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London, New York, Paris, and Vienna became important musical centers as a consequence of the social and economic conditions that gave rise to an active concert life in each of them. The 19th century was an age of musical entrepreneurialism, and new markets for professionalism and commerce were created, such as blackface minstrelsy and music hall. Ticket prices were used to produce a class hierarchy of concerts. Cheap concerts were plentiful in the 1850s. The railways gave a boost to the music business. Women began to find professional musical employment, perhaps performing in a “Ladies' Orchestra” or, more often, becoming piano teachers. Alongside the promotion of public performances, music publishing and piano making were the most important musical enterprises of the new commercial age. Inevitably copyright and performing rights became crucial matters. This chapter argues that the status of popular music changed profoundly with the development of the music market.

Nineteenth-century bourgeois values were abundant, as were their ideological functions (thrift set against extravagance, self-help against dependence, hard work against idleness) but, where art and entertainment were concerned, the key value in asserting moral leadership was respectability. It was something within the grasp of all, unlike the aristocratic notion of “good breeding”. It followed that recreation should be rational, designed to be improving, and not merely idle amusement. The rational and the recreational were linked together in the sight-singing movement. There were, of course, other kinds of musical activities to worry about: for instance, the moral propriety of the waltz, or the innuendo to be found in songs of the café-concert and music hall, or political songs. Yet, not even Gilbert and Sullivan are morally unimpeachable. A respectable moral tone is at its strongest in the drawing-room ballad, but even sterner moral fiber is found in temperance ballads.

Art in the second half of the 19th century had to take its place in the market with other commodities. The economics of cultural provision in the metropolis necessitated focusing on particular consumers. Old markets had to be developed, new ones created — such as promenade concerts, dance halls, minstrelsy, cafés-concerts, music halls — and, where necessary, demand stimulated. The diverse markets for cultural goods were noted in London at mid-century: theatres for pleasure seekers, sacred choral concerts for the philanthropic, “ancient concerts” for the wealthy, and the tavern sing-song for the working class. Musicians had to deal with markets and market relations rather than patrons and patronage. Taste was more closely aligned to matters of respectability and class status than to questions of aesthetics. All classes had to take into account the character of a performance venue before stepping inside, even though a certain amount of class mixing was normal at musical entertainments.

This chapter presents an analysis of Oliver!’s phenomenal reception on its West End premiere at the New Theatre. Oliver!’s debut initiated a media frenzy regarding the “rebirth” of the supposedly moribund English musical, and the excitement surrounding Bart’s adaptation bordered on nationalistic fervor. The English press’s enthusiastic hyping of Oliver!’s Englishness is somewhat ironic given that Oliver!’s musical narrative was based heavily on the American musical model. Nevertheless, Bart’s use of a Dickensian source, along with his emphasis on music-hall songs and melodies, granted the piece a sense of national identity that proved a strong cause for celebration among the English public. The triumph of Oliver! as an English musical represented the larger triumph of the cultural narratives surrounding Dickens and music hall as embodiments of Englishness, and though these narratives presented oversimplifications of two mass-cultural Victorian institutions, they likewise reinforce the power of these institutions as symbols of Englishness.

This chapter positions Victorian music hall as key to an analysis of popular entertainment after the division created by the 1843 Theatres Act, when dramatic and non-dramatic elements of theatre were forced to separate and reposition themselves in the former patent theatres, the illegitimate theatres and the newly created music halls. Radcliffe uses the theoretical models of status, hierarchy and cultural capital to examine the dramatic theatre’s response in the late nineteenth century to the increasing competition posed by the music hall industry. Radcliffe focuses on the debates between actor-manager, Henry Irving and one of the most powerful, new-style corporate capitalist music hall managers, H. E. Moss. The conflict reveals the cultural and economic position of theatre in its negotiation of an increasingly bureaucratic organised industry.

This chapter presents certain transitional musical events that took place in African American music during the 1940s—events that would have influential effects and would change the course of black music in the following decades. It is devoted to a clarification of these events, with focus on the role of myth and ritual. These events took place as follows: in jazz, the rise of bebop, with its creators returning to and embracing elements of African American myth and ritual, changed the course of the genre; in popular music, the rise of rhythm and blues laid the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll and soul music also caused an incursion of black music into white society; and in concert-hall music, certain black composers embraced myth, paid homage to ritual, and produced works of high quality and import, signaling the rise of black composers of the first rank in American society.

This chapter discusses Roxy's career from 1931–1936. From 1908 to 1928, Roxy had been at the forefront of technological change and adoption in film exhibition and broadcasting. But by spring 1931, when Roxy finally exited his contract with Fox and the Roxy Theatre, he had become a conservative nostalgist, repeating his time-worn broadcasting methods and his exhibition policies without noticing that the times had changed. His on-air variety show was no longer the only one of its kind, and, after nine years, it showed signs of age. While other exhibitors reduced their overhead and began booking headliners instead of prologues, Roxy tuck with much of the same stage show/film programming he had presented for well over a decade. Roxy died of a heart attack on the morning of January 13, 1936.

Dr Fu Manchu has proved the most enduring of the chinoiserie associated with Limehouse, however, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the space of Chinatown, rather than the representation of any one individual. It begins with a brief consideration of the Limehouse lair created for Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, before focusing attention on the less remembered but once infamous literary chinoiserie of Thomas Burke. In particular, it examines the depiction of sound and music in his early works, and their utilisation in the construction of a Chinatown which was enmeshed within the wider East End, and whose Oriental practices intersected with Victorian music hall. In his combination of ancient Chinese melodies and pre-commercialised music hall, Burke assigned his Chinatown and East End to a previous era, his Limehouse was separated from the rest of London by time, as well as race and class. Although Burke in one sense offers Chinatown as a nostalgic alternative to the encroachment of the modern state and bourgeois culture, he also depicts it as a brutal slum where murder and suicide were commonplace. Burke’s subtly subversive chinoserie oscillates between negative and positive constructions of his synthesis of Victorian working-class and Chinese culture.

This chapter examines an intra-gender competition between three masculine identities in Victorian Glasgow. In 1875, sexually risqué performances at a music hall prompted a group of men from the ‘unco guid’, or rigidly respectable middle class, to launch a morality campaign against the halls. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful due to the formation of a cross-class alliance between young, working-class men, known as ‘mashers’, and bourgeois hedonists, who together defended their male right to sexual pleasure. The analysis of this masculine power play is suggestive in three ways: it demonstrates the existence in Presbyterian Scotland of an unrespectable masculinity; it emphasizes the importance of considering alternative forms of masculine identity in their own right, and not in relation to a hegemonic norm; and it suggests that the preservation of music-hall style into the Edwardian period was the result as much of a gendered as a class-inflected contest of social hierarchies for control.

This chapter argues for the longstanding affinity between the market and the theatre, expressed in the frequent elision of festivity with commerce in markets, fairs and carnivals. The chapter utilises Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, and Stallybrass and White’s application of it to cultural transgression. It argues that the street markets were performative places, and picks up earlier analysis of sensory affect in an investigation of the soundscape of the markets. Performance and sound lead into a final section that continues the cultural analysis of the markets and their people commenced in the previous chapter, describing how the costermongers populated the music hall stage, with a voice and look that was distilled (directly or indirectly) from street market origins. It concludes that the street markets existed on stage and in representation in a form that allowed them to be consumed nostalgically into popular culture well beyond the period of this study.

This chapter examines the relationship between radio broadcasting and Hollywood. By the late 1930s, Hollywood became the new center of program production. The center of radio programming then shifted to Hollywood, which evolved from being chief competitor to closest collaborator of the New York based radio industry. J. Walter Thompson, one of the most established and longstanding advertising agencies, took the lead in early radio and then in Hollywood-based programming. They produced major Hollywood-based programs, such as Lux Radio Theatre and Kraft Music Hall. Kraft Music Hall was a musical variety show, which featured classical music artists, and secured the services of major Hollywood stars.

This chapter charts the laughter prompted by the everyday interactions of employers and servants that were widely represented in music hall, cinema, periodicals, newspapers, and other forms of mass leisure. It suggests that laughter is an intensely revealing emotion that structures relationships of inequality and offers both forms of resistance and support for the status quo. The use made by scholars of laughter is reviewed, and some new directions are suggested. The chapter assess the failed jokes, and shared jokes, of the century, and suggests that cultural representations of service, cleaning, and char work continued to be widely found funny during the period between World War II and the 1980s when the numbers employed in service were very low. Service continued to have cultural resonance, and has profoundly shaped traditions of British humour.

This chapter examines the Scotch comic and its projection of Scottish identity alongside other ‘national’ stage representations popular in Scottish music halls at the time, which would also have contributed to creating ‘an inclusive model of the national culture as the sum of all current cultural activity’. It explores the tension between music hall as popular culture and commercial entertainment genre. It considers the proposition that there was much more to the Scotch comic than Lauder's iconic tartanised, version; that the figure was originally a product of urban industrial society, adapted to meet the demands of a market-driven commercial format — music hall — but that, post-Lauder, it reconnected with earlier strands of this working-class performing tradition in ways in which make it clear that the figure remained an expression of Scottish urban working-class culture. It examines the different impact of the Scotch comic tradition on the Glasgow Jewish comedian Ike Freedman.

This chapter is concerned with the new demands, opportunities, and limitations of the medium of film as it attempted to capture theatrical performances in the early days of sound. During the early 1930s, it is interesting to see the impact on performers when they move from a theater stage to a film studio and are faced with a camera instead of a live audience. Four Pathé musical shorts have been chosen as case studies, and they are representative of three musical genres: music hall, operetta, and cabaret. These films contain performances by the Cockney music-hall comedian Gus Elen, the light-operatic tenor Richard Tauber, and the cabaret artist Greta Keller. These early musical shorts are valuable in showing how singers confronted a new audiovisual medium and tried to mould their performances appropriately.

This chapter argues that an oral mode of textual circulation, which T. S. Eliot discovered both in obscene, comic, bawdy folk song and in music hall performance, provided him with a vision of social cohesion that contrasts with the fragmentation that is otherwise central to his work. The ability of these genres to figure an otherwise lost social cohesion, however, reflects the fact that they are spaces where men bonded and created a sense of homosocial community. Eliot’s published comments on obscenity confirm his valuation of the comic or humorous obscene as a mode and index of social health; but the instances where Eliot discovers this cohesion are predicated on the exclusion of women.

This chapter looks at the development of ballet in the second half of the nineteenth century and the way in which at outer London music halls it became increasingly topical in its subject matter during the period 1870-1884. Many of the references related to the changing political conditions of the day, but the references to situations served more to reassure the audiences than to criticise policy makers. There was always an element of fantasy and escapism about the productions but they also introduced audiences to places of which they may have had little knowledge. London’s dance history, away from the opera houses and the two Leicester Square theatres, is very poorly documented. Ballet in the nineteenth century takes many guises and many dance historians dismiss the post-Romantic period in British theatre as it focused on popular entertainment. Because the available information is so patchy the picture becomes distorted. This chapter starts to investigate just what was music hall ballet and why did it appeal so strongly to its audience.