|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
In Hymns for the Fallen, Todd Decker listens closely to forty years
of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy
genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to
place the audience in the midst of battle and to provoke reflection
on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies-such as
Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk
Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper-as well as lesser-known
films, Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich
and culturally resonant aspect of cinema, not only invokes the
realities of war, but also shapes the American audience's
engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood
representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all
three elements of film sound-dialogue, sound effects, music-and
considers how expressive and formal choices in the soundtrack have
turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the
commercial space of the cinema.
Astaire by Numbers looks at every second of dancing Fred Astaire
committed to film in the studio era-all six hours, thirty-four
minutes, and fifty seconds. Using a quantitative digital humanities
approach, as well as previously untapped production records, author
Todd Decker takes the reader onto the set and into the rehearsal
halls and editing rooms where Astaire created his seemingly perfect
film dances. Watching closely in this way reveals how Astaire used
the technically sophisticated resources of the Hollywood film
making machine to craft a singular career in mass entertainment as
a straight white man who danced. Decker dissects Astaire's work at
the level of the shot, the cut, and the dance step to reveal the
aesthetic and practical choices that yielded Astaire's dancing
figure on screen. He offers new insights into how Astaire secured
his masculinity and his heterosexuality, along with a new
understanding of Astaire's whiteness, which emerges in both the
sheer extent of his work and the larger implications of his famous
"full figure" framing of his dancing body. Astaire by Numbers
rethinks this towering straight white male figure from the ground
up by digging deeply into questions of race, gender, and sexuality,
ultimately offering a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century
icon of American popular culture.
Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth
century. Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the
movie musicals of the 1930s, but in "Music Makes Me", Todd Decker
argues that Astaire's work as a dancer and choreographer -
particularly in the realm of tap dancing - made a significant
contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of
Astaire's work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording
with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and
analyzes Astaire's creative relationships with the greats,
including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and
Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire's collaborations with
African American musicians and his work with lesser known
professionals - arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and
performers.
In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis
curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music
scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious Monk to hip
hop, the contributors go beyond repertory and biography to explore
four critical yet overlooked areas: the impact of performance;
patronage's role in creating music and finding a place to play it;
personal identity; and the ways cultural and ethnographic
circumstances determine the music that emerges from the creative
process. Many of the articles also look at how a piece of music
becomes initially popular and then exerts a lasting influence in
the larger global culture. The result is an insightful
state-of-the-field examination that doubles as an engaging short
course on our complex, multifaceted musical heritage. Contributors:
Karen Ahlquist, Amy C. Beal, Mark Clagu,. Esther R. Crookshank,
Todd Decker, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Joshua S. Duchan, Mark Katz,
Jeffrey Magee, Sterling E. Murray, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., David
Warren Steel, Jeffrey Taylor, and Mark Tucker
In Hymns for the Fallen, Todd Decker listens closely to forty years
of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy
genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to
place the audience in the midst of battle and to provoke reflection
on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies-such as
Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk
Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper-as well as lesser-known
films, Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich
and culturally resonant aspect of cinema, not only invokes the
realities of war, but also shapes the American audience's
engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood
representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all
three elements of film sound-dialogue, sound effects, music-and
considers how expressive and formal choices in the soundtrack have
turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the
commercial space of the cinema.
Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth
century. Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the
movie musicals of the 1930s, but in "Music Makes Me", Todd Decker
argues that Astaire's work as a dancer and choreographer -
particularly in the realm of tap dancing - made a significant
contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of
Astaire's work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording
with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and
analyzes Astaire's creative relationships with the greats,
including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and
Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire's collaborations with
African American musicians and his work with lesser known
professionals - arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and
performers.
Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full
story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in
Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and
including much new information from early draft scripts and scores,
this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created
Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the
show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as
Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the
book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later
directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the
twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered,
as are five important London productions and four Hollywood
versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to
the power of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative
audiences for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals,
Show Boat put black and white performers side by side. This book is
the first to take Show Boat's innovative interracial cast as the
defining feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat
juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the
conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical.
Bringing black and white onto the same stage - revealing the
mixed-race roots of musical comedy - Show Boat stimulated creative
artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed
in the American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show
Boat to enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway
history. Show Boat's voyage through the twentieth century offers a
vantage point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a
complex tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music
and dance on the national stage during a century of profound
transformations.
In the mid 1920s, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song
called "Ol' Man River" that combined the seriousness of a Negro
spiritual with the crowd-pleasing power of a Broadway anthem.
Inspired, according to Kern, by the voice of the African American
singer Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River" went on to great success in
the Broadway musical Show Boat and became a signature song for
Robeson, who turned the tune towards his own goals as an activist.
But the story of "Ol' Man River" goes deeper than the curiosity of
a song recorded by so many in so many different ways. For at the
heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is a clear-eyed vision of the
black experience in American history. Anyone-black or white-who
thought they should sing "Ol' Man River" has had to deal with the
charged racial content of the song. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man
River"? traces this aspect of "Ol' Man River's" course through
American history, an at-times high-stakes journey where the African
American struggle for dignity and equality came down to the lyrics
of a popular song. However beyond Robeson and Show Boat, "Ol' Man
River" also had a long and rich life in the world of popular music.
An astonishing variety of singers and musicians from across the
musical spectrum-from pop to jazz, opera to doo wop, rhythm and
blues to gospel to reggae-all chose to perform or record it. Who
Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Lives of an American Song traces
out the performance history of this remarkable song by listening
closely to over two hundred recorded and filmed versions dating
from the song's debut in 1927 to the present. Many famous pop
singers made "Ol' Man River" a signature song; among them Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland: white performers who took
up a lyric told from the black perspective. Important jazz artists
such as Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie,
and Keith Jarrett all played it. Opera singers-black and white,
male and female-took it up as well. And a slew of surprising names
from the first decades of rock and roll also recorded this
inescapable tune, among them Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha
Franklin, the Temptations, Cher, and Rod Stewart.
|
|