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Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four authors suggests that cultural \"mixing\" constitutes one of the central preoccupations of modernist literature. Valuable for any reader interested in the intersections between American literature and the history of American popular music, Henson situates the literary use of popular music as a culturally amalgamated, boundary-crossing form of expression that reflects and defines modern American identities.

Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janácek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatisation of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Whaley traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and beatnik caricatures. The book breaks new ground in showing how jazz shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life.

Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans , reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women’s studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction. Saadi Simawe is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Grinnell College, Iowa.

Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they 'fail' to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers' and readers' most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.

How have American writers written about jazz, and how has jazz influenced American literature? InFascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and literature, looking at jazz musicians and the themes literature has garnered from them by appropriating the style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development of twentieth-century American literature. Yaffe explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's descriptions of Louis Armstrong led to a \"neoconservative\" movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed the red light origins of jazz. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it--often with problematic results.Fascinating Rhythmstops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.

Melding memorable music and inspiring history, Freedom Song presents a fresh perspective on the civil rights movement by showing how songs of hope, faith, and freedom strengthened the movement and served as its voice. In this eye-opening account, you'll discover how churches and other groups--from the SNCC Freedom Singers to the Chicago Children's Choir--transformed music both religious and secular into electrifying anthems that furthered the struggle for civil rights.   From rallies to marches to mass meetings, music was ever-present in the movement. People sang songs to give themselves courage and determination, to spread their message to others, to console each other as they sat in jail. The music they shared took many different forms, including traditional spirituals once sung by slaves, jazz and blues music, and gospel, folk, and pop songs. Freedom Song explores in detail the galvanizing roles of numerous songs, including \"Lift Every Voice and Sing,\" \"The Battle of Jericho,\" \"Wade in the Water,\" and \"We Shall Overcome.\"   As Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others took a stand against prejudice and segregation, a Chicago minister named Chris Moore started a children's choir that embraced the spirit of the civil rights movement and brought young people of different races together, young people who lent their voices to support African Americans struggling for racial equality. More than 50 years later, the Chicago Children's Choir continues its commitment to freedom and justice. An accompanying CD, Songs on the Road to Freedom, features the CCC performing the songs discussed throughout the book.

Federico García Lorca (1889-1936) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century; Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is Spain’s most performed composer of the same period. The two were very different – Lorca was gay, liberal, and a member of the avant garde , while Falla was a devout Catholic – yet they had a profound mutual influence. The two developed an intimate friendship, which ended when Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca in Tune with Falla is the first book to trace Lorca’s impact on Falla’s music, and Falla’s influence on Lorca’s writings. Nelson R. Orringer explores the music underlying Poem of Deep Song , Gypsy Ballads , and Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías , bringing out the analogous sounds and ideas that emerge in the active, ongoing connection between the artworks of both creators. The book emphasizes how this harmony increases knowledge and appreciation of both artists.

Examining American realist fiction as it was informed and shaped by the music of the period, Sounding Real sheds new light on the profound musical and cultural change at the turn of the twentieth century.   Sounding Real by Cristina L. Ruotolo examines landmark changes in American musical standards and tastes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the way they are reflected in American literature of the period. Whereas other interdisciplinary approaches to music and literature often focus on more recent popular music and black music that began with blues and jazz, Ruotolo addresses the literary response to the music that occurred in the decades before the Jazz Age.   By bringing together canonical and lesser-known works by authors like Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Harold Fredric, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Atherton, Ruotolo argues that new, emerging musical forms were breaking free from nineteenth-century constraints, and that the elemental authenticity or real -ness that this new music articulated sparked both interest and anxiety in literature: What are the effects of an emancipated musicality on self and society? How can literature dramatize musical encounters between people otherwise segregated by class, race, ethnicity, or gender?   By examining the influence of an increasingly aggressive and progressive musical marketplace on the realm of literature, Sounding Real depicts a dynamic dialogue between two art forms that itself leads to a broader discussion of how art speaks to society.