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Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz looks at the role played by 1920s musical shorts in crafting studio identity and establishing American film sound. It argues that the persistence of opera and jazz on the soundtrack during and after the conversion produces a fragmentary text and encourages an active spectator.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Archiving America: Sound Technology and Musical Representation
- Chapter 2 Opera Cut Short: From the Castrato to the Film Fragment
- Chapter 3 Selling Jazz Short: Hollywood and the Fantasy of Musical Agency
- Chapter 4 Opera and Jazz in the Score: Toward a New Spectatorship
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
About the author
Jennifer Fleeger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College. Her second book, Mismatched Women: The Voice Meets the Machine, will also appear in Oxford's Music/Media Series.
Summary
Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz looks at the role played by 1920s musical shorts in crafting studio identity and establishing American film sound. It argues that the persistence of opera and jazz on the soundtrack during and after the conversion produces a fragmentary text and encourages an active spectator.
Additional text
Essential scholarship not only explaining the coming of sound to Hollywood cinema, but also a major contribution to the role music plays in the Classic text. Brilliantly brings together technological history and musical analysis.
