Showing papers in "American Music in 1995"

Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined

Abstract: Transforming Tradition offers the first serious look at folksong revivals, vibrant meldings of popular and folk culture that captured public awareness in the 1950s and 1960s. Best remembered for such songs as "Tom Dooley" and for performers like the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, the revival of that era gave rise to hootenannies, coffeehouses, and blues and bluegrass festivals, sowing a legacy of popular interest that lives today. Many of the contributors to this volume were themselves performers in folksong revivals; today they are scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American and Canadian cultural history. As both insiders and analysts they bring unique perspectives and new insights to the study of revivals. In his introduction, Neil Rosenberg explores central issues such as the history of folksong revivals, stereotypes of "folksingers, " connections between scholarship and popularization, meanings of the word "revival, " questions of authenticity and the invention of culture, and issues surrounding reflexive scholarship. The individual studies are divided into three sections. The first covers the "Great Boom" revival of the late '50s and early '60s, and the next approaches the revival as a self-contained social culture with its own "new aesthetic" and in-group values. The last looks at revival activities in systems of musical culture including the blues, old-time fiddling, Northumbrian piping, and bluegrass, with particular emphasis on perceptions of insider and outsider roles. The contributors display keen awareness of how their own perceptions have been shaped by their early, more subjective involvement. For example, Archie Green explores his service as faculty guru to the Campu Folksong Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 1960s. Kenneth S. Goldstein considers how intellectual issues of the "great boom" shaped his work for recording companies. Sheldon Posen uses autobiography as ethnography to explain what happened to him w

Cecilia Reclaimed Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music

Abstract: Cecilia, a fifteenth-century Christian martyr, has long been considered the patron saint of music. In this pathbreaking volume, ten of the best known scholars in the newly emerging field of feminist musicology explore both how gender has helped shape genres and works of music and how music has contributed to prevailing notions of gender. The musical subjects include concert music, both instrumental and vocal, and the vernacular genres of ballads, salon music, and contemporary African American rap. The essays raise issues not only of gender but also of race and class, moving among musical practices of the courtly ruling class and the elite discourse of the twentieth-century modernist movement to practices surrounding marginal girls in Renaissance Venice and the largely white middle-class experiences of magazine and balladry.

Bamboula!: The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Abstract: In Bamboula!, S. Frederick Starr presents an authoritatively researched, engagingly written biography of America's first authentic musical voice. Starr paints for us a striking portrait of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's childhood in 1830s New Orleans, a city madly devoted to music, where opera companies, music halls, fiddlers and banjo-pickers, church choirs, and Army bands all contributed to what Starr calls \"the most stunning manifestation of Jacksonian democracy in the realm of culture to be found anywhere in America.\" We meet Gottschalk's French-speaking maternal grandmother and also his African-American nurse Sally, both of whom regaled him with the songs, legends, and lore of the Creole world, which would inform some of his finest music. We travel with Gottschalk to Paris, where he was a sensation, playing in fashionable salons for the likes of Lamartine, Gautier, and Dumas; and we join his flight from the Revolution of 1848 to a town north of Paris, where he composed his first great works - Bamboula, La Savane, Le Bananier, and Le Mancenillier - all published over the name \"Gottschalk of Louisiana.\" Starr describes Gottschalk's successful return to New York City in the early 1850s, where he enjoyed a degree of popularity never before accorded to an American performer or composer, becoming our first homegrown concert idol. But Starr also examines the life-long struggle between the Catholic Gottschalk and earnest Protestant champions of \"serious\" music, a battle that pitted the austere values of northern Europe against the brighter sensibilities of Paris, Louisiana, and the West Indies.

The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada

Abstract: Named for a popular local fiddle tune, The Crooked Stovepipe is a rollicking, detailed, first-ever study of the indigenous fiddle music and social dancing enjoyed by the Gwich'in Athapaskan Indians and other tribal groups in northeast Alaska, the Yukon, and the northwest territories. Though the music has obvious roots in the British Isles, French Canada, and the American South, the Gwich'in have used it in shaping their own aesthetic, which is apparent in their choice of fiddle tunings, bowing techniques, foot clogging, and a distinctively stratified tune repertoire. Craig Mishler treats this rural subarctic artistic tradition as a distinctive regional style akin to Cajun, bluegrass, or string-band music. He uses convergence theory as the framework for showing how this aesthetic came about. His skillful use of personal anecdotes, interviews, music examples, dance diagrams, and photographs will appeal to general readers interested in folk music and dance, as well as to specialists.

Henry Cowell's United Quartet

Abstract: Henry Cowell (1897-1965) wrote his String Quartet no. 4: United Quartet (L522)1 in 1936. Cowell is still considered by many to be a marginal figure, and the piece itself is relatively obscure and almost six decades old. Why, then, should we invest time and effort in studying it? There are several reasons. First, the importance we attach to Henry Cowell and his achievements depends entirely on the cultural viewpoint we adopt when considering them. From a Eurocentric point of view Cowell is indeed a marginal figure: his links with "the tradition" are at best tenuous, and much of what he did seems completely at odds with mainstream twentieth-century modernism. In this respect his position is far worse than those of two other composers with whom he is often linked, Charles Ives (1874-1954) and John Cage (1912-92), for their work (unlike Cowell's) is in a number of ways closely intertwined with the Eurocentric tradition. If, however, we view Cowell from the alternative position of cultural (rather than merely stylistic) pluralism, a tradition that Lou Harrison (b. 1917) and others have

Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History. 1904-1930

Abstract: This is a study of how Chicago became the major centre of jazz in the 1920s - one of the most vital periods in the history of the music. By exploring the social and racial background of Chicago, Kenney is able to present compelling evidence of why Chicago became such a crucial place for the development of jazz. Kenney knows jazz, but as a historian he can put it into a wider social context. This book should be of great interest to anyone fascinated with jazz history.

Serious Songs of the Early Nineteenth Century. Part 2: The Meaning of the Early Song Melodies

Abstract: In an earlier article I examined the depictions and deeper meanings of lyrics attached to a large group of serious American songs popular in the decades before the Civil War.' There I attempted to establish the symbolic nature of many lyrics as they traced humankind's passage through life-from an arcadian childhood and innocence to an adult world full of strife, sorrow, and aloneness and finally to a permanent home in Heaven (guided by the spirits of loved ones). In what follows I attempt to do the same for the music, particularly the melodies. To that end, the focus of part 2 of "Serious Songs of the Early Nineteenth Century" centers on what the music in these songs is intended to express and those practices and attitudes that invest this expression. To consider the melodies associated with these song lyrics as mere successions of single tones that are organized rhythmically and designed for strophic repetition at a moderately slow tempo tells us little about their purpose. To maintain that tone is apparently connected to tone, that a simplistic sense of flow and anticipation of the melody does ensue, and that a perception of the start and finish of the phrase and strain is planted firmly in the auditor's mind tells us nothing about any inner significance the music might have had for nineteenth-century Americans. We can agree that a melody will alter the "music" residing

It Started in Winona: The Personal and Professional Relationship between Carl Ruggles and Rockwell Kent

Abstract: Winona, Minnesota, in the late spring of 1913. This is hardly the setting in which one would imagine two pioneers of modem American art and music to meet. But it was in the grand rotunda of Winona's impressive Beaux Arts public library that the artist Rockwell Kent and the composer Carl Ruggles first encountered one another. Although their initial meeting was brief, the relationship that continued spanned many decades and had considerable influence upon each man's personal life and professional career. This article will trace that relationship and consider the consequences that a chance meeting in Winona-a city most Easterners considered, at best, a cultural outpostwould have for each man's life and artistic development. The history of Winona can be traced back to the early 1850s. In 1851, Orrin Smith, a steamboat captain from Galena, Illinois, deposited three men on a Mississippi River valley sandbar with orders to claim the land upon which the city of Winona would later be built.' Bordered by the Mississippi on the north, and dramatic, tree-covered bluffs on the south, Winona enjoyed a strategic position along the river. It served as a point of assembly for harvested lumber that was floated down the St. Croix and upper Mississippi rivers as well as the Chippewa River, the Mississippi's Wisconsin tributary. It was also adjacent to rich lands that were opened to settlement and farming after the Sioux relinquished their claims.2 It was not long before both the lumber industry and Winona flourished. According to the historian Henry A. Castle, "Everything was of wood and nearly every stick had to be

Songs of the Early Nineteenth Century Part 1: Early Song Lyrics and Coping with Life

Abstract: This is a study of serious American songs written primarily in the four decades before the Civil War and meant to reach a wide audience, an audience that made no particular distinctions between what we now classify as the art song versus the popular song. These are works that exhibit a grave and pensive frame of mind and examine a grave if not somber subject. They are not satirical, nor do they feature gaiety or hints at light-heartedness. Their themes revolve about home, loved ones, the beloved, the adversities of adult life, death, and the hope for an afterlife. Part I of the investigation, published in this issue, focuses entirely upon the lyrics, not the music, of these songs. Part II, which will follow in a later issue of American Music, will concern itself with the melodies, their meaning, and relation to the lyrics. One should avoid the temptation of painting the views of antebellum men and women in stark black or white. Despite the forbidding questions that divided Americans during the three decades before the Civil War--slavery, states' rights, agrarian versus industrial intereststhere were significant values that the public held in common. Aside from divisive issues, such as those just cited, antebellum American society shared the belief, for example, that a person's full personal development required an assent to commonly accepted standards of right and wrong.

Robert Ward's Instrumental Music

Abstract: The success of Robert Ward's opera The Crucible (1961)' has caused him to be considered primarily as a composer of operas, yet he has written numerous instrumental works throughout his career.2 This article focuses on selected instrumental compositions, presenting an overview of the major works and highlighting salient features of the composer's musical language. Biographical information, often drawn from Ward's own words, helps to illuminate his musical rhetoric, for his philosophies and experiences have integrally shaped his music.3

La Vita Nuova: The Courtship of Charles and Harmony Ives

Abstract: By 1905 Charles Ives had reached a creative, spiritual, and physical crisis that threatened not only his future as an artist but his life as well. A near-prodigy as composer and a professional church organist from his teens, Ives had taken a thorough course of musical study at Yale University with the conservative but nonetheless indispensable Horatio Parker. By the end of college in 1898, following the advice of his late and much-mourned father, George Edward Ives, he had decided against a full-scale musical career. Instead he went into the insurance business, starting as a clerk at Mutual Life in New York City. It was clear that this Yale man was executive material, but after some seven years on the job, nothing in particular had happened. Meanwhile, in 1902, Ives quit his last church-organist position, the only formal connection with the musical profession he ever had. In the years following college Ives composed incessantly at night, on weekends, and during holidays, producing works that include the relatively conservative Second and Third Symphonies and parts of the Violin Sonatas, as well as a string of short revolutionary works, among them From the Steeples and Mountains, several settings of Psalms (which amount to new ways of ordering harmony), the Harvest Home Chorales, Ragtime Dances, and Country Band March. Each of these works sounds inimitably Ivesian, but each is also essentially a musical language of its own. As a whole they add up to no firm direction. Ives

Ben Harney: The Middlesborough Years, 1890-93

Abstract: Benjamin Robertson Harney was born March 6, 1871, in or near Louisville, Kentucky. He died of heart disease in Philadelphia on March 1, 1938, after a long illness.' Harney's significance to the development of American music, specifically ragtime, is indicated by those who have praised him. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis gave Ben Harney a place of honor, for example, in their extensive and pioneering book They All Played Ragtime. They wrote that "a young Kentuckian named Ben Harney, playing and singing a ragtime song in a Gotham vaudeville theatre, inaugurated a remarkable era."2 Gilbert Chase also agreed that Harney was on the cutting edge of the ragtime movement and maintained that "if one took the date of copyright or of publication as the criterion, then precedence in the ragtime field would go to a white musician named Ben R. Harney.''3 The abilities of Harney as a pianist are attested to by none other than the African American ragtime pianists James P. Johnson and William (Willie "the Lion") Smith. Johnson states that he "worked ... with Ben Harney, who was one of the greatest piano players."'4 Although it is doubtful that Smith ever met Harney or heard him play, his remarks regarding a ragtime piano-playing contest lend credence to the mythic character that Harney enjoyed among his African American peers: