Search Results

Of all operatic characters, the most influential on American popular culture was Cho-Cho-San, the title character of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This chapter surveys the large repertoire of Butterfly songs, which, like the opera, allegorize the United States' flexing of imperialistic muscle in the Far East as a love story between a powerful American man and a powerless Japanese woman. Unlike the opera, these popular songs, of which “Poor Butterfly” emerges as the most important, explore a wide range of alternative readings of that allegory, from validating Pinkerton as hero, not villain, to empowering Cho-Cho-San.

This chapter focuses on representations of the American Indian in popular styles of Western music from the 18th century to the present. The intention is to show how cultural difference is represented, when little is known or understood about the culture of those being represented, and to consider how shifting perceptions of the Native American can be related to changes in attitude to the “civilized” and the natural world. The emphasis on the popular sharpens the argument, because this kind of representation needs to be widely understood and easily assimilated in order for it to be popular. The ideology embedded in way the American Indian is represented tells us, predictably, about the attitudes of the person who stands outside Native American culture.

From its opening scene, South Pacific presents problematic images of colonialism that indicate a Western cultural hegemony over the indigenous island peoples and suggests the subsequent influence of postwar capitalism in the region. The character of Bloody Mary simultaneously represents an attempt at assimilation and a carefully enforced outsider status. Although her economic acumen gives Mary a degree of power within the imposed culture, her ethnic difference prevents her assimilation into it. This friction plays an important role in the subplot of Mary, her daughter, and Joe Cable, who cannot reconcile himself to loving an Other. Further, this chapter examines Nellie’s presence at the end of the play as an indicator of the increased postwar American presence in the South Pacific and reinforces a discussion of Nellie as an autonomous character with more power, cultural as well as emotional, than she is generally credited for. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the cultural power of popular song and how popular song topics pervade the musical.

The conflict between ideas of authenticity and commercialism features heavily in current discourses on contemporary popular music, but similar tensions can be identified much earlier. This chapter considers the case of the baritone and composer Henry Russell, one of the most prominent and charismatic "London voices" of the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and the United States. An early exemplar of the solo recitalist, Russell combined both music and rich seams of anecdote in his self-accompanied performances. His popular appeal lay in his distinctive, declamatory singing style (adept at bringing life to either a thrilling descriptive scena or a sentimental ballad), and his catchy melodies with their settings of lyrics by poets aligned with radical political movements such as Charles Mackay and Eliza Cook. Dubbed by the press as the “singer for the million” during the peak of Chartism in 1848, Russell illustrates the complexity of notions of authenticity: not simply in personal terms as a Jew who for most of his career obscured his ethnicity, but also the ways in which his voice and songs both sincerely articulated the needs of the oppressed and served to contain social unrest.

This chapter focuses on XTC's 1989 recording The Mayor of Simpleton. It analyzes this song in relation to the tension between academic discourse and the constitution of the popular song as an object of study. It suggests that the lyrics of this song shows that even among the brainiest pop musicians, it is clearly undesirable to display one's analytical tendencies. It also highlights the conflict between the discourse of musicology and the interpretation of popular music.

Chapter 3 shows how Hollywood's earliest sound films adapted conventions of the musical stage in order to privilege the discrete presentation of songs over norms of narrative coherence. Through the 1910s and 1920s, vaudeville and Broadway shows featured live star vocalists who presented songs as accentuated, discrete moments of performance within narrative contexts, and whose repeated song presentations across a given show resulted in the vocalists becoming associated with particular songs. The “star-song attraction” translated into contemporaneous studio advertisements and was bolstered by the cross-promotion of motion picture songs with sheet music, phonograph records, and radio. It also was made manifest by early sound films whose narratives were engineered in ways that highlighted discrete, modular units of song performance. Extended analyses of Applause (1929) and Weary River (1929) demonstrate how such films could capitalize on the cachet of (allegedly) singing stars: Helen Morgan in Applause, and Richard Barthelmess in Weary River.

This chapter examines the appropriation of sacred themes, imagery, and symbols from the Candomblé religion in Brazilian popular music, analyzes the sacred/secular connection of Brazilian samba, and describes the iconic images and inspirations for popular songs from the axé music of the Orixás. It also suggests that the appropriations of axé, African roots, sacred themes, imagery, and symbols from the andomblé religion in Brazilian popular music correspond to black expressions of religiosity embedded in popular styles such as soul, reggae, jazz, Afro- Beat, and many others.

The uses ascribed to music during May and the après-mai period varied not only across musical and political formations, but also from one musical genre to another. This chapter examines this topic in detail and provides a framework for understanding how genre mediates political expression. The norms, ideologies, and discourses that govern different genres play a decisive role in determining what can or cannot be said through music, what uses a song can or cannot afford. Of particular importance is the correlation of genre and identity, inasmuch as the political agency imputed to a given social group conditions what functions will be attributed to the music(s) associated with this group. To flesh out this thesis, the chapter examines how the events of May were represented in different types of popular song. By examining songs drawn from the genres of the literary chanson (Léo Ferré's “L'été 68”), the revolutionary chanson (Dominique Grange's “Les nouveaux partisans”), and contemporary French pop music (Evariste's “La révolution”), it is shown how the conventions governing subject matter, rhetoric, imagery, and musical style in each influenced their depictions of May '68.

Chapter 5 accounts for the emergence of the plausible integration of songs, an approach that developed in tandem with the diminished use of the popular song and the rise of the orchestral background film score. The chapter recounts the debates in the trade press over the perceived problem that the motion picture song posed: songs threatened narrative coherence and continuity. As the vogue for motion picture songs diminished, the studios cut their branch publishing offices, reduced the staffs of music departments, and employed in-house composers who attempted to cultivate a musical aesthetic based on the Romantic traditions of orchestral scoring. Case studies of In Old Arizona (1929) and Safe in Hell (1931) illustrate some of the practices enacted for the plausible incorporation of songs. These analyses also reveal the use of intermittent scoring that is typically associated with the classical Hollywood film score in subsequent years.

A complicating factor in Fetis's theory of tonality was the repertoire of popular folk songs (the chansons populaires) that collectors were beginning to transcribe and publish in various anthologies throughout the nineteenth century. In this Chapter we see how some of these song catchers insisted that many of their songs, particularly those from the more remote provinces of France such as Brittany, seemed to be based on differing scale systems, some of which suggested modal origins that could be traced to the Middle Ages, or perhaps even earlier to the Greeks. But the picture was not clear. Some of the oldest of the popular songs sounded to many ears as if they were in simple major or minor keys. This evidence suggested that tonality might have roots in vernacular traditions, although a number of church musicians continued to insist that the modal system of the church represented the true, authentic musical language of the people.

Chapter 4 delineates theme songs and incidental songs, and explains how each type of song functioned in dramatically conventional ways: for example, to unify disparate narrative events and characters, to establish geographic and temporal settings, and to convey through lyrics the emotions absent in character dialogue. Whereas films belonging to the musical genre could justify the intrusive appearance of song performances by recourse to audience expectations about Broadway stage musicals, non-musical films motivated star-song performances in narratively cumbersome ways. Analyses of the “strained integration” of songs in two films —Check and Double Check (RKO, 1930) and Possessed (MGM, 1931)—shows how star-song performances were sometimes justified by comparatively weaker means, and thus resulted in narrative disruption rather than coherence. In these cases, the careful motivation of songs called attention to precisely what the classical film sought to efface: the construction of narrative.

This chapter focuses on and discusses the relationship between jazz and pre-rock 'n' roll American popular songs. For a good deal of jazz's history the majority of its harmonic and structural frameworks were taken or borrowed from American popular songs—though “taken” and “borrowed” may imply that there was a distance between jazz and Tin Pan Alley when instead it was more a matter of difference than distance, and a difference that at times was not easy to detect. Furthermore, jazz's musical habits and its emotional atmosphere had a significant influence on the emotional tone, rhythmic traits, and melodic and harmonic flavor of a great many American popular songs—the very same songs that jazz musicians often would immediately put to fervent use.

This chapter explores film exhibition in the 1890s and 1900s in light of evidence for the musical accompaniment of forms of screen media produced in London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Early films are also considered in terms of remediation, such as the emergence of films inspired by popular song titles at the turn of the century, and the fact that popular songs formed the principal content for the various synchronized sound systems developed in the 1900s. This chapter thus provides historical evidence that in London music would likely have been used to accompany early film exhibition from the inception of the medium.

This chapter focuses on Wilder's last decade. His catalog of original compositions for instrumental groups, large and small, continued to grow, as did his collection of distinguished contributions to the popular-song genre. His interest in writing for the stage persisted as well. Still more pivotal was a new attitude of reflection and historical contemplation, both personal and professional, and a commitment to preserve his thoughts for posterity. He had always been a writer, but his yield had often been restricted by the dimensions of a postcard or a page of hotel stationery. In the early 1970s, he began to expand his literary medium and his scope in the direction of a comprehensive memoir. He found that he had a lot of stories to tell and insights to share, not only about himself but also about the music that stood at the core of his artistic consciousness.

This chapter reviews the lessons on the ‘Beat’ – or ‘beatific’ – vision that was discussed in the previous chapters. It examines the relationship between the fifties writers and the sixties songwriters, emphasising the power of popular song to make complex religious philosophies accessible and to make the spiritual dimension of existence seem immediate. The chapter also discusses the tensions that existed within the Beatles and Bob Dylan.