Derek B. Scott
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195309461
- eISBN:
- 9780199871254
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309461.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The words “popular music revolution” may instantly bring to mind jazz of the 1920s or rock 'n' roll of the 1950s, but this book argues that the first popular music revolution occurred in the 19th ...
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The words “popular music revolution” may instantly bring to mind jazz of the 1920s or rock 'n' roll of the 1950s, but this book argues that the first popular music revolution occurred in the 19th century. This was the period when popular styles first began to assert their independence and distinct values. London, New York, Paris, and Vienna feature prominently as cities in which the challenge to the classical tradition was strongest, and in which original and influential forms of popular music arose, such as the Viennese waltz and polka, minstrelsy, the café-concert, operetta, music hall, the black musical, vaudeville, and cabaret. The popular music revolution was driven by social changes and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise: it resulted in a polarization between the style of musical entertainment (or “commercial” music) and that of “serious” art. This book focuses on the key genres and styles that precipitated musical change at that time, and that continued to impact upon popular music in the next century. By the end of the 19th century, popular music had its own characteristic techniques, forms, and devices. The book argues that “popular” refers here, for the first time, not only to the music's reception, but also to the presence of these specific features of style. The shift in meaning of “popular” provided critics with a means of condemning music that bore the signs of the popular, which they regarded as fashionable and facile, rather than progressive and serious.Less
The words “popular music revolution” may instantly bring to mind jazz of the 1920s or rock 'n' roll of the 1950s, but this book argues that the first popular music revolution occurred in the 19th century. This was the period when popular styles first began to assert their independence and distinct values. London, New York, Paris, and Vienna feature prominently as cities in which the challenge to the classical tradition was strongest, and in which original and influential forms of popular music arose, such as the Viennese waltz and polka, minstrelsy, the café-concert, operetta, music hall, the black musical, vaudeville, and cabaret. The popular music revolution was driven by social changes and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise: it resulted in a polarization between the style of musical entertainment (or “commercial” music) and that of “serious” art. This book focuses on the key genres and styles that precipitated musical change at that time, and that continued to impact upon popular music in the next century. By the end of the 19th century, popular music had its own characteristic techniques, forms, and devices. The book argues that “popular” refers here, for the first time, not only to the music's reception, but also to the presence of these specific features of style. The shift in meaning of “popular” provided critics with a means of condemning music that bore the signs of the popular, which they regarded as fashionable and facile, rather than progressive and serious.
Brian Rouleau
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452338
- eISBN:
- 9780801455087
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452338.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter investigates the many instances in which sailors staged blackface minstrel shows while traveling abroad. In their willingness to apply the burnt-cork mask and “jump Jim Crow” for ...
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This chapter investigates the many instances in which sailors staged blackface minstrel shows while traveling abroad. In their willingness to apply the burnt-cork mask and “jump Jim Crow” for indigenous groups around the globe, seafarers played a crucial role in disseminating American racial categories to an array of audiences. Maritime manuscripts also allow insight into how racial formation in the early United States was a global work in progress rather than a continental construct. Race was not produced exclusively by people in the United States, but was both forged in and thought applicable to an international context. The global diffusion of minstrelsy provides a focal point in the effort to describe ideas about racial difference in the United States as something that developed in dialogue with many places.Less
This chapter investigates the many instances in which sailors staged blackface minstrel shows while traveling abroad. In their willingness to apply the burnt-cork mask and “jump Jim Crow” for indigenous groups around the globe, seafarers played a crucial role in disseminating American racial categories to an array of audiences. Maritime manuscripts also allow insight into how racial formation in the early United States was a global work in progress rather than a continental construct. Race was not produced exclusively by people in the United States, but was both forged in and thought applicable to an international context. The global diffusion of minstrelsy provides a focal point in the effort to describe ideas about racial difference in the United States as something that developed in dialogue with many places.
Stephanie Dunson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834626
- eISBN:
- 9781469602967
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807878026_brundage.6
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter argues that we must initially turn our attention back to the antebellum decades that saw the rise of the blackface minstrel tradition—when white men in black facepaint entertained ...
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This chapter argues that we must initially turn our attention back to the antebellum decades that saw the rise of the blackface minstrel tradition—when white men in black facepaint entertained northern audiences with songs and skits meant to represent black culture—if we are to appreciate the challenges and expectations that African American entertainers had to contend with in the early era of twentieth-century mass culture. In truth, no music played a more central role in nineteenth-century American culture than the melodies generated by blackface minstrelsy, from the 1820s, when individual blackface performers popularized routines that were meant to reproduce black dance and music for white northern audiences, to the end of the century, when Tin Pan Alley songwriters cranked out “coon songs” for consumers who took racial stereotypes for granted.Less
This chapter argues that we must initially turn our attention back to the antebellum decades that saw the rise of the blackface minstrel tradition—when white men in black facepaint entertained northern audiences with songs and skits meant to represent black culture—if we are to appreciate the challenges and expectations that African American entertainers had to contend with in the early era of twentieth-century mass culture. In truth, no music played a more central role in nineteenth-century American culture than the melodies generated by blackface minstrelsy, from the 1820s, when individual blackface performers popularized routines that were meant to reproduce black dance and music for white northern audiences, to the end of the century, when Tin Pan Alley songwriters cranked out “coon songs” for consumers who took racial stereotypes for granted.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226709635
- eISBN:
- 9780226709659
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226709659.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter explores the life of a curious blackface minstrel troupe composed of patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Performing several times a year for patients, doctors, and visitors, ...
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This chapter explores the life of a curious blackface minstrel troupe composed of patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Performing several times a year for patients, doctors, and visitors, they turned a famously carnivalesque popular form into a therapeutic diversion for other patients in a display meant to convince the outside world—and perhaps themselves—that they, unlike the black characters they mocked, were capable of rationally managing their affairs in the modern world. The chapter also examines patients' writings about these performances, in which they reflect on how the social categories of blackness and mental alienation resemble one another. This discussion encompasses an analysis of the interplay between strategies of confinement and uplift common to plantation slavery, the colonial enterprise, and institutional psychiatry. The chapter uses the episode to argue that the “civilizing process,” which proved such a potent argument behind Euro-American colonization and enslavement of blacks, also structured the relations between doctors and patients.Less
This chapter explores the life of a curious blackface minstrel troupe composed of patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Performing several times a year for patients, doctors, and visitors, they turned a famously carnivalesque popular form into a therapeutic diversion for other patients in a display meant to convince the outside world—and perhaps themselves—that they, unlike the black characters they mocked, were capable of rationally managing their affairs in the modern world. The chapter also examines patients' writings about these performances, in which they reflect on how the social categories of blackness and mental alienation resemble one another. This discussion encompasses an analysis of the interplay between strategies of confinement and uplift common to plantation slavery, the colonial enterprise, and institutional psychiatry. The chapter uses the episode to argue that the “civilizing process,” which proved such a potent argument behind Euro-American colonization and enslavement of blacks, also structured the relations between doctors and patients.
Bradley Shope
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199352227
- eISBN:
- 9780199352258
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199352227.003.0013
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter discusses blackface minstrel troupes, British regimental bands and jazz orchestras performing in India from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It details their ...
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This chapter discusses blackface minstrel troupes, British regimental bands and jazz orchestras performing in India from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It details their challenges and strategies for success, and suggests that their capacity to facilitate cosmopolitan encounters in the wider world contributed to their popularity and value. It first introduces problems and practicalities in maintaining bands performing British military music in India in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. It then briefly introduces the character and scope of ballroom dance music and blackface minstrelsy in urban centres. To end, it examines the character of jazz orchestras between the 1920s and 1940s, detailing the role of the gramophone industry, entertainment venues such as hotel and cinema hall ballrooms, and the Allied military in Calcutta on their growth and profitability. In each example, it articulates thoughts on the role and usefulness of orchestras and notes issues confronting their musicians.Less
This chapter discusses blackface minstrel troupes, British regimental bands and jazz orchestras performing in India from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It details their challenges and strategies for success, and suggests that their capacity to facilitate cosmopolitan encounters in the wider world contributed to their popularity and value. It first introduces problems and practicalities in maintaining bands performing British military music in India in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. It then briefly introduces the character and scope of ballroom dance music and blackface minstrelsy in urban centres. To end, it examines the character of jazz orchestras between the 1920s and 1940s, detailing the role of the gramophone industry, entertainment venues such as hotel and cinema hall ballrooms, and the Allied military in Calcutta on their growth and profitability. In each example, it articulates thoughts on the role and usefulness of orchestras and notes issues confronting their musicians.
Scott Gac
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300111989
- eISBN:
- 9780300138368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300111989.003.0016
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter examines the fans of the Hutchinson Family Singers, country dwellers singing of family ties along with their religious and reform ideals, played to rural listeners who would adore the ...
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This chapter examines the fans of the Hutchinson Family Singers, country dwellers singing of family ties along with their religious and reform ideals, played to rural listeners who would adore the group even more after the musicians earned the recognition of urban fans such as those in Boston, New York, and especially London. The magnitude of the Hutchinsons' success during 1840 suggests that antislavery, though always a highly contentious issue, was nonetheless growing more popular in the North. The Hutchinsons' medium, the parlor song, and the aesthetic of their music, broke through ideological and political barriers; but at the same time, their performance revealed the limits of reform in song. The success of the Hutchinsons and similar musical acts pushed popular song toward new territory in 1840. At the start of the decade, it looked as if blatant racial characterizations of early blackface minstrels would dominate the scene.Less
This chapter examines the fans of the Hutchinson Family Singers, country dwellers singing of family ties along with their religious and reform ideals, played to rural listeners who would adore the group even more after the musicians earned the recognition of urban fans such as those in Boston, New York, and especially London. The magnitude of the Hutchinsons' success during 1840 suggests that antislavery, though always a highly contentious issue, was nonetheless growing more popular in the North. The Hutchinsons' medium, the parlor song, and the aesthetic of their music, broke through ideological and political barriers; but at the same time, their performance revealed the limits of reform in song. The success of the Hutchinsons and similar musical acts pushed popular song toward new territory in 1840. At the start of the decade, it looked as if blatant racial characterizations of early blackface minstrels would dominate the scene.
Scott Gac
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300111989
- eISBN:
- 9780300138368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300111989.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter explains about music and its reform, burgeoning fame, and again, some sheet music and some of the group's most popular songs of 1843. Though the performance seemingly lacked the import ...
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This chapter explains about music and its reform, burgeoning fame, and again, some sheet music and some of the group's most popular songs of 1843. Though the performance seemingly lacked the import of singing during a church service or playing in the Milford band, the group's size, their rendering of sacred song, and the concert's setting combined to produce a hallowed atmosphere. Music was often thought of as a science in the first half of the nineteenth century, an attitude that had helped make respectable the composing of music and, to a lesser extent, the teaching of music. In 1840, the New Hampshire Hutchinson brothers, looking to capitalize on their rustic roots, went from country to city in their quest to garner the worth attributed to composers and teachers of church music, the respect given to European performers, and the popular success of blackface minstrels.Less
This chapter explains about music and its reform, burgeoning fame, and again, some sheet music and some of the group's most popular songs of 1843. Though the performance seemingly lacked the import of singing during a church service or playing in the Milford band, the group's size, their rendering of sacred song, and the concert's setting combined to produce a hallowed atmosphere. Music was often thought of as a science in the first half of the nineteenth century, an attitude that had helped make respectable the composing of music and, to a lesser extent, the teaching of music. In 1840, the New Hampshire Hutchinson brothers, looking to capitalize on their rustic roots, went from country to city in their quest to garner the worth attributed to composers and teachers of church music, the respect given to European performers, and the popular success of blackface minstrels.
