Music Mentor and Colleague

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
Musical Theater

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's mentoring of younger musicians, especially singers and composers. Among the singers Burleigh mentored are some of the most distinguished African American recital and musical theater performers of the early to mid-twentieth century. In 1934 a black newspaper commented that Burleigh “was always ready to show a helping hand by way of advice to some struggling artist” such as Abbie Mitchell. Burleigh's support and encouragement of younger musicians enabled their careers in very practical ways. He also collaborated with instrumentalists, and although his standards of excellence were high, he was generous in his support of musicians whose talent and professionalism he respected. Aside from Mitchell, Burleigh's early protégés include black singers Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson as well as women composers such as Undine Smith Moore, Florence Price, and Margaret Bonds.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Sweet Mystery

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Peck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Theater ◽  
Standard Practices

Rida Johnson Young (ca. 1869–1926) was one of the most prolific female playwrights of her time, as well as a lyricist and librettist in the musical theater. She wrote more than thirty full-length plays, operettas, and musical comedies, five hundred songs, and four novels. Despite her extensive output, no significant study of her work has been produced. This book examines her musical theater works with in-depth analyses of her librettos and lyrics, as well as her working relationships with other writers, performers, and producers, particularly Lee and J. J. Shubert. Using archival materials such as original typescripts, correspondence, and reviews, the book contextualizes Young’s work within the milieu of the early-twentieth-century professional theater and provides a window into the standard practices of writing and production of the era. The works examined are Naughty Marietta, Lady Luxury, The Red Petticoat, When Love Is Young, His Little Widows, Her Soldier Boy, Maytime, Sometime, Little Simplicity, and The Dream Girl.

Fixing Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.

The Business Life of Emmett Jay Scott

2003 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maceo Crenshaw Dailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Clearing House ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Black Entrepreneurs ◽  
Trading Firm ◽  
Black Township

Emmett Jay Scott was private secretary to Booker T. Washington and later became secretary treasurer of Howard University. He was involved in numerous business activities, ranging from the establishment of the National Negro Business League to the founding of an investment clearing-house, an insurance company, and an overseas trading firm. Scott also promoted the black township of Mound Bayou and backed African American entertainment enterprises. His business activities were largely unheralded, and the frustrations he encountered illustrate both the obstacles and the opportunities for black entrepreneurs in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

AT THE ORIGINS OF THE UZBEK MUSIC THEATER (STUDIOS, TEACHERS, FIRST EXPERIMENTS: 1920-1930S)

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
MARFUA KHAMIDOVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
The State ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
National Opera ◽  
National Music

This article is about the origins of the national opera that was born in Uzbekistan in the first half of the twentieth century. It also tells about the studio training of production and performing personnel for the national music scene within the framework of the Moscow, Baku studios, the Uzbek Opera Studio at the Moscow State Conservatory; about the first experiments of staging musical plays in the Uyghur Drama Troupe, the Concert and Ethnographic Troupe of M. Kari-Yakubov and further in the State Uzbek Musical Theater.

scholarly journals La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Cultural Motifs Persist

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Lay Midwifery ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Jim Crow South

After a general overview of childbirth’s shift to hospital in the early decades of the twentieth century from a national perspective, the chapter narrows its focus to the Jim Crow South. The cultural motifs established during slavery are highlighted as features of African American lay midwifery. A religious calling, an intergenerational female connectedness, and authority to practice were inherent characteristics of the midwife’s role.

First a Trickle, Then a Flood: Jazz Musicians Perform in China from All Over

Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 102-117
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
World Community ◽  
The World ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Transportation Technologies

This chapter discusses the arrival of foreign jazz musicians in China. Mao's demise in 1976, which led to the reemergence of China as part of the world community in the last quarter of the twentieth century, together with the influence of electronic and transportation technologies in the second half of the twentieth century, had a direct impact on the rejuvenation of jazz in China, especially in Shanghai and Beijing. It provided opportunities for jazz musicians from all over the world to perform in China. The locus of this activity, at least in the beginning, was Shanghai and the opportunity fell to African American bassist and horn player Willie Ruff.

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