From Catfish Row to Granby Street: contesting meaning in Porgy and Bess

Abstract

For reasons which would themselves be worthy of an article, the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by popular music scholarship. This has often puzzled me, since such factors as the musical theatre's ambiguous position in the high/low culture debate, its close relationship with film (film musicals were for a time a favoured subject – with film theorists), its persistent playing with the links between song and drama, the sociality of its performance conventions, the durability of the amateur performance tradition, to name but a few, together suggest a promising vein of study. Musical theatre songs have been the subject of intermittent scholarly investigation, mostly from a perspective derived from classical musicology. Wilfrid Mellers, characteristically, sought meaning through musicology (he speaks of Cole Porter's chromatics as telling us ‘regretfully, that we are kidding ourselves’ (in love) and of the ‘queasy honesty’ of ‘Anything Goes’), but found too many musicals tend to ‘create an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions’ and never get beyond that point. (Mellers 1964, pp. 384, 385).