|
Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde
|
| Price: | $65.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
12 new or used available from $53.00
Average customer review:
Product Description
When and how did popular music earn so much cultural capital? To find out, Bernard Gendron investigates five key historical moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances. He begins at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris's Montmartre district, where cabarets showcased popular music alongside poetry readings in spaces decorated with modernist art works. Two decades later, Parisian poets and musicians "slumming" in jazz clubs assimilated jazz's aesthetics in their performances and compositions. In the bebop revolution in mid-1940s America, jazz returned the compliment by absorbing modernist devices and postures, in effect transforming itself into an avant-garde art form. Mid-1960s rock music, under the leadership of the Beatles, went from being reviled as vulgar music to being acclaimed as a cutting-edge art form. Finally, Gendron takes us to the Mudd Club in the late 1970s, where New York punk and new wave rockers were setting the aesthetic agenda for a new generation of artists.
Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the intersections between high and low culture, art and music, or history and aesthetics.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2177368 in Books
- Published on: 2002-04-08
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Gendron (philosophy, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Technology and the Human Condition) here traces the interaction between "high" and "low" culture specifically, between modernist visual art and popular music from the cabarets of Paris's Montmartre district in the 1880s through New York City's "art after midnight" clubs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In scrupulously documented detail, he examines the development of the elite/mass, art/pop dialectic within its social and historical context in the 20th century, such as the metamorphosis of jazz from Dixieland into bebop, incorporating modernist postures, and the metamorphosis of rock from the Beatles into punk and new wave, aided and abetted by Warhol and Waring. With unprecedented depth, detail, and dedication, Gendron illustrates how jazz and rock, once considered banal entertainment, came to be validated as art forms. The author's language and references to Foucault, Lyotard, and Adorno will make this book useful for all academic libraries, though it will be an especially valuable addition to popular culture collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popular music was considered vulgar entertainment. But today, jazz and rock music are seen as forms of art, and their lead practitioners are regularly accorded a status on a par with the cultural elite. When and how did popular music earn so much cultural capital? To find out, Bernard Gendron investigates five key historical moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances. Covering cabarets, jazz, rock and roll, punk rock, and new wave, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club locates the historical points where music and high art collided. It is a book that should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the intersections between high and low culture, art and music, or history and aesthetics.
About the Author
Bernard Gendron is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Technology and the Human Condition.
Customer Reviews
A STUDY IN THE AVANT_GARDE
This is an enjoyable book which talks about popular music, and how it has intermingled its way with avant garde ideas. This book is a great read particularly bercuse it has a section all about the "No Wave" movment of the late 70s-early 80s.
