![]() Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Professor of Music Emerita, Brown University No student of jazz as a Western cultural phenomenon-or of any American music or theater in the 1920s-will dare miss this powerfully illuminating, unabashedly reliable, beautifully written book." His musical analyses of Gershwin, John Alden Carpenter, and George Antheil are not just first class but path breaking. Savran grounds his social history on a huge array of primary sources while drawing, without fanfare or jargon, on theorists such as Adorno and Bordieu. "A stunningly original analysis of music and theater in the 1920s as inseparable faces of jazz. Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University This is performance history as an innovative 'political economy of culture,' and it's a knock-out." Setting Jazz Age entertainments at one another, with 'legitimate theater' duking it out with nightclub revues and movies pummeling vaudeville, Highbrow/Lowdown tracks the rise of heavy-weight Eugene O'Neill to the top of the card, but it also makes heroes of the referees-the drama critics and audiences who crowned the winners. "Like a canny fight promoter in the perennial American culture wars, David Savran puts the reader ringside for a blow-by-blow account of the Battle of the Brows-high, middle, and low. What is intriguing about Savran's book is how these class distinctions still hold true today." points to jazzy composers such as Gershwin, who never got his due while he was writing because of his embrace of jazz. "A book about the fracturing of the theater audience in the 1920s using jazz as a lens. ![]() This intellectual study, a revelatory blending of music criticism and drama history, delves into the critical and artistic antagonisms between jazz and classical music, the serious and lively arts, as well as the old and new middle-class tastes." " Highbrow/Lowdown stakes out the secret history of how that yawning abyss between mass culture and serious theatre came about-a dynamic that still plays out to this day both in the commercial and resident theatres. the analysis of the place of various critics and the audience in a period of major cultural change involving class, race, and ethnicity is especially welcome." The venture into music history and the impact, both positive and negative, of jazz on culture, and especially the emergence of a literary art theater, is the book's most obvious unique contribution. "An elegant, erudite, and thorough study. The efforts to defeat the democratizing influences of jazz and to canonize playwrights like Eugene O'Neill triumphed, giving birth to American theater as we know it today. When the influence of jazz spread to legitimate theater, playwrights, producers, and critics rushed to distinguish the newly emerging literary theater from its illegitimate cousins. But jazz was much more than the music-it was also a powerful cultural force that brought African American, Jewish, and working-class culture into the white Protestant mainstream. society and culture, confusing and challenging long-entrenched hierarchies based on class, race, and ethnicity. The arrival of jazz in the 1920s sparked a cultural revolution that was impossible to contain. It's almost shameful but not quite because very little, other than feelings themselves, means anything anyway.Highbrow/Lowdown explores the twentieth century's first culture war and the forces that permanently transformed American theater into the art form we know today. In current times we substitute monetary value for actual worth, intellectual or otherwise, while we let others think for us and we end up beholden to the untrustworthy, unscrupulous and vacant, but who are best at the game. It comes down to ideas like what is desirable, what is acceptable, but it never gets to ideas like what is really true about physics, love, infinity, identity. We listen to those who tell us the works in the Whitney are highbrow and we believe them. Were the hut dwellers unintelligent? Probably. I go to (the supposedly highbrow) museum and see carvings that were painted two thousand years ago and meant to protect the occupants of some equatorial hut from spiritual intrusions. Good grief- lowbrow and highbrow are just echoes of the pronouncements of some celebrity twit imposing their values on others.
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