composers, directors, producers, bureaucrats, equipment, and locations to construct a narrative of the shifting perception toward electronic music in British culture. By combining a historical discussion with an analysis of specific works, this book derives new hermeneutical models for understanding how the output of the Radiophonic Workshop fits into the larger history of electronic music.

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.

Dangdut Stories

Andrew N. Weintraub — 2010-09-01

Author:: Andrew N. Weintraub
ISBN:: 9780195395662
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195395662.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

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.

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.

A Song in the Dark

Richard Barrios — 2010-02-01

Author:: Richard Barrios
ISBN:: 9780195377347
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377347.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

This book chronicles the birth and early years of an art form — the musical film. When sound came to film in the 1920s, musicals led the way as the testing ground upon which sound film proved itself — dauntlessly, intrepidly, sometimes artistically, often ineptly, through works and artists both familiar and forgotten: Al Jolson, the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody, director Ernst Lubitsch, the aberrant Golden Dawn, many more. After immense popularity, the musical market collapsed almost overnight as oversaturated audiences began to feel the effects of the Depression. There was nearly three years of down time, and then the genre returned, phoenix-like, with the triumphant 42nd Street. After seeming to contradict the national mood, musicals came to symbolize the country's recovery from crisis; in 1934, they assumed their final form with the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code. They would continue successfully for decades, but that early pioneer spirit and willingness to experiment and take chances were now mainly gone. Posterity has mainly misunderstood these films and underestimated their importance, yet their echoes and experiments resonate into the twenty-first century, and they form an intensely vital national heritage. Through meticulous research and analysis based in reception theory, this book reclaims the films and their creators, as well as the culture that embraced, rejected, then reconnected with them.

The Music of Joni Mitchell

Lloyd Whitesell — 2010-01-01

Author:: Lloyd Whitesell
ISBN:: 9780195307993
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195307993.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late 20th century. The book presents a thorough exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from the perspective of music analysis. Analyses are conceived within a holistic framework, which takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. This book offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. The book develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field of popular music.

Electric Folk

Britta Sweers — 2010-01-01

Author:: Britta Sweers
ISBN:: 9780195174786
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195174786.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

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.

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.

Sound Commitments

Robert Adlington — 2009-05-01

Author:: RobertAdlingtonUniversity of Nottingham
ISBN:: 9780195336641
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, History, Western, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336641.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-05-01

During the 1960s many avant‐garde musicians were intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, and often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. This volume examines the encounter of avant‐garde music and ‘the sixties’, across a range of genres, aesthetic positions, and geographical locations. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey, the intention is to give an indication of the richness of avant‐garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Many of these musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Yet this stance threw up some sharp dilemmas. For instance, how could institutional and governmental subsidy for recondite music continue to be justified in the context of demands for democratised decision‐making in cultural affairs? How was the cultural baggage of established performance institutions (such as concert halls, symphony orchestras, and broadcasting organizations) to be reconciled with a radical critique of bourgeois values? Most fundamentally, how could avant‐garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? The contributors address music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory ‘events’, performance art, and experimental popular music, and explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan, and parts of the so‐called ‘Third World’. Each chapter draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period.

The Uncrowned King of Swing

Jeffrey Magee — 2008-05-01

Author:: Jeffrey Magee
ISBN:: 9780195090222
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Music, Popular
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195090222.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2008-05-01

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.