Sport, music‐hall culture and popular song in nineteenth‐century England

1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Gregson ◽  
Mike Huggins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Music Hall

Reviews

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-220
Author(s):  
Reviews Poston-Anderson ◽  
Magnus Schneider ◽  
Ben Wiles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Music Hall

Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, Alexandra Carter, (2005) Aldershot: Ashgate, 177 pp., ISBN 0 7546 3736 0 (hbk), 50.00Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (eds.), (2006) Aldershot (UK) and Burlington (US): Ashgate, 274 pp., ISBN 0 7546 5098 7 (hbk), 65.00The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim, Scott McMillin, (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 230 pp., ISBN 0691127301 (hbk), 15.95

Ally Sloper on Stage

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Roger Sabin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Commercial Exploitation ◽  
Music Hall

The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Scottish Gothic Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Way

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.

The Beau Monde

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The World

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is devoted to nightlife and is intended to show that one purpose of pleasure districts was to construct the idea of the night-time economy. The chapter explores the world of gentlemens’ clubs and other locations of masculine pleasure before moving into an examination of opera, ballet, and gambling; both sources of aristocratic networks. The second half of the chapter then looks at the world of low life in the Covent Garden and Maiden Lane areas; territory of the ‘flash’ and the bohemians. Affluent gentlemen explored what they saw as the ‘underworld’. Here was a world of disreputable bars and spaces for popular song. There is a detailed analysis of venues such as the Cider Cellars which shaped the development of popular music and culture with its bawdy ballads.

The Flageolet: A Woodwind Instrument that Transcended Social Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Douglas MacMillan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Societal Implications ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
And Gender

The flageolet – a woodwind instrument closely akin to the recorder – achieved considerably popularity in nineteenth-century England. It was predominantly an instrument of the amateur musician, and its story becomes a mirror of the musical society in which the instrument flourished. An account of the organology of the flageolet in both its English and French forms, and of its evolution into double, triple and transverse versions, precedes a study of pedagogical material and repertoire. The work of William Bainbridge, who modified the flageolet to simplify its technique and hence enhance its suitability for amateur players, is emphasized, along with his skill as an innovator of complex flageolets. The flageolet attracted a small number of professional exponents who tended to favour the French form of the instrument. The principal focus of the article is an examination of the role of the flageolet within the context of musical praxis in England and its societal implications during the long nineteenth century. After consideration of matters of finance, social class and gender, the article examines the use of the flageolet by amateur and professional musicians, particularly highlighting the importance of the instrument in domestic music-making as well as in amateur public performance. Professional use of the instrument within the context of the concert hall, the theatre, the ballroom and the music hall is explored and examples given of prominent players and ensembles, some of which were composed entirely of female musicians. Final paragraphs note the playing of the flageolet by itinerant and street musicians.

‘… into another kind of life in which anything might happen …’ Popular music and late modernity, 1910–1930

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Baxendale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
As If

One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

‘Not appreciated in Worthing?’ Class expression and popular song texts in mid-nineteenth-century Britain

Popular Music ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vic Gammon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First World War ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Song Texts

Recent research shows that the English folksong collectors, who were active before the First World War, systematically selected what they took down from rural working-class singers, basing their selection on what they considered to be worth preserving from such singers' repertories. Their work, then, can only give us a biased and highly mediated impression of popular singing traditions (see Harker 1972 and 1982; Gammon 1980). The purpose of this article is to see if it is possible to go beyond the work of the collectors, to try to grasp something of the wholeness of popular nineteenth-century singing traditions, and also to situate those traditions socially.

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