Histories of the Musical

An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Volume 1

Edited by Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf

Oxford Handbooks

Easy-to-digest format
Comprehensive companion website with musical examples
Traces the shift of musical themes after World War II

Histories of the Musical

An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Volume 1

Edited by Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf

Description

The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have always sought to amuse more than instruct, and to make money more than make political change. In spite of their unapologetic commercialism, though, musicals have achieved supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not more than any other art form in America, including avant-garde and high art on the one hand, and the full range of popular and commercial art on the other. Reflecting, refracting, and shaping U.S. culture since the early twentieth century, musicals converse with shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and race, and the very question of what it means to be American and to be human.

The chapters gathered in this book, Volume I of the reissued Oxford Handbook, explore the American musical from both the outside and the inside. This first volume concentrates in particular on large-scale, more philosophical issues of relevance to the genre, considering issues of historical situations and formal procedure as they bear on the narratives we make concerning productions and performers, artists and audiences, commerce and context. The first four essays discuss ways of defining histories and texts, and apprehending the formal choices of singers and dancers; the second group of four take up the subtle challenges of the genre's signal transformations out of minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley to "integration" and beyond.

Histories of the Musical

An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Volume 1

Edited by Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf

Oxford Handbooks

Introduction by Mitchell Morris

Part I. Historiography

1. Narratives and Values
Mitchell Morris

2. Texts and Authors
Jim Lovensheimer

3. Musical Styles and Song Conventions
Paul R. Laird

4. Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American "Book Musical"
Liza Gennaro

Part II. Transformations

5. Minstrelsy and Theatrical Miscegenation
Thomas L. Riis

6. Tin Pan Alley Songs on Stage and Screen before World War II
Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris

7. Integration
Geoffrey Block

8. After the "Golden Age"
Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman

Bibliography

Histories of the Musical

An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Volume 1

Edited by Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Raymond Knapp is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mitchell Morris is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Stacy Wolf is Professor in the Program in Theater and Director of the Princeton Atelier in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Contributors:

Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music History, University of Puget Sound

Liza Gennaro, professional choreographer and Assistant Professor and Head of Musical Theatre, Indiana University Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

Raymond Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities, Academic Associate Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music, and Director of the Center for Musical Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles

Paul R. Laird, Professor of Musicology, Director of the Division of Musicology, University of Kansas

Jim Lovensheimer, Associate Professor of Musicology, Vanderbilt University

Mitchell Morris, Professor of Musicology and Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles

Thomas L. Riis, Joseph and Rebecca Negler Endowed Professor of Music and Director of the American Music Research Center, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jessica Sternfeld, Associate Professor of Music History, Chapman University

Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater and Director of the Program in Music Theater, Princeton University

Elizabeth L. Wollman, Associate Professor of Music, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York