Browse

This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth—Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Carousel and Brigadoon were de Mille’s most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director. Each chapter emphasizes de Mille’s unique contributions to the original productions. Several themes emerge. First, character development remained at the heart of de Mille’s Broadway work. She often took minor characters, represented with minimal or no dialogue, and fleshed out their stories. Second, de Mille often came into conflict with her collaborators because of her strong views, but her dances added a layer of meaning that resulted in more complex final products. Finally, de Mille saw much of her choreography as an authorship and argued that she should be given the same rights as the librettist and the composer. Her work as an activist contributed to revisions in dance copyright law and the founding of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a theatrical union that protects the rights of directors and choreographers. Agnes de Mille

Alan Jay Lerner was the lyricist of some of the most beloved musicals of all time, including My Fair Lady, Gigi, Brigadoon, and Camelot. Yet much of his work is less well known and his career has been overlooked in the scholarly literature on musicals. This book helps to bridge the gap by providing new insights into his working life through his professional correspondence with his colleagues and friends. The collection contains letters to Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Frederick Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. It also provides an extensive commentary outlining his early years and putting his career into context.

In 1975, the Broadway musical Chicago brought together a host of memes and myths, the gleefully subversive character of American musical comedy, the reckless glamor of the big-city newspaper, the mad decade of the 1920s, the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon—two of the greatest talents in the musical’s history—and the Wild West gangsterville that was the city of Chicago itself. The tale of a young woman who murders her departing lover and then tricks the jury into letting her off, Chicago seemed too blunt and cynical at first. Everyone agreed it was show biz at its brilliant best, yet the public still preferred A Chorus Line, with its cast of innocents and sentimental feeling. Nevertheless, the 1996 Chicago revival is now the longest-running American musical in history, and the movie version won the Best Picture Oscar. As this text looks back at Chicago’s various moving parts, including the original 1926 play that started it all, a sexy silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, a talkie remake with Ginger Rogers, the musical itself, and at last the movie of the musical, we see how the American theatre serves as a kind of alternative news medium, a town crier warning the public about the racy, devious interior contradictions of American society.

Familiar entertainment icons, stories, and signs from the 1950s and 1960s continue to resonate within contemporary American society and culture. Both the political Left and Right invoke the events and memories of those decades, celebrating or condemning the competing social forces embodied in and unleashed during those years. In recent decades, the entertainment industry has capitalized on this trend with films and television shows that often look back on the 1950s and 1960s with a mixture of nostalgia and criticism.

This book looks at the musical, from The Beggar's Opera to Wicked. Looking at Star Comic and Sweetheart Heroine; the war between musical comedy and operetta; the rise of the sexy story in the 1920s; the wedding of ballet and hoofing in the 1930s; Oklahoma! and Carousel “musical plays” of the 1940s; Novelty Star in the 1950s, and other developments, this book looks at George Gershwin to Ethel Merman to Jerome Robbins to the director-choreographer and the offbeat contemporary show: Porgy and Bess, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Grand Hotel, Grey Gardens, and Rent. The book emphasizes not only the writing of musicals but the performing of them. Considering the development of dance, the book follows it from zany hoofing in the nineteenth century through the tap “combinations” of the 1920s and the injection of ballet and modern dance in the 1930s and 1940s. Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Gwen Verdon: theirs was a time when dance seemed as crucial as music by Richard Rodgers or lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The book examines also the changing role of the star, noting how such early-twentieth-century headliners as Fred Stone seldom varied their portrayals, whether as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz or Little Red Ridinghood's fatherly guardian in The Stepping Stones.

This book approaches George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue as an “arrangement”—a status it has held since its inception in 1924, yet one unconsidered until now. It shifts the emphasis away from a centralized composition and from the sole agency of a single composer, positing a broad vision of the Rhapsody. Based on a host of newly discovered manuscripts, this book significantly alters existing historical and cultural conceptions of the Rhapsody. Each chapter engages a different set of previously unknown documents, providing the reader with a dynamic and multifaceted reappraisal of this emblematic piece of American music. In the process of remapping the terrain of the Rhapsody, new light is shed on familiar and lesser-known musicians who each used arrangements of the piece to establish their musical identities: Ferde Grofé, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Larry Adler, and Anthony Brown. Also considered over the course of the book is the role of visual media in the enduring status of both Gershwin and the Rhapsody, including forays into film, television, and the commercial advertising of United Airlines. The overlapping, divergent, and otherwise hidden narratives that emerge reveal how arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue have shaped the development and approach of musicians throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The reader emerges from the process with new conceptualizations of the Rhapsody, George Gershwin, and music-making in America.

From the end of World War II through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to “ask the experts,” adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was twofold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but also, in doing so, they determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants’ sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how “expertise” served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and nondominant groups from fully participating.

Austin City Limits comprises nearly four decades of changes in civic identity, media, and in potential ways people experience musical meaning. This book acts as a prism pulling together the singular achievements of the PBS television show, and refracting them in ways that bear on popular media culture. Beginning with Willie Nelson’s 1975 pilot broadcast, Austin City Limits sustained national relevance over decades vis-à-vis the local scene and American popular music more broadly, both in constant flux. Austin City Limits spans dramatic shifts in the nature of television and expansion of digital media: once a circumscribed weekly broadcast, it is now a program available for streaming, a presence on Twitter and other social networks, and a “brand” or concept that conveys quality music. It simultaneously exists as a major music festival and a state-of-the-art venue. Thus Austin City Limits draws private and public enterprises—civic, cultural, business, and media organizations—into relationship with audiences in new twenty-first-century ways. The show’s history corresponds to the rise of Austin as “Live Music Capital of the World”; throughout that rise, the show fed the city’s claim to musical vitality just as the city grounded the show’s reputation for authenticity. Furthermore, Austin City Limits bears on the evolution of US public television, along with the broader dilution of genre as a concept. From regional showcase to its current post-genre space as musical tastemaker, Austin City Limits emerges from its deep Texas roots to flower in many directions.

Born into a poor Virginian family, John Treville Latouche (1914–1956), in his short life, made a profound mark on America’s musical theater as a lyricist and librettist. The wit and skill of his lyrics elicited comparisons with the likes of Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, but he had too, as Stephen Sondheim noted, “a large vision of what musical theater could be,” and he proved especially venturesome in helping to develop a lyric theater that innovatively combined music, word, dance, and costume and set design. Many of his pieces, even if not commonly known today, remain high points in the history of American musical theater, including Cabin in the Sky (1940), Beggar’s Holiday (1946), The Golden Apple (1954), The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), and Candide (1956). Extremely versatile, he also wrote cabaret songs, participated in documentary and avant-garde film, translated poetry, and adapted plays. Meanwhile, as one of Manhattan’s most celebrated raconteurs and hosts, he established friendships with many notables, including Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers, Frank O’Hara, Dawn Powell, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, and Gore Vidal—a dazzling constellation of diverse artists all attracted to Latouche’s brilliance and joie de vivre, not to mention his support for their work. This book draws widely on archival collections both at home and abroad, including Latouche’s diaries and the papers of such collaborators as Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Douglas Moore, and Jerome Moross to tell for the first time the story of this fascinating man and his work.

This book constructs a wide-ranging cultural history to explore the earliest stage works of Leonard Bernstein, written during World War II: the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub comedy act called The Revuers. Bernstein and his collaborators—including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green—crossed artistic, political, ethnic, and racial boundaries with abandon. With the zeal of youth, these emerging artists infused their work with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and its first production featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the racial desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial urban vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military. The show starred the dancer Sono Osato, even as her father was interned together with so many Japanese Americans. Fancy Free amiably encoded its own dissenting narratives. Based on a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, it grew out of a complex web of gay relationships. The book explores cross fertilizations across art forms and high-low divides, drawing on intensive archival research, FBI files, interviews with surviving cast members, and previously untapped criticism in African American newspapers.

As a ubiquitous national performance form, musical theatre—an utterly American, unapologetically commercial, earnestly popular, middlebrow genre of art and entertainment—has astonishing staying power. Local productions cross economic, racial, and geographic divides, assuming the status of a national folk practice. Shows are handed down across generations, remarkable in a country with so few common cultural experiences. Artists and audiences learn the Broadway canon, absorb the musical’s conventions, and have a lot of fun in the process. “Broadway,” as a globally recognizable brand, maintains its status as musical theatre’s birthplace, but the form persists in American culture thanks to amateur productions at high schools, community theatres, afterschool programs, summer camps, and dinner theatres. Beyond Broadway illustrates the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in US culture and examines it as a social practice: a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening. Why does local musical theatre flourish in America? Why do people continue to find it pleasurable? Why do they passionately engage in an old-fashioned, slow artistic practice that requires intense, person-to-person collaboration? Why do audiences still flock to musicals in their hometowns? What does local musical theatre do? Beyond Broadway answers these questions by traveling across America, stopping at elementary schools, a middle school performance festival, afterschool programs, high schools, summer camps, state park outdoor theatres, community theatres, and dinner theatres. This expedition illustrates the musical’s abundance and longevity as a thriving social activity that touches millions of lives.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

This study situates Eno’s ambient masterpiece, Music For Airports, within various avant-garde trends in order to underscore its multiple dimensions. In the manner of Satie, it aims to tint living situations without demanding that listeners give the album their full attention. In the manner of Cage, and with La Monte Young’s feel for the textures of individual tones, it arranges the activity of sounds outside traditional Euro-American musical conventions, and in a manner that can spark a kind of thoughtful reverie, thus bringing art into vital, possibly transformative contact with everyday life. Finally, like some of Steve Reich’s works, Music for Airports functions as a piece of conceptual art, facilitating sustained reflections on creativity, listening, and the overall ecology of human activity and meaning, including its technological variability. Because the album has these three distinct dimensions, it requires “prismatic listening,” which switches between distinct modes of attention in the knowledge that these dimensions cannot be heard simultaneously.

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.

The crossroads where the music of Broadway met popular culture was an expansive and pervasive juncture throughout most of the twentieth century and continues to influence the cultural discourse of today. Broadway to Main Street: How Show Music Enchanted America details how Americans heard the music from Broadway on every Main Street across the country over the last 125 years, from sheet music, radio, and recordings to television and the Internet. The original Broadway cast album—from the 78 rpm recording of Oklahoma! to the digital download of Hamilton—is one of the most successful, yet undervalued, genres in the history of popular recording. The phenomenon of how show tunes penetrated the American consciousness came not only from the original cast albums but from interpreters such as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, impresarios such as Rudy Vallee and Ed Sullivan, and record producers such as Johnny Mercer and Goddard Lieberson. The history of Broadway music is also the history of American popular music; the technological, commercial, and marketing forces of communications and media over the last century were inextricably bound up in the enterprise of bringing the musical gems of New York’s Theater District to millions of listeners from Trenton to Tacoma, and from Tallahassee to Toronto.

Hip hop and diplomacy are unlikely partners. And yet, since 2001 the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists to perform and teach around the world. The government has good reason to be interested in hip hop: it is known and loved across the globe, readily acknowledged as a product of American culture. Moreover, hip hop has long been a means of fostering community through creative collaboration—what hip hop artists call building—and can thus facilitate mutual respect and cooperation among people of different nations, a key objective of diplomacy. At heart, Build is about the intersection of art and power. It reveals the power of art to bridge cultural divides, facilitate understanding, and express and heal trauma. Yet power is always double-edged, and the story of hip hop diplomacy is deeply fraught. Build explores the inescapable tensions and ambiguities in the relationship between art and the state, revealing the ethical complexities that lurk behind what might seem mere goodwill tours. In the end, however, Build makes the case that hip hop can be a valuable, positive, and effective means to promote meaningful and productive relations between people and nations. Hip hop, a US-born art form that has become a voice of struggle and celebration worldwide, has the power to build global community at time when it is so desperately needed.

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.

This book documents the history and development of bluegrass music in and around Washington, DC. It begins with the pre-bluegrass period of country music and ends with a description of the local scene near the end of the 2010s. Capital Bluegrass details the period when this genre became recognized locally as a separate genre within country music, which occurred shortly after the Country Gentlemen formed in 1957. This music gained a wider audience during the 1960s, when WAMU-FM began broadcasting this music and the nationally recognized magazine Bluegrass Unlimited was launched in suburban Maryland. Bluegrass flourished during the 1980s with dozens of local venues offering live bluegrass weekly and the public radio station featuring forty hours a week of bluegrass programming. Although it remains a notable genre in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, by the 1990s bluegrass began its slow decline in popularity. By 2019, the local bluegrass community remains stable, though graying. Despite the creation of both bluegrasscountry.org and the DC Bluegrass Union, it is abundantly clear that general recognition and appreciation for bluegrass locally is well below the heights it reached some thirty-five years earlier.