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This new multiauthor volume will examine The Wizard of Oz and its surrounding culture, centering on three areas of study: early adaptations of Baum’s novels, insights into the MGM film, and the legacy of The Wizard of Oz on the popular stage. Although the articles will devote some attention to the genesis of the musical and the biographical profiles of the creative team, the book will prioritize critical and analytical readings. Authors will primarily illuminate the reasons why The Wizard of Oz has become iconic in the history of the movie musical, acknowledging the great lengths to which MGM went in making it an exceptional project, and why it continues to hold so much appeal in the twenty-first century. The development of the score will receive particularly close attention, filling an important gap in the literature and addressing the fact that the songs are key to the movie’s popularity. Two central chapters will address the music in the MGM film, considering the interaction between the songs and the underscore, and also reflecting on the enduring appeal of the musical numbers. But the significance of the music in early stage productions and later reinterpretations will also be given careful attention: several of the authors will question how the music is employed alongside other components—on stage and screen—and to what effect. Ultimately, the book will incorporate a variety of scholarly approaches, to present an authoritative and engaging understanding of one of the most significant movie musicals that will appeal to film lovers and academics alike.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the explosion of Fifties nostalgia in Hollywood film and popular music from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. In these years, Hollywood produced a slew of nostalgia films and circulated old movies on VHS; oldies radio allowed record companies to mine their own past, while genres like punk and new wave resurrected old styles; and the film and music industries collaborated to bring Fifties nostalgia to Hollywood soundtrack albums and music videos. In large part, these films, albums, and videos were not directed toward aging Baby Boomers but American teenagers—a “Re-Generation” trained in technological and cultural practices of rewind, record, replay, and rerun. Breaking from the dominant wisdom that casts this “pop nostalgia” as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan’s politics or postmodernist aesthetics, the book both complicates and transcends standard diagnoses of the political function of nostalgia in popular media, and sheds new light on a crucial and underexamined period in American politics and culture.

On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to America’s venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie Hall. The resulting concert—widely considered one of the most significant events in American music history—helped to usher jazz and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records’ 1950 release of the concert on LP. This book provides the first in-depth, scholarly study of this seminal concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival research with close analysis of the recording, the author strips back the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the performance in its original context, and explore what the material has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception, and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the twentieth century, this book is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and scholars.

Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. A significant record of Coltrane’s transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album is also an embodiment of the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life. The album itself comprises a four-part suite; the titles of the four parts-“Acknowledgment,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm,”-along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he “recites” instrumentally in “Psalm” reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of seminal jazz recordings. This book explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, and the album’s seminal importance in jazz history. Using criticism of late Coltrane recordings as a starting point, the author suggests ways of listening to these recordings that can be considered outside the conventional ideologies of mainstream jazz practice. The book concludes with a study of the broad musical and cultural impact of the album, examining the relationship between the recording and music, literature, poetry and film.

This book explores the development of and the social, cultural, and historical context of chiptune, a form of electronic music that emerged from the first generation of video game consoles and home computers in the 1980s. Through a combination of musical and procedural analysis and practitioner interviews, the book explores the role the technical constraints of early video game hardware played in shaping the sound of 8-bit video game music and the inventive approaches to coding and composition musicians used to circumvent them. It examines the sounds, culture, and personalities behind the music and shows how chiptune links as closely to the music of Bach as to the aggressive posturing of punk or the driving electronic sounds of house. The book begins by looking at chiptune’s roots in video game music and discusses how, as the sound chips that gave rise to its distinctive voice were superseded by more sophisticated hardware, chiptune moved underground to become an important part of the demoscene, a networked community of digital artists. It discusses chiptune’s reemergence in the late 1990s as a new wave of young musicians rediscovered these obsolete machines and began to use them as quirky and characterful musical instruments, in the process taking chiptune from the desktop and placing it centre stage. The book concludes by contemplating what lies ahead; as more people incorporate the chiptune sound into their work, will it ever hit the mainstream or will it remain firmly countercultural as part of the digital underground?

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.

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.

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through hillbilly and swing music in the 1940s, soul music in the 1960s, country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses on the process of “gentrification” through which these categories are produced and how these are articulated to categories of identity (especially those of race and gender). This process is traced by an analysis of the discourses through which ideas about genres circulate, the institutions that either support and sustain genres or withhold their support, and the sounds that become identified with a particular genre and a particular demographic group. The conclusion discusses the pertinence of the approach to genre used in the book to the changes brought about by the internet and file sharing to the circulation of popular music genres.

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.

Fifty years after Charley Patton's death in 1934, a team of blues experts gathered five thousand miles from Dockery Farms at the University of Liege in Belgium to honor the life and music of the most influential artist of the Mississippi Delta blues. This book brings together essays from that international symposium on Charley Patton and Mississippi blues traditions, influences, and comparisons. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Liège in Belgium, this edition has been revised and updated with a new foreword, new images added, and some chapters translated into English for the first time. Patton's personal life and his recorded music bear witness to how he endured and prevailed in his struggle as a black man during the early twentieth century. Within this book, that story offers hope and wonder. Organized in two parts, the chapters create an invaluable resource on the life and music of this early master. The book secures the legacy of Charley Patton as the fountainhead of Mississippi Delta blues.

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.

Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Hollywood luminaries such as Gloria Swanson tempted him with commissions, and arguably more people heard his film music than his efforts in all other genres combined. Films for which Prokofiev composed, in particular those of Sergey Eisenstein, are now classics of world cinema. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines—for the first time—the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career. Prokofiev’s film music derived from a self-imposed challenge: to compose “serious” music for a broad audience. The picture that emerges is of a composer seeking an individual film-music voice, shunning Hollywood models, and objecting to his Soviet colleagues’ ideologically expedient film songs. Looking at Prokofiev’s film music as a whole—with well-known blockbusters like Alexander Nevsky considered alongside more obscure or aborted projects—reveals that there were multiple solutions to the challenge, each with varying degrees of success. Prokofiev carefully balanced his own populist agenda, the perceived aesthetic demands of the films themselves, and, later on, Soviet bureaucratic demands for accessibility.

This book 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.

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.

History, reflection, criticism, and praise all combine to produce this informed, thoughtful, and exuberant look at the musical film. Over its nine-decade history, the musical has gone through stages of plenty and famine, relevance and inconsequence, acclaim and ridicule. Somehow it manages to keep recurring—from Al Jolson to Les Misérables—and finds ways to serve its audiences and learn from (or disregard) its history. From film’s dawn of sound through the Great Depression and World War II, through the age of television and into the rise of the internet, the musical has constantly found ways to communicate, divert, and captivate. Here, the musical is explored through many of its aspects—its relationship with the stage and with the public, performers and songwriters and filmmakers, animated film, aspects of money and race and sexuality, and the musical’s odd ongoing connection with television. Through all of this, the book draws conclusions about both the importance of the musical to American culture, and the perils and difficulties that constantly befall those who create it. A musical can be marvellous—and just as easily it can be disastrous.