Identities and Audiences in the Musical

Identities and Audiences in the Musical
Author: Raymond Knapp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190877812

Issues of identity have always been central to the American musical in all its guises. Who appears in musicals, who or what they are meant to represent, and how, over time, those representations have been understood and interpreted, provide the very basis for our engagement with the genre. In this third volume of the reissued Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, chapters focus on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, regional vs. national identity, and the cultural and class significance of the musical itself. As important as the question of who appears in musicals are the questions of who watches and listens to them, and of how specific cultures of reception attend differently to the musical. Chapters thus address cultural codes inherent to the genre, in particular those found in traditional school theater programs.

Protest Music in France

Protest Music in France
Author: Barbara Lebrun
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780754664727

Barbara Lebrun traces the evolution of 'protest' music in France since 1981, exploring the contradictions that emerge when artists who take their musical production and political commitment 'seriously', cross over to the mainstream, becoming profitable and consensual. Contestation is understood as a discourse shaped by the assumptions and practices of artists, producers, the media and audiences, for whom it makes sense to reject politically reactionary ideas and the dominant taste for commercial pop. Placing music in its economic, historical and ideological context, however, reveals the fragility and instability of these oppositions. The book focuses on music production in France, the representations of a 'protest' identity in relation to discourses of national identity and examines the audiences of French 'protest' music and considers festivals as places of 'non-mainstream' identity negotiation.

Postnational Musical Identities

Postnational Musical Identities
Author: Ignacio Corona
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2008
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780739118214

Postnational Musical Identities gathers interdisciplinary essays that explore how music audiences and markets are imagined in a globalized scenario, how music reflects and reflects upon new understandings of citizenship beyond the nation-state, and how music works as a site of resistance against globalization. "Hybridity," "postnationalism," "transnationalism," "globalization," "diaspora," and similar buzzwords have not only informed scholarly discourse and analysis of music but also shaped the way musical productions have been marketed worldwide in recent times. While the construction of identities occupies a central position in this context, there are discrepancies between the conceptualization of music as an extremely fluid phenomenon and the traditionally monovalent notion of identity to which it has historically been incorporated. As such, music has always been linked to the construction of regional and national identities. The essays in this collection seek to explore the role of music, networks of music distribution, music markets, music consumption, music production, and music scholarship in the articulation of postnational sites of identification.

Media Audiences and Identity

Media Audiences and Identity
Author: S. Bailey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2005-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230501117

Using a unique combination of cultural studies research, neo-pragmatist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, the author sheds light on the formation of a social identity and the important role that mass media play in this process. Case studies covering a range of media and communities provide a model for developing a truly explanatory as well as descriptive account of self-media interaction that bridges the two opposing sides of the media audience debate and provides a significant new dimension to notions of 'passive' and 'active' media audiences.

Handbook of Musical Identities

Handbook of Musical Identities
Author: Raymond MacDonald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1013
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0191092347

Music is a tremendously powerful channel through which people develop their personal and social identities. Music is used to communicate emotions, thoughts, political statements, social relationships, and physical expressions. But, just as language can mediate the construction and negotiation of developing identities, so music can also be a means of communication through which aspects of people's identities are constructed. Music can have a profound influence on our developing sense of identity, our values, and our beliefs, be it from rock music, classical music, or jazz. Musical identities (MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell, 2002) was unique in being in being one of the first books to explore this fascinating topic. This new book documents the remarkable expansion and growth in the study of musical identities since the publication of the earlier work. The editors identify three main features of current psychological approaches to musical identities, which concern their definition, development, and the identification of individual differences, as well as four main real-life contexts in which musical identities have been investigated, namely in music and musical institutions; specific geographical communities; education; and in health and well-being. This conceptual framework provides the rationale for the structure of the Handbook. The book is divided into seven main sections. The first, 'Sociological, discursive and narrative approaches', includes several general theoretical accounts of musical identities from this perspective, as well as some more specific investigations. The second and third main sections deal in depth with two of the three psychological topics described above, namely the development of and individual differences in musical identities. The fourth, fifth and sixth main sections pursue three of the real-life contexts identified above, namely 'Musical institutions and practitioners', 'Education', and 'Health and well-being'. The seventh and final main section of the Handbook - 'Case studies' - includes chapters which look at particular musical identities in specific times, places, or contexts. The multidisciplinary range and breadth of the Handbook's contents reflect the rapid changes that are taking place in music, in digital technology, and in their role in society as a whole, such that the study of musical identity is likely to proliferate even further in the future.

The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity

The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity
Author: Raymond Knapp
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2010-06-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1400832683

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project. This book addresses a variety of specific themes in musicals that serve this general function: fairy tale and fantasy, idealism and inspiration, gender and sexuality, and relationships, among others. It also considers three overlapping genres that are central, in quite different ways, to the projection of personal identity: operetta, movie musicals, and operatic musicals. Among the musicals discussed are Camelot, Candide; Chicago; Company; Evita; Gypsy; Into the Woods; Kiss Me, Kate; A Little Night Music; Man of La Mancha; Meet Me in St. Louis; The Merry Widow; Moulin Rouge; My Fair Lady; Passion; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Singin' in the Rain; Stormy Weather; Sweeney Todd; and The Wizard of Oz. Complementing the author's earlier work, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, this book completes a two-volume thematic history of the genre, designed for general audiences and specialists alike.

Dissonant Identities

Dissonant Identities
Author: Barry Shank
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819572675

Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

Popular Music Fandom

Popular Music Fandom
Author: Mark Duffett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1134467699

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.

Sources of Identity

Sources of Identity
Author: Lisa Colton
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9782503567785

The papers included in this volume were presented, in much shorter form, at a conference entitled 'Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600' held at the University of Sheffield in 2013. The stated aim of the event was to leave aside the traditionally dominant view of early music sources as a means of access to medieval and Renaissance repertoires, focussing instead on the people who commissioned, made, owned and used music books, and on their reasons for so doing. In the terms proposed by a recent study of art patronage in the period, what was the 'payoff' enjoyed by individuals and groups who created and deployed such objects?

Musical Identities

Musical Identities
Author: Raymond A. R. MacDonald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2002-07-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0198509324

Music plays an important role in all our lives, and is a channel through which we can express emotions, thoughts, political statements, and social relationships. However, just as music can be a channel through which we express ourselves, it can also have a profound influence on our own developing sense of identity. This is the first book to explore the powerful effect that music can have as we develop our sense of identity, from adolescence through to adulthood. Bringing together leading experts from psychology and music, it will be a valuable addition to the music psychology literature, and essential for music psychologists, social and developmental psychologists, and educational psychologists.