The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity

The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity

Author: Raymond Knapp

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0691186200

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The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This thoughtful history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers probing discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, advance themes related to American national identity. Written by a musicologist and supported by a wealth of illustrative audio examples (on the book's website), the book examines key historical antecedents to the musical, including the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nineteenth and early twentieth-century American burlesque and vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and other song types. It then proceeds thematically, focusing primarily on fifteen mainstream shows from the twentieth century, with discussions of such notable productions as Show Boat (1927), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), West Side Story (1957), Hair (1967), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Assassins (1991). The shows are grouped according to their treatment of themes that include defining America, mythologies, counter-mythologies, race and ethnicity, dealing with World War II, and exoticism. Each chapter concludes with a brief consideration of available scholarship on related subjects; an extensive appendix provides information on each show discussed, including plot summaries and song lists, and a listing of important films, videos, audio recordings, published scores, and libretti associated with each musical.


Tap Roots

Tap Roots

Author: Mark Knowles

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2002-06-03

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780786412679

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Tracing the development of tap dancing from ancient India to the Broadway stage in 1903, when the word "Tap" was first used in publicity to describe this new American style of dance, this text separates the cultural, societal and historical events that influenced the development of Tap dancing. Section One covers primary influences such as Irish step dancing, English clog dancing and African dancing. Section Two covers theatrical influences (early theatrical developments, "Daddy" Rice, the Virginia Minstrels) and Section Three covers various other influences (Native American, German and Shaker). Also included are accounts of the people present at tap's inception and how various styles of dance were mixed to create a new art form.


Discovering Dance

Discovering Dance

Author: Gayle Kassing

Publisher: Human Kinetics

Published: 2024-09-25

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1718220855

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Discovering Dance, Second Edition, is the premier introductory dance text for high school students. Whether they are new to dance or already have some experience, students will be able to grasp the foundational concepts of dance as they consider where dance movement comes from and why humans are compelled to move, and they will explore movement activities from the perspectives of a dancer, a choreographer, and an observer. The result is a well-rounded educational experience for students to build on, whether they want to further explore performance or choreography or otherwise factor dance into their college or career goals. Specifically designed to meet national and state dance education standards, Discovering Dance offers a ready-to-implement dance curriculum that is foundational and flexible. It fosters students’ discovery of dance through creating, performing, analyzing, understanding, responding to, connecting to, and evaluating dance and dance forms. The book is divided into four parts and 17 chapters. Part I focuses on the foundational concepts of dance and art processes, wellness, safety, dance elements, and composition. Part II delves into dance in society, including historical, social, traditional, and cultural dances. In part III, students explore dance on stage—including ballet, modern dance, jazz dance, tap, and hip-hop—and examine aspects of performance and production. Part IV rounds out the content by preparing students for dance in college or as a career and throughout life. The chapter content helps students discover dance genres; explore each genre through its history, artists, vocabulary, and significant works; apply dance concepts through movement and through written, oral, visual, technology, and multimedia assignments, thus deepening their knowledge and abilities; enhance learning by completing a portfolio assignment and review quiz for each chapter; and gain insight into dance artists, companies, and events through the Did You Know? and Spotlight elements. Learning objectives, vocabulary terms, and an essential question open each chapter. Throughout the chapters are four types of activities: Discover, Explore, Journal, and Research. The activities and assignments meet the needs of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and help students explore dance through vocabulary, history, culture, creation, performance, and choreography. A comprehensive glossary further facilitates learning. The personal discovery process is greatly aided by technology—including video clips that demonstrate dance genres, forms, styles, and techniques as well as learning experiences that require taking photos and creating time lines, graphs, drawings, diagrams, or soundscapes.


Fixing the Musical

Fixing the Musical

Author: Douglas L. Reside

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0190073713

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Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some and not others? The musical theatre repertory is not composed of titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube. The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to hear when they attend a production, are defined by media consumed at home more than by memories of performances witnessed in the theatre. For example, author Doug Reside shows that it is no accident that the serious book musical with a fixed score developed in the 1940s - when commercially pressed and marketed record albums made it possible to record most of the score of a new musical in a fixed medium. And Hamilton, a musical with dense lyrics and revolutionary musical style, would not have been as easily accessible to world audiences if most hadn't already had the opportunity to learn the score by listening to free digital streams of the original cast recording. The technologies that made these media possible developed concurrently with and shaped the American musical as an art form. Reside uncovers how the affordances and limitations of these technologies established a repertory of titles that are most frequently performed and defined by the texts used in these performances. Fixing the Musical argues that the musicals we most remember are those which most effectively used their era's best recording and distribution technologies to document and share the work with those who would never see the original production on Broadway.