"On My Way": The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess

Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240134
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A former New York Times music critic and award-winning author describes the contributions of the stage and film master director to Gershwin's classic American folk opera that originally premiered in 1935.

"On My Way": The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess

Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240134
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A former New York Times music critic and award-winning author describes the contributions of the stage and film master director to Gershwin's classic American folk opera that originally premiered in 1935.

"On My Way"

Author: Joseph Horovitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A former New York Times music critic and award-winning author describes the contributions of the stage and film master director to Gershwin's classic American folk opera that originally premiered in 1935.

"On My Way": The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess

Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240592
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A revelatory history of the operatic masterpiece that both made and destroyed Rouben Mamoulian, its director and unsung hero. "Bring my goat!" Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess, whom he loves, has left for New York City, and he’s determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment—New York is a great distance from South Carolina’s Catfish Row—Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and leads the community in an ecstatic finale, "Oh Lawd, I’m on my way." Stephen Sondheim has called "Bring my goat!" "one of the most moving moments in musical theater history." For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward—the author of the seminal novella and subsequent play, Porgy, and later the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess—penned this historic line. In fact, both it and "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way" were added to the play eight years earlier by that production’s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of this master director. Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, award-winning author Joseph Horowitz shows that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward's vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of suffering and redemption. Part biography, part revelatory history, "On My Way" re-creates Mamoulian's visionary style on stage and screen, his collaboration with George Gershwin, and the genesis of the opera that changed the face of American musical life.

Porgy

Porgy PDF Author: DuBose Heyward
Publisher: Bibliotech Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Basis for light opera Porgy and Bess. Story of crippled Negro beggar and his friends and enemies in Charleston, S.C.

Porgy

Porgy PDF Author: Dorothy Heyward
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description


The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical

The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical PDF Author: Raymond Knapp
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195385942
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website.Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.

Summertime: George Gershwin's Life in Music

Summertime: George Gershwin's Life in Music PDF Author: Richard Crawford
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635414
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
The life of a beloved American composer reflected through his music, writings, and letters. New York City native and gifted pianist George Gershwin blossomed as an accompanist before his talent as a songwriter opened the way to Broadway, where he fashioned his own brand of American music. He composed a long run of musical comedies, many with his brother Ira as lyricist, but his aspirations reached beyond commercial success. A lifetime learner, Gershwin was able to appeal to listeners on both sides of the purported popular-classical divide. In 1924—when he was just twenty-five—he bridged that gap with his first instrumental composition, Rhapsody in Blue, an instant classic premiered by Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra, as the anchor of a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” From that time forward his work as a composer, pianist, and citizen of the Jazz Age made him in some circles a leader on America’s musical scene. The late1920s found him extending the range of the shows he scored to include the United Kingdom, and he published several articles to reveal his thinking about a range of musical matters. Moreover, having polished his skills as an orchestrator, he pushed boundaries again in 1935 with the groundbreaking folk opera, Porgy and Bess—his magnum opus. Gershwin’s talent and warmth made him a presence in New York’s musical and social circles (and linked him romantically with pianist-composer Kay Swift). In 1936 he and Ira moved west to write songs for Hollywood. Their work was cut short, however, when George developed a brain tumor and died at thirty-eight, a beloved American artist. Drawing extensively from letters and contemporaneous accounts, acclaimed music historian Richard Crawford traces the arc of Gershwin’s remarkable life, seamlessly blending colorful anecdotes with a discussion of Gershwin’s unforgettable oeuvre. His days on earth were limited to the summertime of life. But the spirit and inventive vitality of the music he left behind lives on.

The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin

The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin PDF Author: Anna Harwell Celenza
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423531
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Explores how Gershwin's iconic music was shaped by American political, intellectual, cultural and business interests as well as technological advances.

Defining Cinema

Defining Cinema PDF Author: Michael Slowik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197511236
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Defining Cinema: Rouben Mamoulian and Hollywood Film Style, 1929-1957 takes a holistic look at Mamoulian's oeuvre by examining both his stage and his screen work, and also brings together insights from his correspondence, his theories on film, and analysis of the films themselves. It presents a filmmaker whose work was innovative and exciting, who pushed hard on cinema's potential as an artform, and who in many ways helped move cinema towards the kind of entertainment that it remains today.

Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists

Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists PDF Author: Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316518469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Unique account of how ordinary people shaped Soviet-American relations in the 1930s told through the adventures of two Russian humourists.