Download or read book Opera in the Jazz Age written by Alexandra Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular culture at a moment when there was a growing imperative to categorize art forms as "highbrow," "middlebrow," or "lowbrow." In this provocative and timely study, Alexandra Wilson considers how the opera debate of the 1920s continues to shape the ways in which we discuss the art form, and draws connections between the battle of the brows and present-day discussions about elitism.
Download or read book Tales of Southeast Asia s Jazz Age written by Peter Keppy and published by National University of Singapore Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luis Borromeo was the Philippines's "King of Jazz," who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia's 1920s Jazz Age. This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo's and Riboet's styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local. Leaning on cultural studies and the work on cosmopolitanism and modernity by Henry Jenkins and Joel Kahn, Peter Keppy examines pop culture at this time as a contradictory social phenomenon. He challenges notions of Southeast Asia's popular culture as lowbrow entertainment created by elites and commerce to manipulate the masses, arguing instead that audiences seized on this popular culture to channel emancipatory activities, to articulate social critique, and to propagate an inclusive nationalism without being radically anticolonial.
Download or read book Supreme City written by Donald L. Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --
Download or read book Really the Blues written by Mezz Mezzrow and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as an “American counter-culture classic,” this “funny” and candid musical memoir offers a delicious glimpse into the 1930s jazz scene (The Wall Street Journal) Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues—the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe—is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”
Download or read book Dressed to Kill written by Virginia Bates and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lavish volume invites the reader into the glamorous fashions of the 1920s. Virginia, a renowned antique clothing shop in London, has been a go-to for fashion designers, models, stylists, and fashionistas for years. With its carefully curated selection of perfectly preserved heirloom dresses, coats, lingerie, and accessories, Virginia’s rare clothing is collected by designers for inspiration and by serious clothing collectors (both museum curators as well as celebrities). This stunning volume highlights the best of the collection, scaling the heights of Jazz Age fashion with chapters on sequined dresses, cocktail wear, bridge coats, opera coats, evening jackets, and house coats. Through sumptuous still-life photographs of the clothes and opulent film-set interiors, Dressed to Kill invites readers into a magical world. The rare and precious beaded dresses, feathered capes, and silky kimonos are beautifully documented, highlighting the craftsmanship and ornamentation of the pieces. Historical information is accompanied by guidelines for the care of antique clothing. With essays by leading fashion authorities, this is a must-have book for collectors, connoisseurs, and those who believe in evening style.
Download or read book The Puccini Problem written by Alexandra Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-08 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions that were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.
Download or read book The Chicagoan written by Neil Harris and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name The Chicagoan." "Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. Harris's substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s. The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features - and even one issue reprinted in its entirety." "Recalling a vivid moment in the life of the Windy City, the Chicagoan is a forgotten treasure, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Puccini s La Boh me written by Alexandra Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? In this book, author Alexandra Wilson traces La Bohème's rise to fame and demonstrates that its success grew steadily through stage performances, recordings, filmed versions and the endorsements of star singers. More recently, popular songs, film soundtracks and musicals that draw on the opera's music and themes added further to its immense cultural impact. This cultural history offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. Wilson argues that La Bohème's approach to realism and its flouting of conventions of the Italian operatic tradition made it strikingly modern for the 1890s. She explores how Puccini and his librettists engaged with gender, urban poverty and nostalgia--themes that grew out of the work's own time and continue to resonate with audiences more than 120 years later. Her analysis of the opera's depiction of Paris reveals that La Bohème was not only influenced by the romantic mythologies surrounding the city to this day but also helped shape them. Wilson's consideration of how directors have reinvented this opera for a new age completes this fascinating history of La Bohème, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this opera and the works it inspired.
Download or read book Mr Wrigley s Ball Club written by Roberts Ehrgott and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was a city of immigrants, mobsters, and flappers with one shared passion: the Chicago Cubs. It all began when the chewing-gum tycoon William Wrigley decided to build the world’s greatest ball club in the nation’s Second City. In this Jazz Age center, the maverick Wrigley exploited the revolutionary technology of broadcasting to attract eager throngs of women to his renovated ballpark. Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club transports us to this heady era of baseball history and introduces the team at its crazy heart—an amalgam of rakes, pranksters, schemers, and choirboys who take center stage in memorable successes, equally memorable disasters, and shadowy intrigue. Readers take front-row seats to meet Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Joe McCarthy, Lewis “Hack” Wilson, Gabby Hartnett. The cast of characters also includes their colorful if less-extolled teammates and the Cubs’ nemesis, Babe Ruth, who terminates the ambitions of Mr. Wrigley’s ball club with one emphatic swing.
Download or read book Opera After the Zero Hour written by Emily Richmond Pollock and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.
Download or read book Midnight in Cairo The Divas of Egypt s Roaring 20s written by Raphael Cormack and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant portrait of the talented and entrepreneurial women who defined an era in Cairo. One of the world’s most multicultural cities, twentieth-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and ’30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a “modern” Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry—as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry. Raphael Cormack unveils the rich histories of independent, enterprising women like vaudeville star Rose al-Youssef (who launched one of Cairo’s most important newspapers); nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdiyya (the first woman to lead an Egyptian theater company) and her great rival, Oum Kalthoum (still venerated for her soulful lyrics); and other fabulous female stars of the interwar period, a time marked by excess and unheard-of freedom of expression. Buffeted by crosswinds of colonialism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, “religious” and “secular” values, patriarchy and feminism, this new generation of celebrities offered a new vision for women in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.
Download or read book New York Art Deco written by Anthony W. Robins and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a 2017–2018 New York City Book Award presented by the New York Society Library Of all the world's great cities, perhaps none is so defined by its Art Deco architecture as New York. Lively and informative, New York Art Deco leads readers step-by-step past the monuments of the 1920s and '30s that recast New York as the world's modern metropolis. Anthony W. Robins, New York's best-known Art Deco guide, includes an introductory essay describing the Art Deco phenomenon, followed by eleven walking tour itineraries in Manhattan—each accompanied by a map designed by legendary New York cartographer John Tauranac—and a survey of Deco sites across the four other boroughs. Also included is a photo gallery of sixteen color plates by nationally acclaimed Art Deco photographer Randy Juster. In New York Art Deco, Robins has distilled thirty years' worth of experience into a guidebook for all to enjoy at their own pace.
Download or read book Welcome to Jazz written by Carolyn Sloan and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INTERACTIVE, SWING-ALONG PICTURE BOOK—WITH 12 SOUND CHIPS! Are you ready to swing? Discover the wonders of jazz: How to get in the groove, what it means to play a solo, and the joy of singing along in a call-and-response. In this interactive swing-along picture book with 12 sound chips, you’ll hear the instruments of jazz—the rhythm section with its banjo, drums, and tuba, and the leads, like the clarinet, trumpet, and trombone. And you’ll hear singers scat, improvising melodies with nonsense syllables like be-bop and doo-we-ah! Along the way, you’ll learn how this unique African American art form started in New Orleans, and how jazz changed over time as innovative musicians like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday added their own ideas to it. Press the buttons to hear the band, the rhythms, and the singer calling out: “OH WHEN THE SAINTS—oh when the saints…”
Download or read book Yellow Music written by Andrew F. Jones and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-19 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThe distribution of the gramophone and the birth of popular music, including jazz, as a part of nation-building and modernity in China./div
Download or read book Divas and Scholars written by Philip Gossett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett’s personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas. Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrall both aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it—in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.
Download or read book Bach s Famous Choir written by Michael Maul and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cantors of the St. Thomas School and Church in Leipzig could be counted among the most significant German composers of their times. But what attracted these artists - from Seth Calvisius to J.S. Bach to Johann Adam Hiller - to the music school and choir and inspired them to explore new repertoire of the highest standing? And how did the cantors influence the musical profile of the school - a profile that often became a bone of contention between school and city hall? The success of the St. Thomas School was not a foregone conclusion; its history is replete with challenges and setbacks as well as triumphs. The school was caught between the conflicting interests of enthusiastic mayors and townspeople, who wanted to showcase the city's musical culture, and opposing parties, including jealous rectors and elitist sponsors, who argued for the traditional subordination of the cantorate to the school system. Drawing on many new, recently discovered sources, Michael Maul explores the phenomenon of the St Thomas School. He shows how cantors, local luminaries and municipal politicians overcame the School's detractors to make it a remarkable success, with a world-famous choir. Illuminating the social and political history of the cantorate and the musical life of an important German city, the book will be of interest to scholars of Baroque music and J.S. Bach, cultural historians, choral directors, and musicologists and performers studying historical performance practice. MICHAEL MAUL is Senior Scholar at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig and lecturer in musicology at the universities of Leipzig/Halle. He is also the artistic director of the annual Leipzig Bach Festival.
Download or read book A Certain Age written by Beatriz Williams and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of A Hundred Summers brings the Roaring Twenties brilliantly to life in this enchanting and compulsively readable tale of intrigue, romance, and scandal in New York Society, brimming with lush atmosphere, striking characters, and irresistible charm. As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, has done the unthinkable: she’s fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War. An intense and deeply honorable man, Octavian is devoted to the beautiful socialite of a certain age and wants to marry her. While times are changing and she does adore the Boy, divorce for a woman of Theresa’s wealth and social standing is out of the question, and there is no need; she has an understanding with Sylvo, her generous and well-respected philanderer husband. But their relationship subtly shifts when her bachelor brother, Ox, decides to tie the knot with the sweet younger daughter of a newly wealthy inventor. Engaging a longstanding family tradition, Theresa enlists the Boy to act as her brother’s cavalier, presenting the family’s diamond rose ring to Ox’s intended, Miss Sophie Fortescue—and to check into the background of the little-known Fortescue family. When Octavian meets Sophie, he falls under the spell of the pretty ingénue, even as he uncovers a shocking family secret. As the love triangle of Theresa, Octavian, and Sophie progresses, it transforms into a saga of divided loyalties, dangerous revelations, and surprising twists that will lead to a shocking transgression . . . and eventually force Theresa to make a bittersweet choice. Full of the glamour, wit and delicious twists that are the hallmarks of Beatriz Williams’ fiction and alternating between Sophie’s spirited voice and Theresa’s vibrant timbre, A Certain Age is a beguiling reinterpretation of Richard Strauss’s comic opera Der Rosenkavalier, set against the sweeping decadence of Gatsby’s New York.
