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Achieving Musical Success in the String Classroom

Karel Butz

Achieving Musical Success in the String Classroom describes the author’s pragmatic pedagogical approach toward developing complete musicianship in beginning through advanced-level string players by ... More

Achieving Musical Success in the String Classroom describes the author’s pragmatic pedagogical approach toward developing complete musicianship in beginning through advanced-level string players by incorporating the ideas of Mimi Zweig, Paul Rolland, and Shinichi Suzuki. The author’s philosophical assumptions are explained in regard to the structure and purpose of string teaching contributing to a high level of musical artistry among students. Introductory through advanced string concepts relating to instrument setup, posture, left- and right-hand development, music theory, aural skills, assessment procedures, imagery in playing, the development of individual practice and ensemble skills, and effective rehearsal strategies are explained in a sequential approach that benefits the classroom teacher and student. In addition, several score examples, sample lesson plans, and grading rubrics, as well as videos of the author demonstrating his pedagogical ideas and techniques with musicians, are included.Less

Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso no. 1

Peter J. Schmelz

This book provides for the first time an accessible, comprehensive study of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977). One of Schnittke’s best-known and most compelling works, the Concerto ... More

This book provides for the first time an accessible, comprehensive study of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977). One of Schnittke’s best-known and most compelling works, the Concerto Grosso no. 1 sounds the surface of late Soviet life, resonating as well with contemporary compositional currents around the world. This innovative monograph builds on existing publications about the Concerto Grosso no. 1 in English, Russian, and German, augmenting and complicating them. It adds new information from underused primary sources, including Schnittke’s unpublished correspondence and his many published interviews. It also engages further with his sketches for the Concerto Grosso no. 1 and contemporary Soviet musical criticism. The result is a more objective, historical appraisal of this rich, multifaceted composition. The Concerto Grosso no. 1 provided a utopian model of the contemporary soundscape. It was a decisive point in Schnittke’s development of the approach he called polystylism, which aimed to contain in a single composition the wide range of contemporary musical styles, including jazz, pop, rock, and serial music. Thanks to it and his other similar compositions, Schnittke became one of the most-performed and most-recorded living composers at the end of the twentieth century. The novel structure of this book engages the Concerto Grosso no. 1 conceptually, historically, musically, and phenomenologically: the six movements of the composition frame the six chapters. The present volume thus provides a holistic accounting of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, its influences, and its impact on subsequent music making in the Soviet Union and worldwide.Less

And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom

Stanley J. Rabinowitz (ed.)

Here for the first time in English are freshly translated essays on famous women in the arts, in contemporary Russian life, and especially in the world of classical dance written by Russia’s foremost ... More

Here for the first time in English are freshly translated essays on famous women in the arts, in contemporary Russian life, and especially in the world of classical dance written by Russia’s foremost ballet critic of his day, Akim Volynsky (1861–1926). Volynsky’s depiction of the body beautiful onstage at St. Petersburg’s storied Maryinsky Theater is preceded by his earlier writings on women in Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, and Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious female personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Liubov Gurevich, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome. Volynsky was a man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation, which crossed over into the personal and libidinal. His career looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred “high priest” of classical dance, George Balanchine; indeed, with their undeniable proclivity toward ballet’s female component, Volynsky’s dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier “gendered” criticism, invite speculation on how truly groundbreaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is.Less

Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint

Benjamin Tausig

Bangkok Is Ringing is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where ... More

Bangkok Is Ringing is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where dissidents used media to broadcast to both local and diffuse audiences, the book catalogues these mass protests in a way that few movements have ever been catalogued. The Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt protests that shook Thailand took place just before other international political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Bangkok Is Ringing analyzes the Thai protests in comparison with these, seeking to understand the logic not only of political change in Thailand, but across the globe. The book is attuned to sound in a great variety of forms. The author traces the history and use in protest of specific media forms, including community radio, megaphones, CDs, and live concerts. The research took place over the course of sixteen months, and the author worked closely with musicians, concert promoters, activists, and rank-and-file protesters. The result is a detailed and sensitive ethnography that argues for an understanding of sound and political movements in tandem. In particular, it emphasizes the necessity of thinking through constraint as a fundamental condition of both political movements and the sound that these movements produce. In order to produce political transformations, the book argues, dissidents must be sensitive to the ways that their sounding is constrained and channeled.Less

Boom's Blues: Music, Journalism, and Friendship in Wartime

Wim Verbei

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the ... More

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. The book tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. The book ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of 13 blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then 23-year-old Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.Less

Class, Control, and Classical Music

Anna Bull

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by ... More

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.Less

Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism

Alexandra Kieffer

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the work of Claude Debussy spurred a reimagining of music and musical listening in which Parisian musicians and intellectuals, informed by recent scientific ... More

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the work of Claude Debussy spurred a reimagining of music and musical listening in which Parisian musicians and intellectuals, informed by recent scientific discourse on affect, perception, and cognition, attempted to articulate a music aesthetics appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. Important themes in debussyste music criticism are prefigured in the Symbolist wagnérisme of the late 1880s, which elaborated a model of affect and cognition drawn from the empirical psychology of Théodule Ribot. Following the premiere of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, Debussy’s supporters, attempting to explain the opera’s novelty, turned away from a music aesthetics that gave primacy to inner emotion and toward an aesthetics oriented instead toward listening, sensation, and the materiality of sound. Over the following decade, critics Jean Marnold and Louis Laloy, drawing from a wide swath of early-twentieth-century intellectual culture that included empirical psychology and post-Helmholtzian acoustics, were particularly influential as defenders of the ostensibly scientifically valid nature of Debussy’s innovations as well as his historical importance. After 1910, however, the cultural relevance of debussysme quickly declined as standards of aesthetic value shifted toward the abstract and universal (as opposed to the fleeting ephemerality of sensation) and as the deepening divide between scientific methods and humanistic ones made the intellectual culture of debussysme untenable.Less

Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna

Robert L. Kendrick

This study of some sixty-odd Italian-language music-theater pieces for Holy Week in seventeenth-century Vienna addresses the issues of Habsburg dynastic piety, memory and commemoration, Passion ... More

This study of some sixty-odd Italian-language music-theater pieces for Holy Week in seventeenth-century Vienna addresses the issues of Habsburg dynastic piety, memory and commemoration, Passion devotion, and political meaning in the works. It further considers some surprising conjunctions of poetic conceptualism in connection with surprising—and theatrical—musical techniques. The pieces were meant to be performed in front of a constructed replica of Christ’s tomb—hence their Italian sobriquet, sepolcri—and often with an additional stage-set. Flourishing during the reign of Emperor Leopold I (1657–1705), the genre was also indebted to the patronage and piety of the women around him, including his stepmother, the Dowager Empress Eleonora, his three wives, and several of his daughters. The libretti, many by the famed Nicolo Minato, show unusual textual strategies in the recollection of Christ’s Passion, as they are imagined to take place after his burial. But they also involve wider realms of the dynastic’s self-image, material possessions, and political ideology. Although both the texts and the music—the latter by a variety of composers, most notably Giovanni Felice Sances and Antonio Draghi, along with Leopold himself—are little studied today, they also combined in performance to provide a sonic enactment of mourning according to the most recent norms of Italian musical dramaturgy.Less

The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty-First Century

Ryan P. Harper

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular ... More

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest. The book explores how the Gaithers negotiate the tension between preservation and modification of community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience, and to initiate and respond to ideological shifts within their fan base’s culture. Using data he collected from his immersion in the Homecoming catalogue, his attendance of numerous concerts and tapings, and his extensive conversations with Homecoming fans and the Gaithers themselves, Harper reveals the Homecomings to be a crucible of American religious, racial, sexual and regional identity formation.Less

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels and the History of American Fiddling

Chris Goertzen

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our ... More

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our modern contest-driven fiddle subcultures. But the fate of the Virginia Reels pointed in that direction, suggesting that southern fiddling, after his time, would happen outside of commercial popular culture even though it would sporadically engage that culture. This book uses this seminal collection as the springboard for a fresh exploration of fiddling in America, past and present. It first discusses the life of the arranger. Then it explains how this collection was meant to fit into the broad stream of early nineteenth-century music publishing. The book describes the character of these fiddle tunes' names (and such titles in general), what we can learn about antebellum oral tradition from this collection, and how fiddling relates to blackface minstrelsy. Throughout, the book connects the evidence concerning both repertoire and practice found in the Virginia Reels with current southern fiddling, encompassing styles ranging from straightforward to fancy—old-time styles of the Upper South, exuberant West Virginia styles, and the melodic improvisations of modern contest fiddling. Twenty-six song sheets assist in this discovery. The book incorporates performance descriptions and music terminology into his accessible, engaging prose. The book presents an extended look at the history of southern fiddling and a close examination of current practices.Less

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century

Lucia Ruprecht

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of ... More

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranges across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary’s embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. The book shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. It shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben’s preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Rancière’s multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, it highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. It also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution that enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.Less

Hildegard of Bingen

Honey Meconi

The book provides a short but thorough introduction to twelfth-century composer and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, creator of seventy-seven plainchant melodies (her Symphonia armonie celestium ... More

The book provides a short but thorough introduction to twelfth-century composer and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, creator of seventy-seven plainchant melodies (her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) as well as a complete play set to music, the Ordo virtutum. Six chapters chronicle her eventful life, incorporating information about her compositions in the Dendermonde and Riesencodex manuscripts as appropriate: enclosure at the monastery of Disibodenberg; the catalytic vision that spurred her multifaceted creativity; her founding of the convent at Rupertsberg; preaching tours and exorcisms; clashes with priests, prelates, popes, and the Holy Roman Emperor; punishment by interdict; and final vindication. These chapters also explore her many nonmusical creations (three major theological treatises, Gospel homilies and smaller religious writings, scientific and medical works, two hagiographies, an invented language and accompanying alphabet, and her extensive correspondence). A seventh chapter traces continued awareness of her achievement after her death, her canonization and recognition as Doctor of the Church, and the belated rebirth of her music. The final three chapters are devoted to her music, beginning with a general overview and followed by a chapter each on shorter and longer genres, with the former providing basic liturgical information. Ancillary material includes a dozen illustrations (including several iconic images), a works list, and a selected bibliography and discography.Less

La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid

Hilde Roos

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. ... More

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Time of Apartheid charts Eoan’s opera activities from its inception in 1933 until the cessation of its work by 1980. By accepting funding from the apartheid government and adhering to apartheid conditions, the group, in time, became politically compromised, resulting in the rejection of the group by their own community and the cessation of opera production. However, their unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera lead to the most extraordinary of performance trajectories. During apartheid, the Eoan Group provided a space for colored people to perform Western classical art forms in an environment that potentially transgressed racial boundaries and challenged perceptions of racial exclusivity in the genre of opera. This highly significant endeavor and the way it was thwarted at the hands of the apartheid regime is the story that unfolds in this book.Less

Living in The Merry Ghetto: The Music and Politics of the Czech Underground

Trever Hagen

Living in the Merry Ghetto reframes how people use music to build resistance. To do so, Hagen addresses the social context of illegal music-making in Czechoslovakia during state socialism, asking ... More

Living in the Merry Ghetto reframes how people use music to build resistance. To do so, Hagen addresses the social context of illegal music-making in Czechoslovakia during state socialism, asking “How Do Aesthetics Nurture Political Consciousness?”. He tells the story of a group of rock ’n’ rollers who went underground after 1968, building a parallel world from where they could flourish: the Merry Ghetto. The book examines the case of the Czech Underground, the politics of their music and their way of life, paying close attention to the development of the ensemble the Plastic People of the Universe. Taking in multiple political transitions from the 1940s to the 2000s, the story focuses on non-official cultural practices such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, seeking out copied cassette tapes, listening to banned LPs, growing long hair, attending clandestine concerts, smuggling albums via diplomats, recording in home-studios, and being thrown in prison for any of these activities. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Undergrounders, archival research, and participant observation, Hagen shows how these practices shaped consciousness, informed bodies, and promoted collective action, all of which contributed to an Underground way of life.Less

Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master

Nadine Meisner

Born two hundred years ago in Marseilles, Marius Petipa spent more than sixty years in Imperial Russia as a ballet master, serving directly under the eye of the Emperor. He became the greatest ... More

Born two hundred years ago in Marseilles, Marius Petipa spent more than sixty years in Imperial Russia as a ballet master, serving directly under the eye of the Emperor. He became the greatest choreographer of the nineteenth century, creating a quantity of work, some of which—such as Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty—has survived to attract audiences all round the world. In Russia, he was revered, even if by the end of his life he had become outmoded and new ideas were circulating, culminating in the experiments of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Yet even the rebels recognized his genius and their indebtedness to him. He had a lasting and profound effect, both in the Soviet Union, where ballet became an emblem of cultural prestige, and in the West, where his spiritual descendants, Diaghilev included, promulgated and extended his work. Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master is a survey of his life and work, before and after his arrival in St Petersburg. It is a cultural biography placing Petipa in his context. It describes the people and events around him; it traces the evolution of the aesthetics of ballet; it analyses the influences that made Petipa unique; and it examines the ways that he, in turn, influenced the course of modern ballet.Less

Music Assessment for Better Ensembles

Brian P. Shaw

Assessment is central to ensemble music. Yet, teachers do not always have the expertise to harness its potential to improve rehearsals and performances, and promote and document student learning. ... More

Assessment is central to ensemble music. Yet, teachers do not always have the expertise to harness its potential to improve rehearsals and performances, and promote and document student learning. Written specifically for band, choir, and orchestra teachers at all levels, this book contains all of the information necessary to design and use assessment in a thriving music classroom. The first section addresses foundations such as learning targets, metacognition, and growth mindset. Assessment jargon such as formative assessment, summative assessment, Assessment for Learning, self and peer assessment, and authentic assessment is clarified and illustrated with music examples. Readers will learn practical strategies for choosing which concepts to assess, which methods to use, and how to use results to provide accurate and effective feedback to students. The second section brings assessment fundamentals into the music room. Filled with practical advice, each chapter examines a different facet of musicianship. Sample assessments in all performance areas are provided, including concert preparation, music literacy, fundamentals and technique, terminology, interpretation, evaluation and critique, composition and improvisation, beliefs and attitudes, and more. The final section is an examination of grading practices in music classes. Readers will gain information about ensemble grades that communicate what students know and are able to do. The book concludes with ways for music educators to take their first steps toward implementing these strategies in their own teaching, including the use of instructional technology. Assessing like an expert is possible, and this book is just what teachers need to get started.Less

Music in Disney's Animated Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book

James Bohn

Music in Disney’s Animated Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book investigates how music functions in Disney Animated films. The book identifies several techniques used in a ... More

Music in Disney’s Animated Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book investigates how music functions in Disney Animated films. The book identifies several techniques used in a number of Disney animated movies. In addition it also presents a history of music in Disney animated films, as well as biographical information on several of the Studios’ seminal composers. The popularity and critical acclaim of Disney animated features is built as much on music as it is on animation. From Steamboat Willie through Bambi, music is the organizing element of Disney’s animation. Songs that establish character and aid in narrative form the backbone of the Studios’ animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through The Jungle Book and beyond. In the course of their early animated features the Studios’ composers developed a number of techniques and models that have been used throughout their oeuvre. Instrumental instances of a given film’s songs are used to comment on various character’s thoughts, as well as on the plot and action. Songs featured in Disney films are often transitioned into or out of using rhymed, metered dialog, functioning in much the same way as recitative in opera. The book also explores the use of theme and variation technique, leitmotif, theatrical conventions, and song archetypes.Less

Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music

Holly Watkins

Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies by blending the study of musical works with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a ... More

Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies by blending the study of musical works with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of music and aesthetics that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share. In its discussion of organicism, formalism, critical plant studies, biosemiotics, and systems theory, the book puts canonical publications by figures such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eduard Hanslick in conversation with more recent thinkers including Elizabeth Grosz, Michael Marder, Donna Haraway, and Eduardo Kohn. The piano music of Robert Schumann occupies a special place in the book, which features interpretations and analyses of the Arabesque, op. 18, Blumenstück, op. 19, and Waldszenen, op. 82.Less

Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

Luigi Nono

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

This is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned ... More

This is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned for both his compositions and his utopian views. His many essays and lectures reveal an artist at the center of the analytical, theoretical, critical, and political debates of the time. This selection of Nono's most significant essays, articles, and interviews covers his entire career (1948–1989), faithfully mirroring the interests, orientations, continuities, and fractures of a complex and unique personality. His writings illuminate his intensive involvements with theatre, painting, literature, politics, science, and even mysticism. Nono's words make vividly evident his restless quest for the transformative possibilities of a radical musical experience, one that is at the same time profoundly engaged with its performers and spaces, its audiences, and its human and social motivations and ramifications.Less

On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide

Ethan Mordden

This critical analysis of Barbra Streisand looks past the mainstream show-business principal to deconstruct an artist who is in fact a revolutionary figure. Streisand pioneered an intense and even ... More

This critical analysis of Barbra Streisand looks past the mainstream show-business principal to deconstruct an artist who is in fact a revolutionary figure. Streisand pioneered an intense and even passionate singing style at odds with the once prevailing easy-listen manner typified by Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Like Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, she was one of the new wave actors of the 1960s who broke away from the standard models for movie stars. But Streisand has much greater range than others of this kind, as comfortable in musical comedy as in serious drama. She can play the madcap Fanny Brice and Dolly, the politically intense heroine of The Way We Were, the sexually abused daughter who becomes a prostitute and a murderer in Nuts, the cross-dressing Yentl who seeks the liberty that men take for granted and women are denied. Streisand has been, in all, an invigorating artist, not only unique but extraordinary. It would be impossible to imagine what American culture would have been like without her.Less