Music Hall Research Articles

Active Acoustics in Concert Halls - A New Approach

Abstract Active acoustics offers potential benefits in music halls having acoustical short-comings and is a relatively inexpensive alternative to physical modifications of the enclosures. One critical benefit of active architecture is the controlled variability of acoustics. Although many improvements have been made over the last 60 years in the quality and usability of active acoustics, some problems still persist and the acceptance of this technology is advancing cautiously. McGill's Virtual Acoustic Technology (VAT) offers new solutions in the key areas of performance by focusing on the electroacoustic coupling between the existing room acoustics and the simulation acoustics. All control parameters of the active acoustics are implemented in the Space Builder engine by employing multichannel parallel mixing, routing, and processing. The virtual acoustic response is created using low-latency convolution and a three-way temporal segmentation of the measured impulse responses. This method facilitates a sooner release of the virtual room response and its radiation into the surrounding space. Field tests are currently underway at McGill University involving performing musicians and the audience in order to fully assess and quantify the benefits of this new approach in active acoustics.

Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan

In this essay the social historian Simon Featherstone examines the theatre of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan and argues that her strange, illicit performances offer a way of re-reading British popular performance in the 1930s and 1940s. This critically neglected period has been characterized by the decline of the radical energies of nineteenth-century music hall and the variety theatre which displaced it. Duncan's performances, however, with their extravagant display and management of her body and deployment of a range of references to popular materials, including puppetry, melodrama, children's games, and sentimental narratives, suggest the existence of other trajectories. Like the ‘dark village’ that Eric Hobsbawm identified as the illegal shadow of nineteenth-century social practices, Duncan's ‘dark theatre’ can be seen as a shadow world of mid-century performance styles. It provided a knowing yet emotionally fulfilling theatrical experience for her audiences while at the same time posing radical questions about the limits and meanings of the representation of gender and class in the unregulated venues of the spiritualist circuit. Politically ambiguous in their mixture of entrepreneurial exploitation and willingness to offer forthright challenges to social and legal authorities, Duncan's performances indicate the persistence of complex spaces and traditions of popular theatricality in the period.

Nina Simone's Triple Play

Nina Simone's Triple Play Daphne A. Brooks (bio) Listen to the opening notes of Nina Simone's remarkable 1957 debut album Little Girl Blue and one hears a performer asserting her intentions, throwing down the glove: the exuberant "motor running-running" (Dobie 232) trademark vocals, the playfully virtuosic dance of a pianist's velocity that turns the tempo of a Duke Ellington classic inside out and breaks open the melody to mine the ironically pulsating energy, the propulsive beat of non-stop "indigo" heartbreak. As jazz critic Scott Yanow states in the liner notes to the album, Simone's take on Ellington was one of many "unexpected" and "memorable" twists that introduced the artist to the world. "[R]ather than begin the [recording] with one of her more accessible vocals," says Yanow, "Simone starts out with a surprisingly up tempo and abstract piano exploration of 'Mood Indigo' before her vocal makes the song a bit more recognizable" (Yanow). It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone's counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together "highbrow" and "lowbrow" forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was, some might argue, "emo" before "emo," Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.1 No one critical apparatus can sustain a sufficient reading of Nina Simone, an artist celebrated in part for having stylized a heterogeneous musical repertory of songs for nearly four decades. A classically-trained pianist who shifted into jazz, pop, cabaret, and folk performing in the mid 1950s as a way to support her education and subsequently to shore up her income, Simone gained notoriety for having moved fluidly from playing the music hall chanteuse by covering Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (inspired by Billie Holiday's interpretation) and the Norwegian folk lilt of "Black is the Color of My True Lover's Hair" to "Duke Ellington compositions, Israeli folk songs, and songs by the Bee Gees" (Bernstein B6). She was the ultimate queen of popular music "crossover" in the most exhilarating and unconventional sense of the word, and she deftly and consistently called upon this ability to mix and match musical forms as a way to break free of the racial and gender circumscriptions placed upon her in popular music culture. Simone frequently commented on the significance of her generic moves, boldly proclaiming that "'It's always been my aim to stay outside any category'. 'That's my freedom,'" she insisted to one reporter. But it was a "freedom" that, according to biographer David Nathan, "drove industry pundits and the music press crazy as they tried to categorize her" (Nathan 232). [End Page 176] "There Must Be Some Kind of a Way Out of This Place": Nina Simone's Musical Maroonage In many ways, Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like? Some of Simone's most famous song titles summed up this query. Through her music she sought to make her listeners grasp how "it would feel to be free" and to be "young, gifted, and black," as well as female. Her songs thus served as sonic struggles in and of themselves, as embattled efforts to elude generic categorizations as a black female performer. These points would likewise resonate throughout much of Simone's intense and absorbing memoir, I Put a Spell On You, a text in which the artist assails the cultural myopia of critics too obtuse to read the aesthetic range and complexities of her material. "[S]aying what sort of music I played," Simone observes, "gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there" (Simone and Cleary 68-69). For Simone, the constant (and, in her mind, completely erroneous) comparisons to Billie Holiday were signs of the music press's inability to read the depth of diversity in black female musical expression. People, she argues, "couldn't get past the fact we were both black. . . . Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be" (Simone...

The Lost Film: Vienna 1924, the footballer as movie star

In 1922 the song Heute spielt der Uridil (Uridil is Playing Today) was first published and sung in the music halls of Vienna. The song, a lively foxtrot, was described on its score as a ‘Foot‐ball‐...

The Edwardian sense: art, design, and performance in Britain, 1901-1910

Although numerous studies have explored the Edwardian period (1901-1910) as one of political and social change, this innovative book is the first to explore how art, design, and performance not only registered those changes but helped to precipitate them. While acknowledging familiar divisions between the highbrow world of aesthetic theory and the popular delights of the music hall, or between the neo-Baroque magnificence of central London and the slums of the East End, The Edwardian Sense also discusses the middlebrow culture that characterizes the anonymous edge of the city. Essays are divided into three sections under the broad headings of spectacle, setting, and place, which reflect the book's focus on the visual, spatial, and geographic perspectives of the Edwardians themselves.

Theory with a Capital T: Cultural Studies’ Assault on Popular Art

Those whose knowledge of the study of popular culture is based on what has come out of the American academy in recent decades may be pardoned for assuming that any intellectually respectable consideration of a work of popular culture must have a single-minded focus on its political impact and a corresponding refusal to consider its artistic quality. The error may be pardonable, but the assumption is still wrong. Before and despite the contemporary institutionalization of popular culture studies in the university, usually under the aegis of “culture studies,” many writers and critics, including some now classified as irremediably elitist, have believed that popular art at its best could both “delight and teach,” in Horace’s famous phrase. Insisting on looking at popular art first as art rather than as sociological data, they have found that works of popular culture at their best made their impact by the same sort of “selection and concentration,” to use T. S. Eliot’s words praising the music hall performer Marie Lloyd, that is a hallmark of fine art. It was because Marie Lloyd’s act was “all a matter of selection and concentration” that Eliot paid tribute to her as “the greatest music-hall artist of her time in England.” Unlike lesser performers she did not need to depend on “the grotesque” or “exaggeration” for humor. Eliot’s essay on Marie Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:469–480 DOI 10.1007/s12129-010-9194-7

Saxie Dowell: Saxophonist, Bandleader, War Hero

Saxie DowellSaxophonist, Bandleader, War Hero Terrence S. Tickle (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Saxie Dowell (here) got his nickname very early, playing one of the first saxophones in Raleigh from the age of twelve, often at his father’s drug store downtown. He went on to become one of the most famous composers of popular and comic songs of the Big Band era. Publicity photograph, courtesy of the author. [End Page 143] “Boob boop dittum dattum wattum, choo/And they swam and they swam all over the dam.” Today, many recognize these lines from “Three Little Fishies” in the “itty bitty pool,” and the equally popular “Playmates,” from cartoons and children’s programming, but the composer, Saxie Dowell, was once one of the most famous composers of popular and comic songs of the Big Band era. Horace Kirby “Saxie” Dowell was born on May 29, 1904, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he grew up singing duets with his mother in the church choir. He got his nickname very early, playing one of the first saxophones in Raleigh from the age of twelve, often at his father’s drug store downtown. He entered the University of North Carolina in 1922, where he became the saxophonist of the most popular band on campus, the Carolina Club Orchestra, led by James Hal Kemp from Charlotte. The band was no mere hobby for Hal Kemp and his band members. They were dedicated musicians who played on campus, in clubs across the state, and, during the summers, on transatlantic voyages. They were so busy, in fact, that Dowell was enrolled at UNC only for his first year. After that he became a full-time musician, although he continued to live at the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house. In those days, the rules on campus living were much more relaxed. The Carolina Club Orchestra made their first transatlantic booking in the summer of 1924 and their first recordings in England for London Columbia that year. The band was at the leading edge of hot jazz styling at the time and had several bookings among the younger British royalty, including the Prince of Wales, the future King George. They hit the big time when sailing back to the United States on the RMS Berengaria, where the Prince sat in with the band on drums. When the Prince of Wales declared Kemp’s group his favorite band, the news services immediately wired the comment to the American papers. By the time the band arrived in New York the booking requests for the band were so great that Kemp’s brother, T. D., quit his job at Westinghouse and started the Kemp Agency, which later booked talents like Rudy Vallee, Ginger Rogers, and Al Jolson.1 The year after his transatlantic summer tour with the Carolina Club Orchestra, Kemp organized a smaller seven-piece ensemble, which became the forerunner of his nationally known orchestra, with Dowell and several new North Carolina talents. All of the new members joined as freshmen in 1925 and all were destined for national fame. There was Edgar “Skinnay” Ennis from Salisbury, who played drums but became more famous as a vocalist on Kemp recordings like “Got a Date with an Angel.” Ennis would leave the Kemp band in 1937 to start his own band and act as musical director for Bob Hope. Bandmate John Scott Trotter attended high school with Kemp in Charlotte and played with him in the orchestra at the Hawthorne Lane Methodist Church. Trotter was Kemp’s primary arranger, and the talent that moved the band away from the twenties collegiate sound and toward the more sophisticated big band sound of the 1930s. He left the band in [End Page 144] 1936 to become the musical director for Bing Crosby, starting with Crosby’s movie Pennies from Heaven. Trotter would continue to work in the movies and as music director of the “Kraft Music Hall” radio show. Ben Williams, a truly talented sax player from Concord, North Carolina, rounded out the band.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Hal Kemp (conducting) and His Orchestra became one of the most popular in the country. Saxie Dowell...

Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (review)

Reviewed by: Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms Tim Watson Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. By Anita Patterson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Anita Patterson's book is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on transnational, transatlantic modernisms. Along with critics such as Jahan Ramazani, Matthew Hart, and the contributors to Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel's anthology Geomodernisms,1 Patterson is helping to shift the focal point of modernist studies away from national paradigms, seeking in this book rather to "uncover a dense matrix of hemispheric and transatlantic convergences" (3) among poets as diverse as Derek Walcott, Jacques Roumain, Wilson Harris, Langston Hughes, St.-John Perse, and T. S. Eliot. With rich close readings, meticulous research, and an especially helpful emphasis on connections between Anglophone and Francophone poets, Patterson demonstrates in five strong chapters "how the diasporic consequences of imperialism have configured close, surprising affinities among poets and cultures of the Americas" (179). This new, expanded version of American poetry will be of great use to subsequent scholars; however, as I argue below, there is also a lingering tension in her book between a cross-cultural model of poetic convergences and a more hierarchical model based on an idea of poetic influence that tends to flow from center to periphery. The version of American poetry that Patterson develops here is capacious: it contains multitudes. It is hemispheric and transatlantic in scope, encompassing the U.S.-born, British-naturalized Eliot, the Guadaloupe-born, Parisian resident Perse, and the Haitian poet Roumain, exiled in New York City, to take just three well-traveled examples prominent in Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. Most importantly, Patterson's concept of American poetry is fundamentally multilingual, and her astute analyses of the relationships (including mutual translations) between Eliot and Perse, and between Roumain and Hughes, lie at the center of this book, making a much needed break with the monolingualism that still pervades much modernist scholarship. Following Hughes, for example, back and forth between the United States, Paris (where he met and translated the surrealist Louis Aragon), and Haiti (where he met and translated Roumain), Patterson adds to the scholarship of Brent Edwards and others that has been recasting Hughes as a poet of diasporic, multilingual modernism.2 For Patterson, this multifaceted, pan-American tradition has two clear throughlines, one leading back to Edgar Allen Poe and the other to Walt Whitman; and these two poetic streams —representing craft and form, on the one hand, and vernacular idioms and political content, on the other—meet in one preeminent figure, T. S. Eliot, who takes center stage in this reconstructed, plural account of early twentieth-century modernisms. This is not your grandparents. T. S. Eliot. While acknowledging the figure of the poet as the Anglicized, patrician gatekeeper of the arts with reactionary views on race and religion, Patterson instead highlights the aspects of Eliot's verse that maintained ties, however ambivalently, with American places and the history of the Americas, and with the demotic forms of everyday speech and popular culture, such as jazz and music hall. In an intriguing and surprising reading of "Gerontion," for example, she uncovers allusions to specific American settings and argues that Eliot learned from Poe how to use local elements to bypass the nationalist impulse that both saw as a detrimental part of the U.S. literary scene. In her second chapter, Patterson argues that the locations in an early French lyric of Eliot's, "Lune de miel," produce a complex sense of place: "The setting ... works like a palimpsest, weirdly imposing European geography on American prairie landscapes" (53). She argues that the poem's deictic phrase "les voici à [here they are in] Ravenne" merges the Italian city with Ravinia, Illinois, the "summer opera capital" of the U.S. on the outskirts of Chicago (53). And where Jed Esty reads Four Quartets as evidence of the poet's post-Waste Land "antidiasporic" impulse towards a holistic, recuperated England, "following the trail of his family's colonial migration back to their native English village, East Coker,"3 Patterson, by contrast, draws our attention to moments in Eliot's work that evoke the American frontier, with the...

Near broke, but no tramp: Billie Ritchie, Charlie Chaplin and ‘that costume’

This article revisits the various claims and counter‐claims that have been made over the years as to whether the 1910s music hall comedian turned slapstick film star Billie Ritchie stole his costume and comic persona from Charlie Chaplin, or was himself the victim of plagiarism on Chaplin’s part. It proposes that neither of these arguments can be definitively supported on the basis of evidence available in the public domain, but also draws attention to the fact that there are other factors in play that may plausibly explain the various similarities between the two comedians as the result of shared formative influences rather than outright imitation, and that some contemporaries deemed it eminently reasonable to take such a view. The article moves on to consider the significance of the fact that, although their costumes were practically identical, Ritchie typically played dissolute gentlemen of ambiguous class status rather than tramps. It concludes that there is a stronger argument to be made that, rather than seeking to represent vagrancy, both Chaplin and Ritchie originally used the iconic ‘tramp’ costume to poke fun at the culturally ubiquitous Edwardian figure of the ‘masher’ – a lower‐middle‐ or working‐class male pleasure‐seeker trying (and in their incarnations, failing) to emulate the fashions of his social superiors.

Christmas in July

namely, the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular and the Park Avenue Christmas Tree Lighting and Carol Sing, I am still thinking about what I experienced at these two events in New York. The ghost of Christmas past still haunts me in July. Residing in the New York metropolitan area does not put those of us who live there beyond the occasional need to play the tourist in our own Big Apple. So when a friend suggested we attend the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, I welcomed the opportunity. I had seen the show only once before—some thirty years ago—and it seemed like a good way to begin the holiday season. Radio City Music Hall, part of the Rockefeller Center complex, is a cavernous and opulent theatre seating nearly 6,000 people, a vintage Art Deco masterpiece that opened in 1932. It is furnished with a twin-console “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ of 4,400 pipes, boasts a full orchestra, and features the famous Rockettes with their high-kick dance line. The annual Christmas Spectacular is not as pricey as Broadway, and many working parents can still afford to come to it with their children and flash cameras in tow. The program is an amalgam of pop-culture Christmas scenes: a high-tech animation sequence that gives the audience, bedecked in 3-D eyeglasses, the exhilarating sensation of flying with Santa Claus over the streets of Manhattan; the incredibly synchronized dancing of the Rockettes; a sampling from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; and a procession of live sheep and camels moving on stage silently and deliberately to Bethlehem. The show builds to a climactic “living nativity” as majestically garbed wise men bow before the Holy Family and offer their gifts to the Christ child. Then the entire audience joins the cast in singing “Joy to the World.” It’s all here American style: a ninety-minute celebration seamlessly combining holiday chutzpuh, sexy chorus girls, Santa Claus, and the infant Savior in a nostalgic setting Theology Today editorial

COSMOPOLITANISM, FEMINISM, AND THE MOVING BODY

In October 1894, Mrs. Laura OrmistonChant, a feminist purity reformer, successfully challenged the music and dancing license of the Empire Theatre of Varieties before the licensing committee of the London County Council. Mrs. Chant raised two objections to the management of the Empire: first, that “the promenade, an open space behind the dress circle in front of the bar,” where 500 people circulated nightly, was used “as the habitual resort of prostitutes in pursuit of their traffic.” Her “second indictment” was that parts of the performance on stage were exceedingly indecent, including the costumes of the ballet dancers (“London County Council”). Chant had gone to the Empire promenade, twice dressed in her “best” evening gown, and been herself accosted. Her protest, declaredThe Sketch, provoked the “battle of the Empire,” a “great fight . . . waged with a war of words, a battery of correspondence, and a skirmish of sketches” (qtd in Faulk 77). Visually commemorated in the illustrated press and in numerous music hall spoofs, the “Battle of the Empire” was most extensively covered in the correspondence columns of theDaily Telegraph, under the heading, “Prudes on the Prowl.”

한지사 직물을 이용한 유니폼 디자인 개발에 관한 연구 - 음악홀 유니폼을 중심으로 -

The advanced and complicated modern society recognizes image creation based on the identity of the global competitive age as the important means. The requirement for a new vision to the globally environmental problem has affected on design so that as environmentally-friendly products and technologies have been developed and original expression modes have been appeared which the medium of paper which is natural material, paper has been highlighted newly. Hanji made of mulberry fiber, a bast fiber of mulberry is a representative environment-friendly natural fiber. In addition, it has various functions similar to those of yellow earth such as emission of far infrared rays, antibiosis, deodorization, fast dry ability of sweat, and simple dyeing ability. It is Hanji threads that are produced from various processes of Hanji materials. Therefore, hanji threads are able to be both woven and knitted still remaining Hanji's excellent characteristics. In addition, it is light, bio-degradable, durable and washable, and it is an environment friendly product with the distinguished texture and sensitivity. Under the concept of 'Circle' designed the uniforms of music hall to inform that the uniforms as a media representing music hall represents the unique Sori Arts Center of Jeollabuk-do traditional style.

Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (review)

Reviewed by: Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France Raymond Watkins Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France. Rae Beth Gordon. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiv + 311. $89.95 (cloth). Rae Beth Gordon’s book fully lives up to its goal of being what Clifford Geertz calls a “thick description,” focusing on Parisian life between 1875 and 1910 and using “journalistic firsthand accounts and the iconography of gesture and movement in drawings, posters, lithographs, and photographs in the music-hall and in film representations” (2). Gordon is a vigilant urban anthropologist, mining an impressive number of the era’s newspapers and journals to provide a ground-level account of la vie quotidienne as experienced in the music halls, cabarets and café-concerts, and reflected by prominent journalists and cultural critics of the fin de siècle. She concentrates on three fields: late nineteenth-century psychological pathology, Darwinian concepts of evolution and fears of animal regression, and colonial views of African and African-American dance hall performers, all to show the way these separate practices create “an amalgam in the popular imagination” (4). Gordon is at her best in teasing out the complex interrelations between these practices, so that her study increasingly feels like a “palimpsest” (130) of cultural influence. One underlying argument, fully developed in Gordon’s previous book, is that the French are particularly drawn to convulsive movement and gesture, witnessed equally in the hysteric at the Salpêtrière as in the epileptic contortions of the café-club performer (19–34).1 In this way, Dances with Darwin trades on spectacular displays of the body in movement, whether through hysteria (chapter 1), degeneration and evolutionary conceptions of “the ugly” (chapter 2), epileptic singers (chapters 1 and 5), or African and African-American dance (chapter 4). Such displays are brought to life through a remarkable collection of illustrations around which particular chapters are structured, including reproductions of period photographs, posters, cartoons, lithographs, and sketches. These images are fascinating by themselves, but also provide evidentiary support for many of the key points of the book. Chapter 4, “Natural Rhythm: Africans and Black Americans in Paris,” is especially [End Page 437] provocative as the figures provide their own narrative progression to show the imbrication of black/white hybridity, minstrelsy, and fears of evolutionary regression. Although the book’s ostensible focus is the influence of Darwin’s thought on the Parisian café-concert and music hall, I found Gordon’s comments on Darwin and evolution less revealing than the emphasis on race and medical pathology in understanding the mechanisms of the café-concert. Perhaps this is partly because Darwin himself was reluctant to separate human kind into distinct races or classifications (65); perhaps it is due to the ambiguity of Darwin’s beliefs in contrast to some views that grew out of his work, including theories of degeneration, social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism (the latter of which Gordon strongly distinguishes from Darwin). Dances with Darwin might therefore be better titled Dances with Darwinism, since Gordon’s multivalent approach to culture seems weakened by focusing on one man, rather than on the constellation of institutions, movements, and thinkers that contributed to the cultural tapestry called “Darwinism,” including ideas cited in the study by Spencer, Haeckel, Nordau, and Lombroso. Dances with Darwin is a rich contribution to studies of the “primitive,” and Gordon’s archival work serves as a useful extension of Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism by showing that the “angularity and fragmentation” (272) that Lemke claims for twentieth century cubism in fact has a much less auspicious start in music hall performance of the nineteenth century.2 In “Natural Rhythm” (chapter 4), Gordon traces the meteoric popularity of the Cake-Walk in Parisian café-concerts, frequently performed by whites who increasingly exaggerated the Afro- American form. What Gordon shows is the extent to which the Cake-Walk’s popularity was tied to the belief that it was initially performed by “primitives”; Parisians were ignorant of the fact that the Cake-Walk “originated on antebellum southern plantations as a parody of the master’s dances” (173). In other words, the Cake-Walk was a satire...

Magic under Glass (review)

Reviewed by: Magic under Glass Kate Quealy-Gainer Dolamore, Jaclyn. Magic under Glass. Bloomsbury, 2010 [320p]. ISBN 978-1-59990-430-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6-9 Following her mother's death and her father's subsequent financial ruin, Nimira finds herself in an unfriendly foreign land, dancing in a music hall for mere pennies. When a mysterious magician offers her shelter at his lavish mansion and a hefty salary to accompany a musical automaton, she grabs at the chance, dismissing the rumors of ghosts and trickery that surround the magician's estate. Soon, however, she learns that the automaton is actually a fairy prince trapped and cursed, a state that the reigning sorcerer's council would prefer to maintain in order to keep their control over the fairy world. Readers drawn in by the evocative cover of a romantically lit corseted girl will not be disappointed by the story's echoes of Victorian romances, and although the setting is the imaginary land of Lorinar, references to cobblestoned streets, elegant ladies, lecherous old men, and plenty of lurking secrets give it all the atmospheric appeal of nineteenth-century London. Nimira is likable as the strong-willed heroine intent on making a better life for herself, but the story falls a bit flat when she discovers the automaton's secret. The love between her and the fairy prince is never quite explained, and thus her motivation for risking a secure future for the sake of their relationship seems rather implausible, given that Nimira is, above all else, a practical girl. The ending is also less than satisfying, punishing a character who, in light of the vast conspiracy Nimira uncovers, seems like small potatoes and giving no real conclusion to the fairy prince's ordeal although certainly making plenty of room for a sequel. Despite these flaws, however, the book offers plenty of romance and intrigue, and readers not quite ready for the weight of Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, BCCB 5/04, etc.) may do well to start here. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Control algorithms for adaptive time-frequency test signal synthesis for architectural acoustics measurements during music concerts.

A system was proposed by G. Ren et al. [158th Meeting of the ASA (2009)] to perform field acoustics measurements during ongoing music concerts. It addresses the long-standing problem of performing architectural acoustic measurements with an audience present. In this system, an adaptive time-frequency synthesis algorithm was employed to generate test signals with time-frequency energy distributions that conform to predicted “masked measurement vacancies” to ensure that the acoustic response of the test signals can be separated from the music and that the test signals are inaudible to the audience by taking advantage of auditory masking phenomena. In the present paper, approaches utilizing higher-level structure of music are exploited to reduce the number of conflicts between the test signals and the music. Three approaches are described: a music theory based probabilistic prediction algorithm, using prior knowledge of the score, and the third exploits the availability of previous recordings of the music being performed. These control algorithms are adapted to architectural acoustic measurement procedures conforming to ISO3382-1/2(2009). The proposed system achieves similar performance compare to conventional acoustic test procedures, which emit loud test signals in empty music halls.

The London Nobody Knows (review)

Reviewed by: The London Nobody Knows Kevin M. Flanagan The London Nobody Knows (1967; 2008). Produced and Directed by Norman Cohen. Distributed by British Lion Film Corporation (theatrical) Optimum Home Entertainment (DVD). www.optimumreleasing.com 53 min. Adapted from architectural historian and draftsman Geoffrey Fletcher's book of the same name (published 1962), The London Nobody Knows is a quirky, personable documentary concerned with finding the lingering elements of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in mid-1960s London. As narrated by actor James Mason, the film isolates curious locations on the brink of disappearance, extinction, or obsolescence. Fletcher's book is organized by area, but the film chooses to order its selections in more thematic ways. The film begins at a construction site, and soon displays a very idiosyncratic style, showing ultra-modern office towers cut to the rhythm of playful music. The tone abruptly changes—a tactic used at several key points in the film—and cameras enter the inside of the decrepit Bedford Theatre, once a famed venue from the halcyon days of music hall performance, now reduced to putrefying ruin with a hole in the roof. These sequences establish The London Nobody Knows' governing dialectic of rot and rebirth. Mason exudes the perfect demeanor for so strange a project. Part bemused gentleman, part flâneur, and part engaged social reformer, he heads this tour (via on-camera narration and voice-over) around some of the most unsightly spots in the city. Focus tends toward architectural remnants and dead technologies, but the living, human significances remain key. For example, after introducing a 19th century railroad Roundhouse (used for maintenance and track changes), Mason walks amongst the thoroughly rusted grounds surrounding the place. Director Norman Cohen's camera isolates discarded bolts, nails, and decaying wooden barriers. Lest we grow too attached to these oddities, Mason opines "We'd be foolish to mourn them too readily." This phrase—and others like it—keep the film from being too laudatory, too unrealistically critical of the encroaching sights and services of the late 1960s. With the exception of an almost slapstick send-up to the emergence of the mini-skirt, topics too readily associated with London's swinging side (indeed, in full "swing" during the film's production) are absent, and focus is on the unlucky, the forgotten. Britain's cultural ascendancy and hip image are contrasted against its underbelly, a rag-pickers economy of markets (Chapel Market in Islington, the trash heaps of Spitalfields in the East End), homes for the down-and out (a strangely impersonal Salvation Army mission) and the insane (the film's final image is of an apocalyptic street preacher suggesting the end of days). Some of the squalor is truly eye-opening, such as the footage of meths (methylated spirits) drinkers fighting. Their rage and desperation appears to be frighteningly real. While much of the film is candid, there are very carefully staged sequences. In showing a public lavatory in Holborn dated to 1897, [End Page 129] Mason points to the goldfishes reported to have been kept in the water-refill tank by the attendant. He notes that the crew brought their own today to enhance ambiance. Other portions reflect strange, arty flights of fancy, such as when Mason notices an "Egg-Breaking" plant near Southwark. What follows is a strange, silent interlude (Richard Lester meets Dada meets The Goon Show) in which two men in lab coats test the structural strength of white eggs by breaking them in creative ways, from hammer to karate chop to steam roller. The resulting image of piled shells provides a segue to footage of trash collectors adding eggs and other refuse to their removal van. This playful, associative logic showcases the film's unique qualities and continued relevance to students of British society of the 1960s, architectural and urban historians, and psychogeographers. In fact, the film—with its focus on the outcast, the dead, and the more obscure haunts of London's East End—is an obvious precursor to the London writing of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, or the cinema of Patrick Keiller, whose own 1994 film London is strikingly similar at times. The London Nobody Knows is...

Morris, Merce, Music, Movement

Morris, Merce, Music, Movement Jay Rogoff (bio) In summer, like many other city-dwellers, dance repairs to the country. For companies at the top of their form, however, such bucolic retreats provide not rest and relaxation, but athletic vigor and emotional intensity. Summer 2009 brought the Mark Morris Dance Group to upstate New York's Saratoga Performing Arts Center and to Tanglewood in the Berkshires, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Jacob's Pillow, the Berkshires dance mecca, offering pleasures both visceral and philosophical. Our two best modern dance troupes both gave thrilling performances, crash courses on the emotional heights Morris's dances attain in expressing their music, and the surprisingly deep satisfactions Cunningham's provide while barely minding the music at all. Morris became famous for turning traditional narrative and gender upside down. His 1991 The Hard Nut, for example, parodies Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker by setting Act I at a 1960s American Christmas house party, with drunken party guests and TV-addicted brats. Its "Waltz of the Snowflakes" pokes fun at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet production, with both men and women in silver tutus and Dairy Queen soft-serve wigs, flinging fistfuls of fake snow. At the same time, for all its gender silliness, its smart, graceful choreography pays loving homage to Balanchine, while immediately before, a pas de deux for Drosselmeyer and his bewitched nephew soars with gorgeous lifts at Act I's musical climax, a homoerotic apotheosis that nevertheless demonstrates how Morris reveres the music he sets. All nine dances Morris showed July 21 and 22 at Saratoga, and August 5 and 6 at Tanglewood, explored the expressive symbiosis of choreography and music, his precise, beautiful dancers perfectly enacting his designs. If anyone missed his notorious comic antics, these infinitely various confirmations of his status as the world's most musical choreographer since Balanchine more than made up for it, with works that look inevitable and surprising at the same time. Morris's wit and humor, however, had not gone on vacation. The world premiere of Empire Garden justly made the biggest splash at Tanglewood, [End Page 143] not only because it featured Colin Jacobsen, Emanuel Ax, and Yo-Yo Ma playing Charles Ives's Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano. This work for fifteen dancers brilliantly embodies in its variety of movement and mini-episodes Ives's palimpsest of American melodies woven into a darkly harmonious musical fabric. Elizabeth Kurtzman's eye-popping costumes, each unique, echo the musical interweaving by suggesting a tapestry of archaic national archetypes without literally representing them. We think of bandleaders, jockeys, ambassadors in operettas, bellhops, six-day cyclists, minstrel performers, sideshow musclemen, generals, magicians, and other citizens of Americana. In the opening movement, the dancers' slow calisthenics (out of some bygone, patriotic physical culture movement) mature into dazzling whirls, with arms and legs suddenly pulled in or extended, jazzy and classical at once. Dancers turn their backs on us to extend their arms to the moon, rotate on one foot, then strenuously stretch toward us, as if inviting us into their democratic project. At the movement's end, as seven parallel couples curve in a sinuous S like a strigil-patterned frieze, this parti-colored, polyglot crew becomes assimilated into the dance's melting pot. In the hectic central movement, when Ives's trio has three or even four melodies intersecting, Morris hears them and marshals his dancers accordingly, changing a step or motif as quickly as Ives transforms a rhythm or tune. While a trio dances to a folk violin melody, others start tromping to a march for the cello, and still others sway to the piano's lurching "Old Folks at Home." The layers of music keep unfolding and the dancers shift on a dime. Some roll ecstatically on the floor while others eagerly leap around a suddenly elevated tent preacher; then ever-varying groups rattle off a goofy bit of sailor's hornpipe, some vaudeville hoofing, boxers' sparring, a softshoe, brief ballroom partnering, and high music hall kicks punctuating "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay." Yet Morris has integrated these materials elegantly, overlapping his moves in Ives fashion, so instead of a hodgepodge...

Transnational Multimedia: Fortunato Depero’s Impressions of New York City (1928-1930)

This essay looks at the experimentation done by the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero during his short stay in New York City (1928-1930) and shows how Depero, as a foreigner, experienced the capital of the twentieth century during its making, capturing crucial elements – immigration and plurilingualism, fashion and transnational commerce, the incessant construction of skyscrapers, billboard advertising and cinema, the music hall and its theatrical and delirious scenography. A close, selective reading of Depero’s unfinished project New York–Film Vissuto, shows Depero’s avant-gardist take on this experience and fosters connections and comparisons with other international modernist actors who experienced or lived in the city (Le Corbusier, Frederich Kiesler, Leonide Massine, and Katherine Drier). Depero was in New York during the Great Depression as well as a time when an incredible energy was just starting to crystallize in art, architecture, film, music, and literature. Depero translates bits of experience into different media, creating a maze of artifacts (painting, advertising, poetry, and prose) that, on one hand, communicate among themselves and, on the other hand, show the Babel-like confusion among the different media. Once back in Italy, Depero announced his intention to produce the book New York–Film Vissuto to be accompanied by a phonograph disc. It wasn’t produced; instead Depero, in tune with Futurist radio poetry, edited Liriche Radiofoniche: spare lyrics blending with fleeting and cosmopolitan aspects of the New York cityscape, others apparently glorifying Fascism, and some embedded with sounds and visions of nature. This last group of lyrics bears traces of the natural mountainscape, close to Rovereto, to which Depero returned to live and work. A reading of Depero’s artifacts shows the shock effect at play between earlier avant-garde gestures and the political and capitalistic complex with which he was confronted. Between these poles, and in a very specific moment, Depero plays with wit, capturing, yet displacing and interrupting, the spectacle of the city.

Down and out on the quays of İzmir: ‘European’ musicians, innkeepers, and prostitutes in the Ottoman port-cities

One of the factors that contributed to the late nineteenth-century Europeanization of Ottoman urban society was the entertainment sector, in particular bars, music halls and brothels. In the big cities of Rumelia and western Anatolia, a relevant number of the workforce in this sector originated from countries such as Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy or France; they exposed local society to new forms of sociability. This article is intended as an initial step in assessing the impact of coastal popular culture in shaping Hamidian port-city society. It tackles the question of whether it is possible to write such a history with a perspective of agency, by focusing on the people on stage or behind the bar, their migratory background, life-stories, and worldviews. It distinguishes between three milieus: musicians organized in orchestras; individual singers, dancers, bar or pension owners; and prostitutes and pimps or traffickers. All three seem to have retained a liminal lifestyle, with one foot in their place of origin and the other in the region they operated in. Despite their constant interaction with customers or audiences, integration into local society was not the rule, but an exception. The respective milieu of persons engaged in similar semi-itinerant entertainment work was the predominant group of social organization.

Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. By Derek B. Scott.

In its modern form, Western popular music is a product of bigness: big business, huge markets, vast cities. This fact, so obvious as to be easily overlooked, is the starting point for Derek B. Scott's book. He singles out four cities as especially important, and here I cannot improve on his own words: dance music in Vienna provided infectious rhythms, novel orchestral timbres, and a new coloristic use of harmony (chords that took on a ‘free-floating’ major sixth or major seventh); it also employed new melodic devices (the wienerische Note). It was in Vienna that what became known as ‘light music’ was created, and the old types of contredanses were gradually ousted by dances for couples (the waltz and polka). Blackface minstrelsy in New York provided popular music with a percussive character, a new type of syncopation, and a three-chord model—features inherited by a range of twentieth-century styles from blues to punk. Music hall in London supplied songs with a hook or catchy chorus coupled to a less memorable narrative-driven verse section—features inherited by Tin Pan Alley, dance bands, and stage musicals. Cabaret in Paris presented songs with hard-hitting and socially concerned texts, precursors of later protest songs (for example, those of Bob Dylan) and various later forms of ‘realist’ song (for instance, Jacques Brel's ‘Amsterdam’, Radiohead's ‘Creep’) (pp. 6–7).