Shane Greene. 2016. Punk and Revolution: Seven More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 235 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-6274-6 (pbk).
For all this I am, in the end, prepared to forgive Pisani his poor index, his lack of a bibliography, and his apparent reticence about making more than a few cautious references to the world of silent film (it would soon take over many of these dramatic styles and topics and most of the musical devices and techniques that had been developed in melodramatic theater). By the end of the book, many readers will surely want to begin agitating for revivals, or at least readings or performances with speaking actors supported by an appropriately sized orchestra. This is just the sort of thing that the BBC could surely do. A whole lost cultural world is opened up here-we would do well to take note.
In 1847 Atwill of New York published “The Lament of the Blind Orphan Girl.” Composed by William Bradbury, the song is written for voice and piano in a lilting 3/8 meter. Mary, the song’s protagonist, sings of “the silvery moon” and “bright chain of stars” over diatonic harmonies. A dramatic shift to the minor mode supports the climax: “Oh, when shall I see them? I’m blind, oh, I’m blind.” Mary explains that she and her brother have also lost their parents. On the sheet music cover a wreath of flowers encircles an image of a young white woman kneeling beneath a tree, alone at a grave. The title page notes: “As sung with distinguished applause by Abby Hutchinson.” Orphan songs pervade nineteenth-century pop repertory. Scholars have analyzed Latvian, Hmong, Danish, and German orphan songs, but US orphan songs have generated little more than passing references. Other examples include: “The Orphan Nosegay Girl” with words by Mrs. Susanna Rowson from 1805; “The Colored Orphan Boy,” composed by C. D. Abbott and sung by S. C. Campbell of the Campbell Minstrels from 1852; and “The Orphan Ballad Singers Ballad” by Henry Russell from 1866. Orphans were not just a topic; in the latter half of the nineteenth century, actual parentless youth featured in bands such as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Band of New York City. This paper connects the stolen childhoods in orphan songs to those of enslaved youth. If free children were aware of slavery and the movement to abolish it as historian Wilma King has shown, what did it mean for Abby Hutchinson, who started performing abolitionist songs with her brothers at age twelve, to sing as the sentimental stock character of the orphan? Songs like the one above may have been a way that young abolitionists empathized with enslaved youths robbed of their youths.
Music articulates different kinds of selves; this is the central thrust behind Philip M. Gentry's recent book, What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity. The study takes up a range of examples of popular and art musics from the 1950s, approaching its subject in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion. An ambitious and beautifully written book, What Will I Be follows the lead of recent cultural history that centres on the major geopolitical conflict of the century's second half; it brings together musics not often considered under the umbrella of the Cold War to suggest new links between genres that share a Cold War sensibility. Discussions of the Orioles, Doris Day, a number of musicals including South Pacific, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song, and John Cage's 4 ′ 33 ′′ are interleaved with thick descriptions of political change and new assertions of identities. In his introduction, Gentry asserts that the question of identity was especially important during the postwar period: 'The social dislocations and migrations of the two previous decades, through famine and war, had created a situation in which the question of who one's self ought to be in relation to others was at the forefront of the popular imagination' (4). What Will I Be situates anxieties over identity in the context of the 1950s and the decade's attendant political movements: McCarthyism, the African-American civil rights movement, the emergence of gay rights organizations, and stirrings of second-wave feminism. As the guiding question of his project, he asks: 'What is the relationship between these waves of new postwar political movements and the musical revolutions that seem to dovetail so neatly?' (5). He probes identity formation or self-making from psychological, sociological, and historical perspectives, suggesting that 'music became a space, and perhaps the most important one, for collective articulations of self' and that 'musical performances took center stage in the new project of identity' (5). Gentry eschews more sweeping claims about identity, resisting urges to posit identity as either a universal or a transhistorical idea. Instead, he insists on the significance of sharing specific historic moments within particular communities; at the same time, he acknowledges that identity is 'perhaps the most challenging and politically fraught concept of the late 20th century' (6). He adds that 'pervasive status anxiety characterized not just an elite group clinging on to power but also formerly marginalized groups now moving up in society' (9).
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