http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Music. daily 1 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Vol. 27 (2009) through current issue Latest Articles: American Music Music TWO Project MUSE® American Music 1945-2349 0734-4392 Latest articles in American Music. Feed provided by Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.whitmer01.html <p>By Mariana Whitmer, Deane Root</p> Stephen FosterStephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826-January 13, 1864) was the first full-time songwriter in the United States, and still one of the most significant in the nation's history. As the editors of the chapter titled "Stephen Foster's Legacy" wrote in Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion, "A broad multicultural public heard itself in the songs written by Stephen Foster . . ., who forged a synthesis among a variety of styles—from Thomas Moore's Irish parlor songs and bel canto Italian opera to blackface minstrelsy and revival hymns . . . Foster's songs were as common as bread on the table."1 Another musicologist summed up the wide spread of Foster's songs throughout the country thus: "Never before ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.whitmer01.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Editors' Introduction 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Editors' Introduction 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.saunders.html <p>By Steven Saunders</p> One of Stephen Collins Foster's first published songs, "There's a Good Time Coming," offers one of the composer's clearest statements on nineteenth-century culture and politics.1 The text—not by Foster, but by the Scottish-born poet and writer Charles Mackay—catalogues many of the chief cultural barriers of the nineteenth century, including ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and gender. Its text proclaims hopefully:The song presents a progressive, utopian vision of a not-too-distant future, the "good time coming," where barriers of religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status will come crashing down and where war and child labor will vanish. In choosing to set this text, Foster seems to have taken one of ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.saunders.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster's Plantation Melodies 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster's Plantation Melodies Music 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.key.html <p>By Susan Key</p> Stephen Foster's songs embody the simultaneous loss and opportunity of his rapidly industrializing society. While nineteenth-century Americans struggled with the loss of their agrarian identity, they also embraced new commercial means of expressing that loss. New popular novels, journals, and sheet-music titles conveyed a shared national nostalgia in a sentimental style whose emphasis on feeling was shaped by romantics from abroad but given a distinctively American character by native-born composers and writers. By mid-century, the industrial and creative capacity of the young nation united to produce a flood of sentimental products that expressed high-minded values and profound sentiments through everyday ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.key.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 "Forever in Our Ears": Nature, Voice, and Sentiment in Stephen Foster's Parlor Style 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press "Forever in Our Ears": Nature, Voice, and Sentiment in Stephen Foster's Parlor Style Songs 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.miyashita.html <p>By Kazuko Miyashita</p> Since the late nineteenth century, Stephen Foster's songs have been among the best-known American music in Japan for his simple, familiar tunes, which Japanese people associate with pastoral scenery or nostalgia for their native place or their childhood. Most Japanese students learn a number of Foster's songs in their music classes, from elementary through high school.Figure 1 shows several examples from music textbooks published in 2001. Japanese people also often hear his melodies on TV commercials and in many public places. Generally, their image of Foster is of a happy songwriter, but they have paid little attention to his life itself in the context of American history. In fact, many Japanese regard his music ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.miyashita.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Foster's Songs in Japan 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Foster's Songs in Japan Foster, Stephen Collins, 1826-1864 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.whitmer.html <p>By Mariana Whitmer</p> An elderly man, with children and grandchildren gathered about, sits before a newly acquired Orthophonic Victrola. One after another, recent reproductions of [Stephen] Foster's songs by Nathaniel Shilkret's Orchestra and the Victor Singers are rendered. What a flood of memories pour through the mind and heart of him of three score years and ten! . . . Truth compels it to be recorded that silent tears were in evidence and deepest emotions stirred. In the quiet following the "concert" a chance remark made to the family bibliophile proved to be the spark that has brought into being a comprehensive collection of data and material pertaining to the life and work of America's greatest composer of beautiful ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.whitmer.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Josiah Kirby Lilly and the Foster Hall Collection 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Josiah Kirby Lilly and the Foster Hall Collection Foster, Stephen Collins, 1826-1864 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.smolko.html <p>By Joanna R. Smolko</p> When we watch animated cartoons, how much does music shape our perception of the narrative? And why are Stephen Foster's songs so prevalent in cartoon music in what has come to be known as animation's golden age (1930s-1960s), especially in cartoons that depict African American slaves, blackface minstrelsy, and the South? This article explores how Foster's songs were used in Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons as unsettling symbols to evoke race and place. It examines the complex associations and subtexts that are constructed through the pairing of Stephen Foster songs with particular images and themes across these cartoons, especially those scored by Carl Stalling (1891-1972). Stalling ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.smolko.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Southern Fried Foster: Representing Race and Place through Music in Looney Tunes Cartoons 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Southern Fried Foster: Representing Race and Place through Music in Looney Tunes Cartoons Foster, Stephen Collins, 1826-1864 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.haines.html <p>By Kathryn Miller Haines</p> It is a plot you could only expect to find in a Lifetime original movie, the network known for producing over-the-top women in jeopardy stories. In Friends Til the End (1997) a timid young girl named Zane is prodded by her oppressive mother to compete in a talent show in which she is clearly reluctant to perform.1 She mounts the stage and begins singing Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer." Her mother smiles encouragingly as the song heads toward its soaring high notes. Zane falters, the notes come out absurdly flat, and she leaves the stage in tears only to be berated by her mother for her failure.From this point on in the film, Zane, now a tortured, driven young woman, redirects her energies from the pursuit of ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.haines.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Stephen Foster's Music in Motion Pictures and Television 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Stephen Foster's Music in Motion Pictures and Television Television music 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.weed.html <p>By Joe Weed</p> In 2000, I produced an album of sixteen of Foster's tunes performed in traditional old-time string band and bluegrass styles, genres in which Foster's music has remained vibrant. The trajectories of some of the tunes I included on the album demonstrate their long-lasting appeal to subsequent generations.First, a couple of caveats. This article comes from a professional musician and producer, not a trained musicologist or music historian. Second, my experience is with late nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American traditional string band, folk, bluegrass, new acoustic, and other related forms of vernacular music. Clearly, Foster has had a significant influence on many other genres as well. But in ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.weed.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Foster's Songs in Old-Time String Band and Bluegrass Music 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Foster's Songs in Old-Time String Band and Bluegrass Music String band music 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.emerson.html <p>By Ken Emerson</p> I wrote a biography of Stephen Foster in order to understand popular culture, and the original impetus behind it was more contemporary than historical.1 My own background was in rock 'n' roll, which I began writing about in 1968 for a sex, drugs, rock-'n'-revolution alternate newspaper in Boston that one could be arrested for peddling on the streets, which was its initial means of distribution. My very first article in Avatar was about a short-lived psychedelic band called Lothar and the Hand People, and it quoted a French singer-songwriter named Antoine whom I had come across during a summer in France. "Le seul regret de ma vie," he told a French fan magazine, "c'est de n'avoir pas été né noir." My memory and my ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_music/v030/30.3.emerson.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2013-04-25T00:07:52-05:00 Stephen Foster and American Popular Culture 2013-04-24 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Stephen Foster and American Popular Culture Popular culture 2013-04-24 2013 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2013-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 2013-04-24