The Development Of The American Musical.

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The Development Of The American Musical.

The American musical was a main type of entertainment in the twentieth century. They were always full of lively plots, remarkable songs. The musical provided a way of escaping from everyday life into a world of fantasy, especially during the sombre days of world war two. Musicals today are different today the issues, orchestration style etc have changed dramatically over the years by looking at a variety of shows we can see exactly how they have changed.

        First I will look at ‘SHOWBOAT’. Showboat was written in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, and was described as “Perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musicals” It was the first novel to be turned into a musical making a stamp in the history of American Musical history. The novel was originally written by Edna Ferber about the lives of the people who lived on the Mississippi and was already a success, kern and Hammerstein were able to place songs into it that would help to clarify and jazz up the plot Kern said “ songs must be suited to the action and mood of the play” and in showboat his songs helped us to see certain aspects of the characters and also to create certain moods during the play. This was completely different to the vaudeville musical with the unnecessary songs and weak storyline.

        Showboat went against convention by starting the play with a group of negro Americans singing about their lives on quite a sombre note instead of the expected “scantily clad chorus girls”. This was a play that was dealing with severe issues and realistic problems that included racial prejudice kern helped to show the theme of racism with the clever use of Negro rhythms, ragtime numbers and the sound of the banjo.

Kern also used “leitmotifs” (A distinct melodic fragment that represents an emotion, idea object or person) to help us to get a good idea of character and mood. An example of this is when he represents the river as a perfect fourth this is an interval associated with nature.

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Also kern used a three-note theme in the melodies sung by the people who are most closely connected to the river. Kern added an extra note to the perfect fourth thus keeping the link with nature while creating a new idea.

This idea is then upturned to create the opening melody line for “Ol Man River”. This song was written for Paul Robeson, it contains effective, emotive words to communicate the difficulty they were having thus emphasing the racial theme again.

Showboat was a hit with the ...

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