This text addresses the broad range of music in the United States from early periods to today, presenting this rich tapestry of sound in its historical and cultural context. Its reasonable length, readability, and logical organization make the text a useful and attractive means of furthering appreciation of the musical heritage of the United States. Frequent connections to other arts, particularly the visual arts, add to the book's appeal and enhance understanding of core musical concepts. The text also offers an elegant and readable introduction to the fundamentals of music. To order the text packaged with a set of three CDs of recorded examples, at a discounted price, use ISBN 0-07-304387-7.
In“This Is America”: Race, Gender, and Politics in America’s Musical Landscape, Katie Rios argues that prominent American artists and musicians build encoded gestures of resistance into their works and challenge the status quo. These artists offer both an interpretation and a critique of what “This Is America” means. Using Childish Gambino’s video for “This Is America” as a starting point, Rios considers how elements including clothing, hairstyles, body movements, gaze, lighting effects, distortion, and word play symbolize American dissonance. From Laurie Anderson’s presence in challenging authority and playing with traditional gender roles in her works, to the Black female feminism and social activism of Beyoncé, Rhiannon Giddens, and Janelle Monáe, to hip hop as resistance in the age of Trump, to sonic and visual variety in the musical Hamilton, the subjects are as powerful as they are topical. Rios explores the ways in which artists relate to and represent underrepresented groups, especially groups that are not traditionally perceived as having a majority voice. The encoded resistances recur across performances and video recordings so that they begin to become recognizable as repeated acts of resistance directed at injustices based on a number of categories, including race, gender, class, religion, and politics.
New York Times Bestseller: “Both revelatory and entertaining . . . Along the way, Viertel provides some fascinating Broadway history.” —The New York Times Book Review Americans invented musicals—and have a longstanding love affair with them. But what, exactly, is a musical? In this book, longtime theatrical producer and writer Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he shows us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward. Beginning with an overture and concluding with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales, Viertel shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically. The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel like you’re there in the rehearsal room, the front row, and the offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit. “A valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf. . . . fans will appreciate the dips into memoir and Viertel’s takes on original cast albums.” —Publishers Weekly “Even seasoned hands will come away with a clearer understanding of why some shows work while others flop.” —Commentary “A showstopper . . . infectiously entertaining.” —John Lahr, author of Notes on a Cowardly Lion “Thoroughly interesting.” —The A.V. Club “The best general-audience analysis of musical theater I have read in many years.” —The Charlotte Observer “Delightful . . . a little bit history, a little bit memoir, a little bit criticism and, for any theater fan, a whole lot of fun.” —The Dallas Morning News
The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website.Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.
"This book reflects a breakthrough in American music studies, an unrecognized field among traditional musicologists until the past few decades, during which enormous progress has been made in documenting three centuries of American musical activities and figures. Time and effort had to be expended exclusively on the development of basic historical studies. The time has come for a new phase, one that can take a creative, interpretive approach. Professor Crawford's study will introduce this higher level of scholarship into the field of American music studies."—Vivian Perlis, author of Charles Ives Remembered "A major statement by a senior scholar on what American musicology is all about. . . These themes are also topical; they come at a time when much more research is being done in American music, but little thought is being given to the big picture, the vision, the philosophy, and the implications of historical research. Now is the time for a synthesis, and there are few scholars better equipped to do that in American music than Richard Crawford."—Michael Broyles, author of Music of the Highest Class
An illustrated history of America's musical heritage ranges from the earliest examples of Native American traditional song to the innovative sound of contemporary rock and jazz.
Composers like Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich created works that indelibly commemorated American places. Denise Von Glahn analyzes the soundscapes of fourteen figures whose "place pieces" tell us much about the nation's search for its own voice and about its ever-changing sense of self. She connects each composer's feelings about the United States and their reasons for creating a piece to the music, while analyzing their compositional techniques, tunes, and styles. Approaching the compositions in chronological order, Von Glahn reveals how works that celebrated the wilderness gave way to music engaged with humanity's influence--benign and otherwise--on the landscape, before environmentalism inspired a return to nature themes in the late twentieth century. Wide-ranging and astute, The Sounds of Place explores high art music's role in the making of national myth and memory.
From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.
This book is an engaging survey of the growth and development of the arts in America that follows the chronological thread of American music as its guide. For readers unfamiliar with the technical elements of music, the text also offers an elegant and readable introduction to the fundamentals of music and a unique overview of the African and European influences on the development of American music.
