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Calixa Lavallée, the composer of “O Canada,” was the first Canadian-born musician to achieve an international reputation. While primarily remembered for the national anthem, Lavallée and his work extended well beyond Canada, and he played a multitude of roles in North American music as a composer, conductor, administrator, instrumentalist, educator, and critic. In Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Thompson analyzes Lavallée’s music, letters, and published writings, as well as newspapers and music magazines of the time, to provide a detailed account of musical life in nineteenth-century North America and the relationship between music and nation. Leaving Quebec at age sixteen, Lavallée travelled widely for a decade as musical director of a minstrel troupe, and spent a year as a bandsman in the Union Army. Later, as a performer and conductor, he built a repertoire that prepared audiences for the intellectually challenging music of European composers and new music by his US contemporaries. His own music extended from national songs to comic operas, and instrumental music, as he shifted between the worlds of classical and popular music. Previously portrayed as a humble French Canadian forced into exile by ignorance and injustice, Lavallée emerges here as ambitious, radical, bohemian, and fully engaged with the musical, social, and political currents of his time. While nationalism and nation-building are central to this story, Anthems and Minstrel Shows asks to which nation – or nations – Lavallée and “O Canada” really belong.
A study of blackface minstrels in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.
Calixa Lavallée, the composer of “O Canada,” was the first Canadian-born musician to achieve an international reputation. While primarily remembered for the national anthem, Lavallée and his work extended well beyond Canada, and he played a multitude of roles in North American music as a composer, conductor, administrator, instrumentalist, educator, and critic. In Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Thompson analyzes Lavallée’s music, letters, and published writings, as well as newspapers and music magazines of the time, to provide a detailed account of musical life in nineteenth-century North America and the relationship between music and nation. Leaving Quebec at age sixteen, Lavallée travelled widely for a decade as musical director of a minstrel troupe, and spent a year as a bandsman in the Union Army. Later, as a performer and conductor, he built a repertoire that prepared audiences for the intellectually challenging music of European composers and new music by his US contemporaries. His own music extended from national songs to comic operas, and instrumental music, as he shifted between the worlds of classical and popular music. Previously portrayed as a humble French Canadian forced into exile by ignorance and injustice, Lavallée emerges here as ambitious, radical, bohemian, and fully engaged with the musical, social, and political currents of his time. While nationalism and nation-building are central to this story, Anthems and Minstrel Shows asks to which nation – or nations – Lavallée and “O Canada” really belong.
 The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.
A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.
Investigates the origin and heyday of black minstrelsy, which in modern times is considered an embarrassment, and discusses whether or not the art form is actually still alive in the work of contemporary performers--from Dave Chappelle and Flavor Flav to Spike Lee.
The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. “Coon songs,” with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz. In Ragged but Right, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the “big shows,” the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from “coon shouters” to “blues singers.” Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--New York University, 2011.
Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.