Ready for a Brand New Beat

Ready for a Brand New Beat
Author: Mark Kurlansky
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1594632731

Can a song change a nation? In 1964, Marvin Gaye, record producer William “Mickey” Stevenson, and Motown songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter wrote “Dancing in the Street.” The song was recorded at Motown’s Hitsville USA Studio by Martha and the Vandellas, with lead singer Martha Reeves arranging her own vocals. Released on July 31, the song was supposed to be an upbeat dance recording—a precursor to disco, and a song about the joyousness of dance. But events overtook it, and the song became one of the icons of American pop culture. The Beatles had landed in the U.S. in early 1964. By the summer, the sixties were in full swing. The summer of 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the lead-up to a dramatic election. As the country grew more radicalized in those few months, “Dancing in the Street” gained currency as an activist anthem. The song took on new meanings, multiple meanings, for many different groups that were all changing as the country changed. Told by the writer who is legendary for finding the big story in unlikely places, Ready for a Brand New Beat chronicles that extraordinary summer of 1964 and showcases the momentous role that a simple song about dancing played in history.

Ditty Bird Music to Dance To

Ditty Bird Music to Dance To
Author: Mema Publishing LTD
Publisher:
Total Pages: 12
Release: 2020-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9780648268574

DITTY BIRD Music to Dance to Musical Book for Babies is the prefect book to dance-along! Includes: Waltz, Charleston, Rock n' Roll, Tango, Salsa and French Cancan

Dance Me a Song

Dance Me a Song
Author: Beth Genné
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0199700338

Dancer-choreographer-directors Fred Astaire, George Balanchine and Gene Kelly and their colleagues helped to develop a distinctively modern American film-dance style and recurring dance genres for the songs and stories of the American musical. Freely crossing stylistic and class boundaries, their dances were rooted in the diverse dance and music cultures of European immigrants and African-American migrants who mingled in jazz age America. The new technology of sound cinema let them choreograph and fuse camera movement, light, and color with dance and music. Preserved intact for the largest audiences in dance history, their works continue to influence dance and film around the world. This book centers them and their colleagues within the history of dance (where their work has been marginalized) as well as film tracing their development from Broadway to Hollywood (1924-58) and contextualizing them within the American history and culture of their era. This modern style, like the nation in which it developed, was pluralist and populist. It drew from aspects of the old world and new, "high" and "low", theatrical and social dance forms, creating new sites for dance from the living room to the street. A definitive ingredient was the freer more informal movement and behavior of their jazz-age generation, which fit with song lyrics that poeticized slangy American English. The Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and others wrote not only songs but extended dance-driven scores tailored to their choreography, giving a new prominence to the choreographer and dancer-actor. This book discuss how these choreographers collaborated with directors like Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and cinematographers like Gregg Toland, musicians, dancers, designers and technicians to synergize music and moving image in new ways. Eventually, concepts and visual-musical devices derived from dance-making would give entire films the rhythmic flow and feeling of dance. Dancing Americans came to be seen around the world as archetypal embodiments of the free-spirited optimism and energy of America itself.

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance
Author: Walter Aaron Clark
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2019-06-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527536254

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.

Eskimo Songs

Eskimo Songs
Author: Helen Heffron Roberts
Publisher:
Total Pages: 526
Release: 1925
Genre: Eskimos
ISBN:

The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music

The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music
Author: Nanette de Jong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108386415

The diverse musics of the Caribbean form a vital part of the identity of individual island nations and their diasporic communities. At the same time, they witness to collective continuities and the interrelatedness that underlies the region's multi-layered complexity. This Companion introduces familiar and less familiar music practices from different nations, from reggae, calypso and salsa to tambú, méringue and soca. Its multidisciplinary, thematic approach reveals how the music was shaped by strategies of resistance and accommodation during the colonial past and how it has developed in the postcolonial present. The book encourages a comparative and syncretic approach to studying the Caribbean, one that acknowledges its patchwork of fragmented, dynamic, plural and fluid differences. It is an innovative resource for scholars and students of Caribbean musical culture, particularly those seeking a decolonising perspective on the subject.

The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema

The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema
Author: Ajay Gehlawat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000448959

Exploring the evolution of song and dance in the popular Hindi film, this book examines how these quintessential elements have been and continue to be theorized. As song ‘picturizations’, as they are frequently called, have evolved, shifting from little more than impromptu moves around tree trunks to highly choreographed affairs featuring scores of professional dancers and exotic backgrounds, their theorization has also developed beyond the initial, peremptory dismissals of earlier critics. Featuring a landmark collection of essays from leading theorists, as well as newer contributions from up-and-coming scholars, this book develops new and exciting ways of thinking about song and dance in Hindi cinema and, in turn, explores how these elements work to (re)define popular Hindi cinema in the twenty-first century. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars of Hindi cinema, musicals, and global popular cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.