Larry Hamberlin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195338928
- eISBN:
- 9780199855865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338928.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, Opera, Popular
This chapter and the next examine novelty songs that use both opera and ragtime to express tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, racializing them as tensions between white and black America. ...
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This chapter and the next examine novelty songs that use both opera and ragtime to express tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, racializing them as tensions between white and black America. Chapter 6 is an in-depth treatment of a single song, Ted Snyder and Irving Berlin's “That Opera Rag” (1910). Through a close reading of the music and lyrics, an examination of the song's use in a stage comedy, Getting a Polish, and a consideration of the stage persona of May Irwin, the actress who interpolated the song in that comedy, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary audiences could perceive multiple levels of meaning that interact in a complex piece of social and musical commentary.Less
This chapter and the next examine novelty songs that use both opera and ragtime to express tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, racializing them as tensions between white and black America. Chapter 6 is an in-depth treatment of a single song, Ted Snyder and Irving Berlin's “That Opera Rag” (1910). Through a close reading of the music and lyrics, an examination of the song's use in a stage comedy, Getting a Polish, and a consideration of the stage persona of May Irwin, the actress who interpolated the song in that comedy, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary audiences could perceive multiple levels of meaning that interact in a complex piece of social and musical commentary.
Leslie C. Gay Jr
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190932633
- eISBN:
- 9780190932671
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190932633.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our ...
More
This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.Less
This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.
