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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
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Sounding American - Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,051
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Sounding American - Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz (Paperback)
Series: Oxford Music/Media Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz tells the story of
the interaction between musical form, film technology, and ideas
about race, ethnicity, and the nation during the American cinema's
conversion to sound. Contrary to most accepted narratives about the
conversion, which tend to explain the competition between the
Hollywood studios' film sound technologies in qualitative and
economic terms, this book argues that the battle between disc and
film sound was waged primarily in an aesthetic realm. Opera and
jazz in particular, though long neglected in studies of the film
score, were extremely important in defining the scope of the
American soundtrack, not only during the conversion, but also once
sound had been standardized. Examining studio advertisements,
screenplays, scores, and the films themselves, the book
concentrates on the interactions between musical form and film
technology, arguing that each of the major studios appropriated
opera and jazz in a unique way in order to construct its own
version of an ideal American voice. The book's central question
asks what the synthesis of opera and jazz during the conversion
reveals about the stylistic and ideological norms of classical
Hollywood cinema and the racial, ethnic, gendered, and socially
stratified spaces of American musical production. Unlike much of
the scholarship on film music, which gravitates toward feature film
scores, Sounding American concentrates on the musical shorts of the
late 1920s, showing how their representations of the stage,
conservatory, ballroom, and nightclub reflected what opera and jazz
meant for particular groups of Americans and demonstrating how the
cinema helped to shape the racial, ethnic, and national identities
attached to this music. Traditional histories of Hollywood film
music have tended to concentrate on the unity of the score, a model
that assumes a passive spectator. Sounding American claims that the
classical Hollywood film is essentially an illustrated jazz-opera
with a musical structure that encourages an active form of
listening and viewing in order to make sense of what is ultimately
a fragmentary text.
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