Modernism and Popular Music
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 5/26/2011
EAN 9781107005051, ISBN10: 1107005051
Hardcover, 254 pages, 22.9 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.
Preface
Introduction
popular music and the experience of modernism
Part I. Musical Modernism
Popular Music in the Time of Jazz
1. Classical modernity and popular music
2. Twentieth-century modernism and 'jazz' music
Part II. Gershwin, Porter, Waller, and Holiday
3. Melting pot and meeting place
the Gershwin brothers and the arts of quotation
4. 'What is this thing called love?'
Cole Porter and the rhythms of desire
5. Signifying music
Fats Waller and the time of jazz
6. Music without composition
Billie Holiday and ensemble performance
Postscript
popular music and the revolution of the word
Bibliography
Index.