[PDF] Vaudeville Melodies eBook

Author : Nicholas Gebhardt
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 45,23 MB
Release : 2017-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 022644869X

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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.

Author : David Monod
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 50,36 MB
Release : 2020-09-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1469660563

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Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.

Author : Brett Page
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 47,32 MB
Release : 2019-12-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN :

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This valuable work teaches people to write for vaudeville. Vaudeville is a farce with music, a dramatic composition, or light poetry, mixed with songs or ballets. Initially, it was a comedy without psychological or moral themes, based on a humorous situation. It became famous in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1930s, but the concept of vaudeville theatre transformed completely from its French antecedent. This volume is the first treatise on the subject. It is an amusing look at how Vaudeville shows were put together and what went into making them. In addition, the author compiled the opinions of experienced writers regarding vaudeville and the problems faced while writing it. This work remains relevant even today because we consider funny may change with time, but the procedure for setting up and delivering that comedy, mostly, stays the same.

Author : John Metz
Publisher : Pendragon Press
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 14,66 MB
Release : 1986
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780918728265

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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.

Author : Jim Lochner
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 451 pages
File Size : 15,38 MB
Release : 2018-09-20
Category : Music
ISBN : 1476633517

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Charlie Chaplin the actor is universally synonymous with his beloved Tramp character. Chaplin the director is considered one of the great auteurs and innovators of cinema history. Less well known is Chaplin the composer, whose instrumental theme for Modern Times (1936) later became the popular standard "Smile," a Billboard hit for Nat "King" Cole in 1954. Chaplin was prolific yet could not read or write music. It took a rotating cast of talented musicians to translate his unorthodox humming, off-key singing, and amateur piano and violin playing into the singular orchestral vision he heard in his head. Drawing on numerous transcriptions from 60 years of original scores, this comprehensive study reveals the untold story of Chaplin the composer and the string of famous (and not-so-famous) musicians he employed, giving fresh insight into his films and shedding new light on the man behind the icon.

Author : William Howland Kenney
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 46,65 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780195171778

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Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--The formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion.

Author : Bernard Gendron
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 16,34 MB
Release : 2002-04-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780226287355

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When and how did pop music earn so much cultural capital? This text investigates five key moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances.

Author : Gerald Bordman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 936 pages
File Size : 10,96 MB
Release : 2001-03-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0199771170

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Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre has become a landmark book since its original publication in 1978. In this third edition, he offers authoritative summaries on the general artistic trends and developments for each season on musical comedy, operetta, revues, and the one-man and one-woman shows from the first musical to the 1999/2000 season. With detailed show, song, and people indexes, Bordman provides a running commentary and assessment as well as providing the basic facts about each production.