Full Description
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes.
While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond.
The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
Contents
Introduction
Kate Guthrie and Christopher Chowrimootoo
Part I: Representation
1. Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle
Stephen Hinton
2. Plain Tunes for Plain Men? Opera and the "Man in the Street" in 1920s Britain
Alexandra Wilson
3. On or about 1932: The Mechanized Middlebrow, the BBC, and the Amateur
Sarah Collins
4. Tchaikovsky in Hollywood. Do we listen?
Peter Franklin
5. Bread and Champagne: Stalinist Musical Comedies of the 1930s and the Soviet Middlebrow
Peter Kupfer
6. Music and the Good Life in Postwar Britain: The Phenomenon of Eileen Joyce
Heather Wiebe
7. Samuel Barber's A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American Middlebrow
Jacques Dupuis
8. Fringe or Middle? Assessing Rock as Late 20th-Century Middlebrow
Chris McDonald
9. Raising a Brow: Sondheim and the Cultural Status of the Broadway Musical
Dana Gooley
Part II: Mediation
10. Canned Music, Canned Culture: John Philip Sousa and the Proto-Middlebrow
Keir Keightley
11. Forging a Middlebrow Canon in Edwardian London: Landon Ronald and the New Symphony Orchestra
Simon McVeigh
12. How the Early Recorded Operatic Middlebrow was Made
Karen Henson
13. Resisting Middlebrow Mediation: Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" in Interwar Britain
Laura Tunbridge
14. "All these songs help us to trace history": Black Women and the Black Music History Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance Era
Lucy Caplan
15. The Child and the Musical Masterpiece
Kate Guthrie
16. Public Jazz Education and the Mediation of Jazz History in US Middlebrow Culture (1917-1951)
Mario Dunkel
17. Print Culture and the Mediation of the Classical Canon in the Twentieth-Century United States
Joan Shelley Rubin
18. Symphonies Serious or for Fun: Malcolm Arnold, the BBC, and the Production of Taste
Philip Rupprecht
19. Vera Lynn in Nashville (1977): White Working-Class Femininity and Transatlantic Affinities
Christina Baade
Part III: Style
20. New Objectivity and the Middlebrow
John Gabriel
21. From Berlin to New York: Kurt Weill, the Fantaisie Symphonique, and the Middlebrow
Emily MacGregor
22. Socialist Realism, Kitsch, and the Middlebrow Symphony
Pauline Fairclough
23. Paul Whiteman and Glorified "Modern American Music," 1927-1934
John Howland
24. Glière's Light Style
Simon Morrison
25. Bond in the Middle: Swinging between High and Low in the Aspirational 1960s
Kevin Salfen
26. Middlebrow Compositional Aesthetics in 1970s Pop-Rock
Nick Braae
Index
