Broadway Highbrow Discourse and Politics of the American Musical, 1943-1946.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation describes how perceptions of cultural hierarchy have governed the reception, performance, and composition of the American musical theater during the mid 1940s. Its central argument is that shared concepts of highbrow, middlebrow. and lowbrow governed the ways in which composers, producers, and audiences interacted with music and with one another in aesthetic contexts. These emblems of cultural status consisted of ritualized behaviors and recognizable rhetoric that were specific and appropriate to any given artistic venue. This study shows that composers could, and did, play strategically off received notions of cultural hierarchy in order to make interventions into social debate of the time.
Chapter 1 provides an investigation of the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. It describes the emblems of sophistication people have deployed to convey (and thereby "performed" for one another) their musical preferences. In other words, it describes how everyday cultural choices---how one acted in the concert hall, how one spoke about music, how one chose what to listen to, and even how one decided what not to listen to---have constituted an enactment of taste.
After an examination of these discursive patterns, this study describes how a number of composers, librettists, and producers on Broadway in the mid-1940s adapted their scripts, scores, and advertising campaigns to exploit this polarized rhetoric, thereby taking part in social debates of the early Cold War.
Chapter 2 describes the cultural discourse surrounding Richard Rodgers's and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1943 musical Oklahoma! Most surveys of Broadway cite this show as the first "integrated" musical, a term that has designated the cohesion of plot, music, libretto, and dance into one seamless form. As such, this musical has become a watershed moment in most histories of the genre. However, this chapter maintains that integration was not simply a formal property, but that Hammerstein also used the word as discursive ploy to cast himself as a highbrow artist. In doing so, he provided an aesthetic vocabulary by which Broadway could enter heated social debates about the role that the United States should assume in international intellectual culture of World War II.
The focus of Chapter 3 is Billy Rose's revue The Seven Lively Arts (1944). Rose also took part in highbrow culture by hiring dancers from the Ballets Russes and composer Igor Stravinsky to write for his Broadway show, but he did so to opposite cultural ends. Ultimately, if Hammerstein's rhetoric expressed a highbrow values system. Rose's was aggressively middlebrow.
While some scholars have argued that Broadway shed its overtly partisan tendencies after the 1920s and 1930s (with a few notable exceptions), this study demonstrates how the musical stage of the 1940s continued to be an aggressive participant in the variegated, polyglot American culture of those years. To this end, Chapter 4 investigates successive drafts of Duke Ellington's and John LaTouche's Beggar's Holiday (1946). Early versions of this musical contained explicit Communist rhetoric, but as this show was redacted for Broadway the blatantly political material was replaced with rhetoric that explicitly juxtaposed "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture. Although it may not appear socially divisive to scholars today, it was polarizing at the time.
Ultimately, my dissertation describes how an understanding of the categories of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow can offer new points of entry in to scholarly discussion of the ways in which the Broadway musical intervened into public debate.