Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era

Abstract

Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era. By Larry Hamberlin. NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-533892-8 This is a well--researched, eloquent, thoroughly-documented, and fascinating book, and reminds us of the unlimited possibilities for research on more obscure music topics because of the rich availability of internet sources, especially in the wealth of popular sheet music collections, with indexes, cataloging, and cross references. In order to do books like this a generation ago, a researcher would have also had to be a compulsive collector of such musical obscurities. Before the World Wide Web, such a pursuit might have taken a lifetime just to gather the musical examples, not to mention the analysis and writing. The fresh scent of this book reveals the spirit of what scholarship is all about: that sense of adventure, of exploration when we let the material take us where it will. Hamberlin explains that this book was an outgrowth of his research into the uses if European classical music in early jazz, as in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. These forgotten operatic novelty--grand-opera popular songs--tell us much about the enormous changes taking place in American society at the beginning of the twentieth century as reflected in the popular music of the time. Hamberlin, an Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College where he teaches courses in European and American popular and classical music, begins with the observation that little bits of opera turn up "in unexpected corners of American popular culture, including movies (for example The Marx Brothers), jazz and lowbrow stage comedies" and asked the question, what can be learned about the people who sang and listened to these songs and "in particular how they saw themselves in relation to others, including the Europeans whose music they borrowed?' The book focuses on the period between 1900 and 1920, during which the differences between highbrow and lowbrow culture in the United States were differentiated. Many today forget that in nineteenth century America, opera was popular music with deep roots in American popular culture, and that knowing opera was a part of cultural literacy of American society for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, coast to coast, men and women. Because European-derived opera was considered elite culture by the popular masses, operatic novelty songs became a vehicle of social criticism. Hundreds of Tin Pan Alley songs were written about operatic subject matter. Some of them spoofed opera, some quoted from operas, and some alluded to operatic characters or opera stars. Hamberlin gives us a guided tour through a wide variety of subtopics that arise in an examination of this unique repertoire, at the very moment when American popular music was moving away from its European roots. This insightful work is divided into three parts: Caruso and His Cousins; Salome and Her Sisters; and Ephraham and His Equals. In 2004 the Society of American Music awarded Hamberlin the Mark Tucker Prize for his paper "Caruso and His Cousins: Portraits of Italian Americans in the Operatic Novelty Songs of Edwards and Madden," which forms the basis of this section of the book. It covers issues related to Italian immigration and Italian dialect songs. Chapter 2 discusses the impact of opera stars Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini and songs inspired by them. Part II covers "Scheming Young Ladies," "Vision of Salome," and "Poor Little Butterfly." "Scheming Young Ladies" discusses how the peak of the women's suffrage movement coincided with ragtime and the ridicule of women singers, especially sopranos, and women music students and their relationships with their (male) teachers. He discusses the male discomfort with the spectacle of the female singer, "vulnerable to the false encouragement of scheming men, she becomes too heavy and her professional independence is impugned by the implication that she supplements her income by selling sexual favors" (p. …