Sweet Songs For Gentle Americans

Author : Nicholas E. Tawa
Publisher : Popular Press
ISBN 13 : 9780879721305
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans written by Nicholas E. Tawa and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular parlor songs were the main form of secular musical entertainment in the early years of the United States. They were heard regularly in the homes of our principal statesmen, authors, intellectuals, professionals, and businessmen. Laborers and slaves also sang them. They were the principal fare of concert and stage performances, and were freely interpolated into Italian operas, Shakespearean plays, lyceum lectures, and church services. In short, parlor songs played a dominant role in American cultural history. This was the music that Jefferson, Lincoln, Longfellow, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson enjoyed. Yet, whether owing to prejudice or misinformation, we still know little about the songs they listened to and sang: why and for whom written; when heard; or how performed. This book attempts to contribute that knowledge. Contemporary diaries, biographies, fiction, newspapers, periodicals, and books on music were studied and the music itself exhaustively analyzed in order to reach accurate conclusions about the popular culture that emerged between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The reader comes away with a sympathetic understanding of the human hopes, fears, and joys embodied in the songs, and with a curiosity about the countless melodic gems awaiting exploration.

Author : Ted Gioia
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199357595
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love Songs written by Ted Gioia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions of the heart? And how have our changing perceptions about topics such as sexuality and gender roles changed our attitudes towards these songs? In Love Songs: The Hidden History, Ted Gioia uncovers the unexplored story of the love song for the first time. Drawing on two decades of research, Gioia presents the full range of love songs, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day. The book traces the battles over each new insurgency in the music of love--whether spurred by wandering scholars of medieval days or by four lads from Liverpool in more recent times. In these pages, Gioia reveals that the tenderest music has, in different eras, driven many of the most heated cultural conflicts, and how the humble love song has played a key role in expanding the sphere of individualism and personal autonomy in societies around the world. Gioia forefronts the conflicts, controversies, and the battles over censorship and suppression spurred by such music, revealing the outsiders and marginalized groups that have played a decisive role in shaping our songs of romance and courtship, and the ways their innovations have led to reprisals and strife. And he describes the surprising paths by which the love song has triumphed over these obstacles, and emerged as the dominant form of musical expression in modern society.

Author : Michael V Pisani
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300130732
Total Pages : 438 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Native America in Music written by Michael V Pisani and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive look at musical representations of native America from the pre colonial past through the American West and up to the present. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, from the ballets of Lully in the court of Louis XIV to popular ballads of the nineteenth century; from eighteenth-century British-American theater to the musical theater of Irving Berlin; from chamber music by Dvoˆrák to film music for Apaches in Hollywood Westerns. Michael Pisani demonstrates how European colonists and their descendants were fascinated by the idea of race and ethnicity in music, and he examines how music contributed to the complex process of cultural mediation. Pisani reveals how certain themes and metaphors changed over the centuries and shows how much of this “Indian music,” which was and continues to be largely imagined, alternately idealized and vilified the peoples of native America.

Author : David Nicholls
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521454292
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Music written by David Nicholls and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-19 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.

Author : the late Russell Sanjek
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190243295
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Popular Music and Its Business written by the late Russell Sanjek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-07-28 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume two concentrates exclusively on music activity in the United States in the nineteenth century. Among the topics discussed are how changing technology affected the printing of music, the development of sheet music publishing, the growth of the American musical theater, popular religious music, black music (including spirituals and ragtime), music during the Civil War, and finally "music in the era of monopoly," including such subjects as copyright, changing technology and distribution, invention of the phonograph, copyright revision, and the establishment of Tin Pan Alley.

Author : Bill C. Malone
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813149150
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Southern Music/American Music written by Bill C. Malone and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South -- an inspiration for songwriters, a source of styles, and the birthplace of many of the nation's greatest musicians -- plays a defining role in American musical history. It is impossible to think of American music of the past century without such southern-derived forms as ragtime, jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, gospel, rhythm and blues, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano, rock'n'roll, and even rap. Musicians and listeners around the world have made these vibrant styles their own. Southern Music/American Music is the first book to investigate the facets of American music from the South and the many popular forms that emerged from it. In this substantially revised and updated edition, Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin bring this classic work into the twenty-first century, including new material on recent phenomena such as the huge success of the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the renewed popularity of Southern music, as well as important new artists Lucinda Williams, Alejandro Escovedo, and the Dixie Chicks, among others. Extensive bibliographic notes and a new suggested listening guide complete this essential study.

Author : Ann Ostendorf
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 082033975X
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sounds American written by Ann Ostendorf and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sounds American provides new perspectives on the relationship between nationalism and cultural production by examining how Americans grappled with musical diversity in the early national and antebellum eras. During this period a resounding call to create a distinctively American music culture emerged as a way to bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the new nation. This played out with particular intensity in the lower Mississippi River valley, and New Orleans especially. Ann Ostendorf argues that this region, often considered an exception to the nation—with its distance from the center of power, its non-British colonial past, and its varied population—actually shared characteristics of many other places eventually incorporated into the country, thus making it a useful case study for the creation of American culture. Ostendorf conjures the territory's phenomenally diverse “music ways” including grand operas and balls, performances by church choirs and militia bands, and itinerant violin instructors. Music was often associated with “foreigners,” in particular Germans, French, Irish, and Africans. For these outsiders, music helped preserve collective identity. But for critics concerned with developing a national culture, this multitude of influences presented a dilemma that led to an obsessive categorization of music with racial, ethnic, or national markers. Ultimately, the shared experience of categorizing difference and consuming this music became a unifying national phenomenon. Experiencing the unknown became a shared part of the American experience.

Author : Steve Sullivan
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 0810882965
Total Pages : 1027 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings written by Steve Sullivan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 1027 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From John Philip Sousa to Green Day, from Scott Joplin to Kanye West, from Stephen Foster to Coldplay, The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the vast scope of its subject with virtually unprecedented breadth and depth. Approximately 1,000 key song recordings from 1889 to the present are explored in full, unveiling the stories behind the songs, the recordings, the performers, and the songwriters. Beginning the journey in the era of Victorian parlor balladry, brass bands, and ragtime with the advent of the record industry, readers witness the birth of the blues and the dawn of jazz in the 1910s and the emergence of country music on record and the shift from acoustic to electrical recording in the 1920s. The odyssey continues through the Swing Era of the 1930s; rhythm & blues, bluegrass, and bebop in the 1940s; the rock & roll revolution of the 1950s; modern soul, the British invasion, and the folk-rock movement of the 1960s; and finally into the modern era through the musical streams of disco, punk, grunge, hip-hop, and contemporary dance-pop. Sullivan, however, also takes critical detours by extending the coverage to genres neglected in pop music histories, from ethnic and world music, the gospel recording of both black and white artists, and lesser-known traditional folk tunes that reach back hundreds of years. This book is ideal for anyone who truly loves popular music in all of its glorious variety, and anyone wishing to learn more about the roots of virtually all the music we hear today. Popular music fans, as well as scholars of recording history and technology and students of the intersections between music and cultural history will all find this book to be informative and interesting.

Author : Carl Wilson
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1441166777
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Let's Talk About Love written by Carl Wilson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised, expanded edition of Carl Wilson's beloved book Let's Talk About Love - now including essays from a host of writers and cultural critics with a new afterword by the author.

Author : Rainbow Rowell
Publisher : Wednesday Books
ISBN 13 : 1250146097
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wayward Son written by Rainbow Rowell and published by Wednesday Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE HOTLY ANTICIPATED SEQUEL TO THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER CARRY ON Simon Snow is back and he's coming to America! The story is supposed to be over. Simon Snow did everything he was supposed to do. He beat the villain. He won the war. He even fell in love. Now comes the good part, right? Now comes the happily ever after... So why can’t Simon Snow get off the couch? What he needs, according to his best friend, is a change of scenery. He just needs to see himself in a new light. That’s how Simon and Penny and Baz end up in a vintage convertible, tearing across the American West. They find trouble, of course. (Dragons, vampires, skunk-headed things with shotguns.) And they get lost. They get so lost, they start to wonder whether they ever knew where they were headed in the first place. With Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell has written a book for everyone who ever wondered what happened to the Chosen One after he saved the day. And a book for everyone who was ever more curious about the second kiss than the first. It’s another helping of sour cherry scones with an absolutely decadent amount of butter. Come on, Simon Snow. Your hero’s journey might be over – but your life has just begun.