American Musicals in Context: From the American Revolution to the 21st Century gives students a fresh look at history-based musicals, helping readers to understand the American story through one of the country's most celebrated art forms: the musical. With the hit musical Hamilton (2015) captivating audiences and reshaping the way early U.S. history is taught and written about, this book offers insight into an array of musicals that explore U.S. history. The work provides a synopsis, overview of critical and audience reception, and historical context and analysis for each of 20 musicals selected for the unique and illuminating way they present the American story on the stage. Specifically, this volume explores musicals that have centered their themes, characters, and plots on some aspect of America's complex and ever-changing history. Each in its own way helps us rediscover pivotal national crises, key political decisions, defining moral choices, unspeakable and unresolved injustices, important and untold stories, defeats suffered, victories won in the face of monumental adversity, and the sacrifices borne publicly and privately in the process of creating the American narrative, one story at a time. Students will come away from the volume armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to discern fact from fiction in U.S. history.

First published in 1994. This study covers a wide cross-section of topics, individuals, groups, and musical practices representing various regions and cities. The subjects discussed reflect the religious, ethnic, and social plurality of the American musical experience as well as the impact on cultural society provided by the arrival of new musical immigrants and the internal movements of musicians and musical practices. The essays are arranged principally on the basis of the historical chronology of the cultural practices and subjects discussed. Each article helps to shed additional light on cultural expressions through music in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

Irving Berlin's songs have been the soundtrack of America for a century, but his most profound contribution to the nation is to Broadway. Award-winning music historian Jeffrey Magee's chronicle of Berlin's theatrical career is the first book to fully consider the songwriter's immeasurable influence on the Great White Way. Tracing Berlin's humble beginnings on the lower-east side to his rise to American icon, Irving Berlin's American Musical Theatre will delight theater aficionados as well as students of music, and popular culture, and anyone interested in the story of a man whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.

The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This thoughtful history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers probing discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, advance themes related to American national identity. Written by a musicologist and supported by a wealth of illustrative audio examples (on the book's website), the book examines key historical antecedents to the musical, including the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nineteenth and early twentieth-century American burlesque and vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and other song types. It then proceeds thematically, focusing primarily on fifteen mainstream shows from the twentieth century, with discussions of such notable productions as Show Boat (1927), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), West Side Story (1957), Hair (1967), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Assassins (1991). The shows are grouped according to their treatment of themes that include defining America, mythologies, counter-mythologies, race and ethnicity, dealing with World War II, and exoticism. Each chapter concludes with a brief consideration of available scholarship on related subjects; an extensive appendix provides information on each show discussed, including plot summaries and song lists, and a listing of important films, videos, audio recordings, published scores, and libretti associated with each musical.

The Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education is a resource for music education researchers, music education graduate students, and P-16 music teachers. Qualitative research has become an increasingly popular research approach in music education in the last 20 years and until now there has been no source that clarifies terms, challenges, and issues in qualitative research for music education. This Handbook provides that clarification and presents model qualitative studies within the various music education disciplines. The first section of the text defines qualitative research, provides a history of qualitative research in music education, clarifies epistemological foundations and theoretical frameworks and addresses quality in qualitative research. The approaches of case study, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative, and practitioner inquiry are addressed in the second section. Part III examines data collection and analysis with regard to observations, interviews, documents and multi-media data. Within the 11 chapters in the fourth part of the book authors provide syntheses of qualitative research within various areas of music education (i.e., early childhood, strings, and teacher education). The final part of the book examines technology, rigor, ethics, and the future of qualitative research.

Western Theatre in Global Contexts explores the junctures, tensions, and discoveries that occur when teaching Western theatrical practices or directing English-language plays in countries that do not share Western theatre histories or in which English is the non-dominant language. This edited volume examines pedagogical discoveries and teaching methods, how to produce specific plays and musicals, and how students who explore Western practices in non-Western places contribute to the art form. Offering on-the-ground perspectives of teaching and working outside of North American and Europe, the book analyzes the importance of paying attention to the local context when developing theatrical practice and education. It also explores how educators and artists who make deep connections in the local culture can facilitate ethical accessibility to Western models of performance for students, practitioners and audiences. Western Theatre in Global Contexts is an excellent resource for scholars, artists, and teachers that are working abroad or on intercultural projects in theatre, education and the arts.

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.

A guide to locating information on popular music and the people who create it, this volume is designed as a desk reference—to locate answers to specific questions and to direct library users to key resources. More than 400 comprehensive titles are carefully annotated, describing content, scope, and special features. The focus is on the musical styles that have developed measurable commercial success through recordings and live performance. Along with academic titles, many important titles from the popular press are included, as well as selected electronic resources. A necessary reference tool for any library, scholar, student, and popular music buff. The work covers bibliographies, indexes, discographies, dictionaries and encyclopedias, biographical resources, directories, almanacs, yearbooks, and guidebooks on styles that include jazz, swing, Tin Pan Alley, country, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, soul, rockabilly, rock, heavy metal, musical theater, and film music. Its extensive appendices feature discographies and bibliographies of individual artists and ensembles. A detailed index combining authors, titles, and subjects makes cross-referencing easy. The entries are modeled after the immensely useful The Guide to Reference Books.

With chapters on The Sound of Music, Milk and Honey, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, The Rothschilds, Rags, Ragtime and The Producers, this book examines both direct and indirect references to, or resonances of, the Holocaust, tracing changing American attitudes through the chronological progression of these musical productions and their subsequent revivals. Despite the abundance of writing on both musical theatre history and on the difficulties of Holocaust representation, history and theatre scholars alike have thus far ignored the intersections of these areas. The academy thereby risks excluding precisely those works that shed the most light on our culture's evolving response to the Shoah, an event that still helps to define American identity. This book redresses this lapse by focusing on the theatrical form seen by the greatest amount of people--musicals--which either trigger or reflect changing American mores.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project. This book addresses a variety of specific themes in musicals that serve this general function: fairy tale and fantasy, idealism and inspiration, gender and sexuality, and relationships, among others. It also considers three overlapping genres that are central, in quite different ways, to the projection of personal identity: operetta, movie musicals, and operatic musicals. Among the musicals discussed are Camelot, Candide; Chicago; Company; Evita; Gypsy; Into the Woods; Kiss Me, Kate; A Little Night Music; Man of La Mancha; Meet Me in St. Louis; The Merry Widow; Moulin Rouge; My Fair Lady; Passion; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Singin' in the Rain; Stormy Weather; Sweeney Todd; and The Wizard of Oz. Complementing the author's earlier work, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, this book completes a two-volume thematic history of the genre, designed for general audiences and specialists alike.