Reproducing Carmen in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Christoforidis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
American Opera ◽  
Carl Van Vechten

Chapter 9 explains that Carmen proved an ideal vehicle for the new technologies of the twentieth century, embraced by the new recording artists whose prestige was borrowed from the operatic world. The young American opera star Geraldine Farrar, building on the legacies of Emma Calvé and Maria Gay, enjoyed an unprecedented and unmistakably modern celebrity as Carmen, born of her ability to exploit the confluence of operatic performance, recordings, and the silent film industry. In this context, the Metropolitan Opera’s attempt to stage a genuine Spanish opera in the guise of Enrique Granados’s Goyescas was undermined by comparison with the vibrant New York traditions of Carmen in the winter of 1915–16, when the fashion for all things Spanish was so intense that Carl Van Vechten dubbed it “the Spanish blaze.”

Delsarte, François (1811–1871)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie J. Preston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Actor Training ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Professional Performance ◽  
Bodily Expression

A performer and teacher of voice and movement, François Delsarte developed a theory of expression that influenced modern dance, actor training, poetic recitation, silent film, and physical culture in the early twentieth century. His ideas and methods were brought to the United States in 1871 by his student, Steele Mackaye (1842–1894), and then adapted by performers, physical culturists, and reformers into a diverse set of movements known as Delsartism. Extremely popular from the 1880s through the 1920s, Delsartism promoted physical exercises and poetic recitation for health and personal development as well as for professional performance. The movement traveled back to Europe to establish trajectories in many fields of modernist aesthetics and education, all emphasizing bodily expression, classical ideas of beauty, and a unique, improvable selfhood.

“The Hora Staccato in Swing!”: Jascha Heifetz's Musical Eclecticism and the Adaptation of Violin Miniatures

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
History Of

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

Drowning Voices and Drowning Shoreline: A Riverside View of the Social and Ecological Impacts of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project

Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather M. Cox ◽  
Brendan G. DeMelle ◽  
Glenn R. Harris ◽  
Christopher P. Lee ◽  
Laura K. Montondo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecological Impacts ◽  
Commercial Vehicles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power Project ◽  
St Lawrence River

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was a massive restructuring of the St. Lawrence River bordering Canada and the United States. The river had always been used for human transportation, and a shipping canal for commercial vehicles was constructed and enhanced throughout the nineteenth century. However, the river grew increasingly incapable of handling an international fleet composed of larger boats during the twentieth century. Proposals to undertake major renovations for shipping were debated at the highest levels of policy for several decades. Finally, the St. Lawrence River was substantially altered during the 1950s. These changes created a Seaway able to accommodate vessels with deeper drafts and permitted the development of hydro-electric generating facilities through the construction of dikes and dams. All of this activity involved numerous agencies in the governments of the United States, Canada, the Iroquois Confederacy, New York, Ontario, other states and provinces, as well as commercial and industrial entities in the private sector.

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