Vaudeville Melodies

If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.

The Fables of La Fontaine enjoyed universal success from their first appearance in 1668. Fifty years later a collection of songs was published in Paris based on some of these tales set to vaudeville tunes and other simple airs. For th is new edition of these unknown settings the author has written an extensive historical introduction, translated all the texts into English, and provided invaluable suggestions on performance practice. A delightful and witty addition to the concert repertory.

This interdisciplinary volume analyzes previously understudied sources from nineteenth- and twentieth- century France and the Francophone world and situates them in their social, cultural and political contexts.

A fascinating interdisciplinary collection of essays on intertextual relationships in popular music

London, 1820. The British capital is a metropolis that overwhelms dwellers and visitors alike with constant exposure to all kinds of sensory stimulation. Over the next two decades, the city’s tumult will reach new heights: as population expansion places different classes in dangerous proximity and ideas of political and social reform linger in the air, London begins to undergo enormous infrastructure change that will alter it forever. It is the London of this period that editors Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford pinpoint in this book, which chooses one broad musical category—voice—and engages with it through essays on music of the streets, theaters, opera houses, and concert halls; on the raising of voices in religious and sociopolitical contexts; and on the perception of voice in literary works and scientific experiments with acoustics. Emphasizing human subjects, this focus on voice allows the authors to explore the multifaceted issues that shaped London, from the anxiety surrounding the city’s importance in the musical world at large to the changing vocal imaginations that permeated the epoch. Capturing the breadth of sonic stimulations and cultures available—and sometimes unavoidable—to residents at the time, London Voices, 1820–1840 sheds new light on music in Britain and the richness of London culture during this period.

Music Sociology explores 16 different genres to demonstrate that music everywhere reflects social values, organisational processes, meanings and individual identity. Presenting original ethnographic research, the contributors use descriptions of subcultures to explain the concepts of music sociology, including the rituals that link people to music, the past and each other. Music Sociology introduces the sociology of music to those who may not be familiar with it and provides a basic historical perspective on popular music in America and beyond.

A balanced and authoritative account of the theatrical history of all three Scandinavian countries.