Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow

This handbook seeks to reanimate the music, institutions, and audiences that made up the cultural middle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by investigating the wealth of middlebrow culture that bridged the space between highbrow and lowbrow music. With case studies ranging from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, from opera criticism to rock journalism, it brings together scholars of classical and popular music to present a new, enriched narrative of music history.

List of contents

• Introduction


• Kate Guthrie and Christopher Chowrimootoo


• Part I: Representation


• 1. Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle


• Stephen Hinton


• 2. Plain Tunes for Plain Men? Opera and the "Man in the Street" in 1920s Britain


• Alexandra Wilson


• 3. On or about 1932: The Mechanized Middlebrow, the BBC, and the Amateur


• Sarah Collins


• 4. Tchaikovsky in Hollywood. Do we listen?


• Peter Franklin


• 5. Bread and Champagne: Stalinist Musical Comedies of the 1930s and the Soviet Middlebrow


• Peter Kupfer


• 6. Music and the Good Life in Postwar Britain: The Phenomenon of Eileen Joyce


• Heather Wiebe


• 7. Samuel Barber's A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American Middlebrow


• Jacques Dupuis


• 8. Fringe or Middle? Assessing Rock as Late 20th-Century Middlebrow


• Chris McDonald


• 9. Raising a Brow: Sondheim and the Cultural Status of the Broadway Musical


• Dana Gooley


• Part II: Mediation


• 10. Canned Music, Canned Culture: John Philip Sousa and the Proto-Middlebrow


• Keir Keightley


• 11. Forging a Middlebrow Canon in Edwardian London: Landon Ronald and the New Symphony Orchestra


• Simon McVeigh


• 12. How the Early Recorded Operatic Middlebrow was Made


• Karen Henson


• 13. Resisting Middlebrow Mediation: Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" in Interwar Britain


• Laura Tunbridge


• 14. "All these songs help us to trace history": Black Women and the Black Music History Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance Era


• Lucy Caplan


• 15. The Child and the Musical Masterpiece


• Kate Guthrie


• 16. Public Jazz Education and the Mediation of Jazz History in US Middlebrow Culture (1917-1951)


• Mario Dunkel


• 17. Print Culture and the Mediation of the Classical Canon in the Twentieth-Century United States


• Joan Shelley Rubin


• 18. Symphonies Serious or for Fun: Malcolm Arnold, the BBC, and the Production of Taste


• Philip Rupprecht


• 19. Vera Lynn in Nashville (1977): White Working-Class Femininity and Transatlantic Affinities


• Christina Baade


• Part III: Style


• 20. New Objectivity and the Middlebrow


• John Gabriel


• 21. From Berlin to New York: Kurt Weill, the Fantaisie Symphonique, and the Middlebrow


• Emily MacGregor


• 22. Socialist Realism, Kitsch, and the Middlebrow Symphony


• Pauline Fairclough


• 23. Paul Whiteman and Glorified "Modern American Music," 1927-1934


• John Howland


• 24. Glière's Light Style


• Simon Morrison


• 25. Bond in the Middle: Swinging between High and Low in the Aspirational 1960s


• Kevin Salfen


• 26. Middlebrow Compositional Aesthetics in 1970s Pop-Rock


• Nick Braae


• Index

About the author

Kate Guthrie is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. She is author of The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain, which received the North American British Music Studies Association's Diana McVeagh Prize. She has published numerous articles, including her award-winning pieces in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Music and Letters. Before joining Bristol, she undertook her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southampton and her AHRC-funded doctoral research at King's College London. She is on the board of Twentieth-Century Music.

Christopher Chowrimootoo is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide and co-editor of "Musicology and the Middlebrow," a colloquy published in Journal of the American Musicological Society. He has published in such leading journals as Twentieth-Century Music,

Journal of Musicology, and Cambridge Opera Journal, and has won prizes from the Royal Musical Association and the Kurt Weill Foundation.

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes.

While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond.

The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.

Product details

• Authors: Kate (Senior Lecturer in Music Guthrie
• Assisted by: Christopher Chowrimootoo (Editor), Kate Guthrie (Editor), Guthrie Kate (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 06.03.2025
• EAN: 9780197523933
• ISBN: 978-0-19-752393-3
• No. of pages: 632
• Series: Oxford Handbooks
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music history; MUSIC / History & Criticism, HISTORY / Historiography, MUSIC / Philosophy & Social Aspects, Music reviews & criticism, Music reviews and criticism