Bøker av Michael Broyles

Michael Broyles shows how three key decades-the 1840s, the 1920s and the 1950s-shaped America's musical future. In each, new styles of music combined with emerging technologies, from the locomotive to the transistor radio, to have lasting impact on our cultural landscape. All too often, these new developments revealed racial fault lines running through the business of music in an echo of American society as a whole. Through the music of each decade we see the social, cultural and political fabric of the time. A variety of characters serve as focal points for each chapter, including the original Jim Crow, a colourful Hungarian dancing master named Gabriel De Korponay, "Empress of the Blues" Bessie Smith, and the singer Johnnie Ray, whom Tony Bennett called "the father of rock 'n' roll." Their stories, and many others, animate this fascinating look at how American music became what it is today.

Edited version of the 1837 journal of American musician Lowell Mason written while traveling through Europe.

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. In this stimulating book Michael Broyles considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself.Broyles starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. Broyles goes on to investigate the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music—classical, popular, and jazz—and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, Broyles shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture and the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.