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.
Table of Contents
IntroductionKate Guthrie and Christopher ChowrimootooPart I: Representation1. Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the MiddleStephen Hinton2. Plain Tunes for Plain Men? Opera and the "Man in the Street" in 1920s BritainAlexandra Wilson3. On or about 1932: The Mechanized Middlebrow, the BBC, and the AmateurSarah Collins4. Tchaikovsky in Hollywood. Do we listen?Peter Franklin5. Bread and Champagne: Stalinist Musical Comedies of the 1930s and the Soviet MiddlebrowPeter Kupfer6. Music and the Good Life in Postwar Britain: The Phenomenon of Eileen Joyce Heather Wiebe7. Samuel Barber's A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American MiddlebrowJacques Dupuis8. Fringe or Middle? Assessing Rock as Late 20th-Century MiddlebrowChris McDonald9. Raising a Brow: Sondheim and the Cultural Status of the Broadway MusicalDana Gooley Part II: Mediation10. Canned Music, Canned Culture: John Philip Sousa and the Proto-MiddlebrowKeir Keightley11. Forging a Middlebrow Canon in Edwardian London: Landon Ronald and the New Symphony OrchestraSimon McVeigh12. How the Early Recorded Operatic Middlebrow was MadeKaren Henson13. Resisting Middlebrow Mediation: Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" in Interwar BritainLaura Tunbridge14. "All these songs help us to trace history": Black Women and the Black Music History Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance EraLucy Caplan15. The Child and the Musical MasterpieceKate Guthrie16. Public Jazz Education and the Mediation of Jazz History in US Middlebrow Culture (1917-1951) Mario Dunkel17. Print Culture and the Mediation of the Classical Canon in the Twentieth-Century United StatesJoan Shelley Rubin18. Symphonies Serious or for Fun: Malcolm Arnold, the BBC, and the Production of TastePhilip Rupprecht19. Vera Lynn in Nashville (1977): White Working-Class Femininity and Transatlantic AffinitiesChristina BaadePart III: Style20. New Objectivity and the MiddlebrowJohn Gabriel21. From Berlin to New York: Kurt Weill, the Fantaisie Symphonique, and the MiddlebrowEmily MacGregor22. Socialist Realism, Kitsch, and the Middlebrow SymphonyPauline Fairclough23. Paul Whiteman and Glorified "Modern American Music," 1927-1934John Howland24. Glière's Light StyleSimon Morrison 25. Bond in the Middle: Swinging between High and Low in the Aspirational 1960sKevin Salfen 26. Middlebrow Compositional Aesthetics in 1970s Pop-RockNick BraaeIndex
