Joseph Urban and American Scene Design

1991 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-186
Author(s):  
Dean Howd
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Scene Design ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of

Along with Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson, Joseph Urban brought the New Stagecraft to America in the 1920s. No other designer of his period lavished more lush color on the stage or brought scene design closer to the level his contemporaries called “Art.” Urban produced the backdrops of the famous Follies for Florenz Ziegfeld, and the Metropolitan Opera continued to use his sets for more than two decades after his death. As early as 1917 the New York Times risked the prediction that “when the historian of the New York stage writes the record, of the uplift of the art of its decoration received in the teens of the twentieth century he will have to give the greatest credit to Joseph Urban.” Instead, he has been virtually ignored: for example, Brockett and Findlay in their history of the modern theatre, Century of Innovation, fail to mention Urban at all. In view of his extensive design record it is surprising that he remains so little known.

Visions of Salome: The Femme Fatale in American Popular Songs before 1920

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
LARRY HAMBERLIN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Important Marker

Abstract This article documents representations of Salome, an archetypal exotic femme fatale, in American popular songs of the early twentieth century. The production of Salome songs began shortly after the sensational 1907 U.S. premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Vaudeville performers, beginning with the Met's own prima ballerina, capitalized on the ensuing fad for Salome dances, which the New York Times called “Salomania.” Relevant songs and dances figured in musical comedies and revues until some time after the return of Strauss's opera to the New York stage, in the 1909 Manhattan Opera Company production with Mary Garden in the title role. Through the next decade, musical, lyrical, and illustrative tropes that originated in the Salome songs became disassociated from the figure of Salome, gradually merging into “oriental fox-trots” and exotic romance songs. The topical humor of the Salome songs suggests that American audiences were skeptical of the allure of orientalist fantasy, then at its height in Europe, and that an unwillingness to grant artistic legitimacy to Salome's religious-themed eroticism is an important marker of the American reception of works such as Strauss's.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Opera Houses

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

André Martinet (1908–1999)

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-293
Author(s):  
Johannes Klare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Research Director

André Martinet holds an important position in the history of linguistics in the twentieth century. For more than six decades he decisively influenced the development of linguistics in France and in the world. He is one of the spokespersons for French linguistic structuralism, the structuralisme fonctionnel. The article focuses on a description and critical appreciation of the interlinguistic part of Martinet’s work. The issue of auxiliary languages and hence interlinguistics had interested Martinet greatly from his youth and provoked him to examine the matter actively. From 1946 onwards he worked in New York as a professor at Columbia University and a research director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). From 1934 he was in contact with the Danish linguist and interlinguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). Martinet, who went back to Paris in 1955 to work as a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne), increasingly developed into an expert in planned languages; for his whole life, he was committed to the world-wide use of a foreign language that can be learned equally easily by members of all ethnic groups; Esperanto, functioning since 1887, seemed a good option to him.

scholarly journals Political News Discourse Analysis Based on an Attitudinal Perspective of the Appraisal Theory—Taking the New York Times’ Report China-DPRK Relations as an Example

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 1357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinxiu Jin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
North Korea ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship among China, the United States and North Korea has already been a focus of international politics. From June 19 to 20, North Korea leader Kim Jong-un ended his third visit to China within 100 days. This is also his three consecutive visits to China since he took office in December 2011. The high density and frequency are not only rare in the history of China-DPRK relations, but also seem to be unique in the history of international relations, indicating that China-DPRK relations are welcoming new era. This paper selects the New York Times’ report on China-DPRK relations as an example, which is based on an attitudinal perspective of the appraisal theory to analyze American attitudes toward China. Attitudes are positive and negative, explicit and implicit. Whether the attitude is good or not depends on the linguistic meaning of expressing attitude. The meaning of language is positive, and the attitude of expression is positive; the meaning of language is negative, and the attitude of expression is negative. The study found that most of the attitude resources are affect (which are always negative affect), which are mainly realized through such means as lexical, syntactical and rhetorical strategies implicitly or explicitly. All these negative evaluations not only help construct a discourse mode for building the bad image of China but also are not good to China-DPRK relations. The United States wants to tarnish image of China and destroy the relationship between China and North Korea by its political news discourse.

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