| Popis: |
When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the US in 1850, she became the prototype for the modern pop star. Meanwhile, her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for another figure of enduring significance: the pop culture impresario. Starting with Lind’s fabled US tour, Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and the changing conditions of live music performance in the US into the twenty-first century. It covers a range of historic performances, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers expanding the sphere of African American music in the 1870s, to Benny Goodman bringing swing to Carnegie Hall in 1938, to 1952’s Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland—arguably the first rock ‘n’ roll concert—to Beyoncé’s boundary-shattering performance at the 2018 Coachella festival. More than that, it details the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and a variety of live music producers (promoters, agents, sound and stage technicians) in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved. Live Music in America connects what occurs behind the scenes to what takes place on the stage to highlight the ways in which live music is something that is very deliberately produced and does not just spontaneously materialize. Along the way, previously unstudied archival materials shed new light on the origins of jazz, the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, and the rise of the modern music festival. |
