American Square Dance Vol. 48, No. 10 (Oct. 1993)

Monthly square dance magazine that began publication in 1945

Woodstock Scholarship: An Interdisciplinary Annotated Bibliography

Since August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair looms large when recounting the history and impact of the baby boom generation and the societal upheavals of the Sixties. Scholars study the sociological, political, musical, and artistic impact of the event and use it as a cultural touchstone when exploring alternative perspectives or seeking clarity. This interdisciplinary annotated bibliography records the details of over 400 English-language resources on the Festival, including books, chapters, articles, websites, transcriptions and videos. Divided into six main subsections―Culture & Society, History, Biography, Music, Film, Arts & Literature―for ease of consultation Woodstock Scholarship sheds light on all facets of a key happening in our collective history. Throughout the 1960s, popular music became increasingly reflective and suggestive of the rising political and social consciousness of the youth culture. Examples can be seen in the development of the protest song genre within the folk music boom of the early Sixties and the marriage of lifestyle to music first reflected by The Beatles with fashion, followed by psychedelic music with the emerging drug culture. Woodstock was where these themes coalesced, thus becoming the defining and last great moment of the 1960s. However, Woodstock also represented an abundant amount of experiences and ideas and moments. Thus, when exploring the complicated accounts and numerous facets of America during the turbulent Sixties one discovers scholarship on the key subjects, such as the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights Movement, often considering and debating the importance, relevance, and epic nature of Woodstock. Multiple narratives emerge: a radical engagement of the hippie movement, an overt commercial exploitation of youth culture, a political statement. Woodstock scholarship does not stand alone as field of study, but it is at the cross-road of a number of disciplines―music history, cultural studies, sociology, arts and literature, media studies, politics and economics. Providing full bibliographical details and concise, informative annotation for each entry, Woodstock Scholarship is an essential tool for students, scholars, teachers, and librarians in all these areas, as well as for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of both the Woodstock Music and Art Fair phenomenon and of the confluence of music, commerce and politics. Loyola Marymount University has generously contributed towards the publication of this volume. A free, socially enhanced version of this book is available on Wikiversity, a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to educational resources. You can access it at: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Woodstock_Scholarship:_An_Interdisciplinary_Annotated_Bibliograph

Convergences Between Leonard Bernstein's On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953) and His Contemporary Concert Music

"Convergences Between Leonard Bernstein's On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953) and His Contemporary Concert Music" On the Town and Wonderful Town are the two musicals that Leonard Bernstein wrote before Candide and West Side Story. These two shows won success in their original runs and On the Town was adapted by MGM into a film in 1949 while Wonderful Town was presented live as a television special on CBS in 1958. As an American composer, Bernstein sought out the "American voice" in all of his works, and merging traits from concert hall music and the popular idioms from the Broadway musical theater became a personal signature of his compositions. Chapter 1 deals with the background of the creation of On the Town and Wonderful Town, including how the creators conceived their ideas, the receptions of the original runs, and the historical circumstances they faced. Chapter 2 examines the application of popular idioms, which Bernstein used in his Broadway scores, in his large-scale concert works in the 1940s and 1950s, including Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah, Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, and Serenade after Plato's Symposium. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on the music of On the Town and Wonderful Town. In On the Town, the composer showed his ambition to apply techniques that he learned from his academic training: contrapuntal structure, fugal-like sections, highly dissonant sonorities, and developing motives to unify the work. In Wonderful Town, Bernstein continued the direction of his work On the Town and blended 1930s swing music and operatic moments, together with other music styles. Meanwhile, Bernstein reused materials from other works, which is a technique that is common to concert music composers, such as J. S. Bach, Handel, and Beethoven, and, instead of simply reprising songs, he applied small motives to help unify the entire work, a technique that one finds in opera more often. As an active musician, Bernstein was aware of new trends in the concert field and merged them into his musicals but did not abandon the conventions of writing memorable melodies. Through the examination of On the Town and Wonderful Town, we can see that Bernstein, as an ambitious musician from the concert hall, devoting himself to musical theater

American Square Dance Vol. 44, No. 12 (Dec. 1989)

Monthly square dance magazine that began publication in 1945

The star quilt.

The adopted daughter of a Cherokee woman and a likable country man, Ginny Hefner grew up an only child in the small northeastern Oklahoma town of Wagoner in the decade of the 1930s. In that small town, against the backdrop of Prohibition, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Ginny taught herself how to survive on her own after her parents' marriage unraveled. She found her first true friend in Skeet Maddox. It was through Skeet that Ginny learned there was more to life. While she got by with very little, Ginny dreamed of more. She weathered those bleak days, remembering every detail. She wrote down and recorded her life lessons and memories on scraps of paper for her granddaughter to cherish and remember. These are her stories, the happy and the sad, the tragic and the comforting, all reconstructing a life.--Abstract

Savoy: reassessing the role of the "World's Finest Ballroom" in music and culture, 1926-1958.

From 1926 to 1958, the Savoy Ballroom in New York's Harlem neighborhood played a critical role in the development and showcasing of African-American popular culture. During its lifetime, the Savoy Ballroom significantly affected the concurrent development of jazz music and jazz dance, and laid important groundwork for racial integration. The Savoy Ballroom served as the home base for such jazz greats as William "Chick" Webb, Lucius Venable "Lucky" Millinder, and David "Panama" Francis, and launched the careers of John Birk "Dizzy" Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. Beyond music, the Lindy Hop, a partnered jazz dance that emerged at the Savoy during the late 1920s, was one of the Ballroom's cultural exports; it gained an unprecedented degree of fame and recognition during the late 1930s, and is still practiced today by communities across the United States and the world. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the cultural, social, and musical contribution made by the Savoy Ballroom to the promotion of African-American culture. The first and second chapters of this dissertation address the historical and cultural context of Harlem and the Savoy proper. The third chapter examines some of the emerging traditions behind the Savoy Ballroom's status as the "World's Finest Ballroom." The fourth and fifth chapters address the chronological and technical development of music and jazz dance at the Savoy, with particular attention given to the lasting impact of such advancements as the incorporation of swing feel into jazz. The sixth chapter examines the cultural impact of the Ballroom on contemporary and modern media, particularly print, music, film, and photography. Finally, the seventh chapter examines the Savoy Ballroom's participation in New York's World's Fair exhibition in 1939, and its impact on the worldwide export of Harlem's African-American culture

Music and Healing: Progress Towards Elysium

This dissertation explores some of the many roles music, as a healing and nurturing art, plays in support of health and wellness. The fundamental question is how does music nurture, revive, animate, and inspire us to lead healthier and richer lives? Historical and modern sources, ranging from ancient philosophical works to reports of laboratory-based investigations, suggests that music is a remarkably positive and therapeutic element in the development of happier, healthier individuals, and well-adjusted societies. This study is the outcome of three deeply personal impulses: a) the experience of one who has personally benefited from music as a healing balm; b) the performer's desire to better understand the positive reactions, both emotional and physical, of audiences to specific musical selections and genres; and c) growing evidence that society is weakened and dulled (nor can foot feel, being shod) by the loss of the collective experience of live music due to the proliferation of digital technologies that facilitate access to a complexity of recorded music choices. There is compelling scientific documentation that experience listening to and creating live music when very young is especially beneficial. If the positive seeds of music are not planted in youth, the continued disintegration of the long-standing cultural musical institutions that serve a vital role in maintaining the social fabric is threatened. The dissertation documents the authors own response to the diminution of opportunities for participation in live music: the establishment of Euterpe, a non-profit charitable organization that presents live interactive classical and jazz performance programs for children in the public school system. The work is captured and analyzed in several ways: video recordings; art work produced by the children during Euterpe programs, and analysis extracted from previously published Qualitative Research Studies which were designed by leading scientific researchers in the field

The aged south: old age and roots music in the us south, 1900-1945

This dissertation investigates experiences and representations of old age and ageing in roots music of the US South from 1900-1945. During this period, aged musicians and depictions of old age were commonplace in southern roots music. This dissertation assesses the meanings and functions of age and ageing in southern roots music in the context of the drastic economic, technological, political, social, racial, and cultural changes and tensions in the early twentieth century South. This study proposes that the production of ideas about old age in southern roots music figured into a range of anxieties about the modernising ‘New South’, and a corresponding nostalgia for the ‘Old South’. This dissertation posits that the proliferation of older people and ideas about ‘elders’ in roots music also reflected and impacted on some of the realities and beliefs about the changing age demographics and generational dynamics of the era, such as those relating to life expectancy, retirement, pensions, and an evolving sense of ‘age consciousness’. Employing a multi- and interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation revaluates roots music and southern history with new analytical frameworks from the fields of medical humanities and age studies, with a particular focus on how issues of debility, disability, and ageism intersect with other power structures. This dissertation adds the category of age to a growing literature on the cultural significances of early roots music and the mass media by analysing a range of textual, visual, and aural primary sources and synthesising secondary research to explore the age dimension of five domains of southern roots music: old fiddlers’ contests; aged musicians in the broadcasting and recording industries; ‘age masquerade’ on ‘barn dance’ radio; representations of old age on commercial ‘old-time’ and ‘race’ recordings; and folklorists John and Alan Lomax’s research for the Library of Congress into African American music

The art of persuasion: a critical survey of British animated information films (1939 2009)

Comparatively little has been written about British animated public information film and this gap in knowledge led to research, which positioned my practice as an animator in the historical and theoretical contexts of British filmmaking. My research investigates how animation creates distinctive approaches to information narratives and contributes to persuasive information communication. The animated public information film is one of several categories of information film, which are identified in my Glossary of Terms. Volume 1 of the thesis contains theoretical and historical discussion and argument. Chapter 1 is an overview of my research which generated the first comprehensive filmography of animated British public information shorts, chronologically recorded and defined from 1939 2009. Chapter 2 uses my filmography to determine the core characteristics, role and function of animated information film in the interdisciplinary contemporary era. This in turn informs my own approach to making a contemporary information film, and I also draw on some informal primary research and my critique of the historical sources identified in Chapter 1. Chapter 3, on my practice (evidenced in Volume 2), identifies how a contemporary animation responds to my research questions: How is the art of persuasion manifested in British animated information films? and How can animation practice contribute to contemporary information films made for public distribution? I focus on the history of British animation information films to assess patterns and forms affiliated with information delivery. I examine media technology and methods of communications as they evolve in a cross-media era, consider how they facilitate the production of a contemporary information film, and evaluate how I developed Tell Someone to provide information on how children, aged seven to eleven, can remain safe while on the Internet. My research establishes that British animation has been instrumental in contributing to social awareness by delivering important information to British society for over seventy years. My practice reveals that animation can make a contemporary contribution to information films. It proves to be adaptable to rapidly changing technology and capable of updating knowledge to meet new social challenges posed both by online access to technology and the new multiple platforms available for the delivery of information in the digital era

Wooster Magazine: Winter 2014

The Winter 2014 edition of the Wooster Magazine highlights many different topics. Editor Karol Crosbie gives the top 10 reasons why she likes her job as an introduction in the magazine. The beloved restaurant, The Shack, has closed its doors for good. The college\u27s radio station, WOO 91, has a new home in the basement of Lowry Center. There is a section about the plants on campus and how they are seen by different people on campus. Some students in Charles Kammer\u27s religious study course, Just Work share their experience working in Lowry Dining Hall. Karol Crosbie put together a section highlighting some alumni that are now noteworthy chefs.https://openworks.wooster.edu/wooalumnimag_2011-present/1031/thumbnail.jp