1,721,006 research outputs found
Awakening 'Sleeping Beauty': the creation of a national ballet in Britain
No full textThe post-war reopening of London’s Royal Opera House in 1946 has long been viewed as a turning point in policy-makers’ pursuit of national culture: the opulent new production of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet seemed to abandon the wartime emphasis on amateur involvement in the arts in favour of a more elitist preoccupation with international prestige. By resituating the opening night within the broad history of mid-century British ballet culture, this article offers an alternative perspective—one that reveals the production to be far from straightforwardly elitist. In particular, it explores why ballet’s perceived reliance on spectacle made it a problematic vehicle for national culture. It also sheds new light on how the European art canon was appropriated in an attempt to bring Britain the international renown that many considered the hallmark of a ‘truly national culture’
Book review. Katherine Spring, Saying it With Songs: Popular Music & The Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema
No full textPropaganda music in second world war Britain: John Ireland's Epic March
Get PDFWhile biographical studies of British composers’ experiences in the Second World War abound, little attention has been paid to how the demands of ‘total’ war impacted on music’s ideological status. This article sheds new light on how composers and critics negotiated the problematic relationship between art music and politics in this period. John Ireland’s Epic March – a BBC commission that caused the composer considerable anxiety – provides a case study. Drawing first on the correspondence charting the lengthy genesis of the work, and then on the work’s critical reception, I consider how Ireland and his audiences sought to reconcile the conflicting political and aesthetic demands of this commission. With its conventional musical style, Epic March offers an example of a ‘middlebrow’ attempt to bridge the gap between art and politic
Dreams of Germany: music and (trans)national imaginaries in the Modern Era. Conference report
No full textReview-article: Soundtracks to the 'People's War'
No full textBooks under review: Christina L. Baade, Victory Through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Patrick Bade, Music Wars: 1937-1945 (London: East & West Publishing, 2012)
The Child and the Musical Masterpiece
No full textThis chapter explores how and why the “art of listening” became so heavily intertwined with twentieth-century Western childhood. Focusing on the nationwide campaign to teach “music appreciation” in British schools, it investigates how middlebrow educators imagined that this mode of listening traditionally associated with the bourgeois public sphere could resolve the deep-seated social, cultural, and educational challenges of their day. In so doing, the chapter challenges the peripheral place that children and childhood have occupied in the growing body of scholarship on middlebrow culture, showing instead that they formed an important subsection of the middlebrow public in their own right. It ultimately argues that disentangling the children’s middlebrow from its adult counterpart throws new light on music pedagogy at large—by complicating the progressive versus traditional binary that has shaped histories of education, as it has narratives of twentieth-century music
Book review. Murray Foreman, One Night On TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television
No full textBook Revie
Introduction:Bridging the Gap
No full textRecent years have witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the middlebrow. Where previously it attracted downright hostility, scholars have begun to interrogate the middlebrow’s history. In addition to building a more nuanced historical picture, they have asked why it was such an uncomfortable category, and what its occlusion in scholarship has meant for historiography. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to delve more deeply into these questions and to ask how reanimating the middlebrow might radically reshape our understanding of music history. Using the paradigmatic Leonard Bernstein as an entry point, this chapter introduces the values, practices, and debates that have shaped the middlebrow over the past 150 years. It explores why, from the late nineteenth century, commentators, creatives, and audiences began organizing culture into “highbrow” and “lowbrow”; and it traces how, from the outset, these categories were complicated by middlebrow institutions, artworks, and reception modes that fell “in between.” The chapter reveals how and why imagined distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were traditionally endorsed by the academy—notably, in the subdisciplinary separation of art from popular music studies. Viewing long-standing musicological antipathy toward the middlebrow as a further product of this polarized outlook, it begins to stake the ground for middlebrow studies within musicology. Ultimately, the middlebrow emerges as a vital critical apparatus in the pursuit of a more variegated and inclusive history of twentieth-century culture
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