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  • The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow

    The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow by Guthrie, Kate; Chowrimootoo, Christopher;

    Series: Oxford Handbooks;

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 127.50
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    Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP USA
    • Date of Publication 7 February 2025

    • ISBN 9780197523933
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages628 pages
    • Size 236x173x45 mm
    • Weight 1225 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 34 illustrations, 3 tables
    • 585

    Categories

    Short description:

    This handbook seeks to reanimate the music, institutions, and audiences that made up the cultural middle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by investigating the wealth of middlebrow culture that bridged the space between highbrow and lowbrow music. With case studies ranging from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, from opera criticism to rock journalism, it brings together scholars of classical and popular music to present a new, enriched narrative of music history.

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    Long 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.

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    Table of 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

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