Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0301
Rebecca Lentjes
On a rainy Saturday in May 2018, I visited an independent abortion clinic in the Southeast.1 Known as a “destination clinic” within the antiabortion movement, this abortion clinic gets bombarded by the sounds of hundreds of antiabortion protesters from multiple protest groups every weekend. In this city, a local noise ordinance permits amplified sound up to 75 decibels starting at 8:00 a.m., as long as the assembled faction applies for a sound permit up to a week before. According to volunteers and a clinic administrator, every week protesters from the same prayer ministries successfully apply for the permit. On Saturday mornings the protesters assemble on the sidewalk, road, and grassy area across the street from the clinic. As patients drive up the winding road toward the clinic, they become confused by the obstacle course they must navigate. The road is lined with groups of shouting protesters, police cars, and RVs offering “crisis pregnancy” care and free pregnancy tests. Individual protesters sometimes run out in front of the approaching vehicles, waving their hands and shouting, “No!,” “Stop!,” and “Don’t go in there!” When I visited, the first wave of protesters arrived and started setting up before the clinic opened at 7:30 a.m. A handful of protesters, the majority of whom were white men, gathered on the sidewalk under a
{"title":"The Sonic Politics of the US Abortion Wars","authors":"Rebecca Lentjes","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0301","url":null,"abstract":"On a rainy Saturday in May 2018, I visited an independent abortion clinic in the Southeast.1 Known as a “destination clinic” within the antiabortion movement, this abortion clinic gets bombarded by the sounds of hundreds of antiabortion protesters from multiple protest groups every weekend. In this city, a local noise ordinance permits amplified sound up to 75 decibels starting at 8:00 a.m., as long as the assembled faction applies for a sound permit up to a week before. According to volunteers and a clinic administrator, every week protesters from the same prayer ministries successfully apply for the permit. On Saturday mornings the protesters assemble on the sidewalk, road, and grassy area across the street from the clinic. As patients drive up the winding road toward the clinic, they become confused by the obstacle course they must navigate. The road is lined with groups of shouting protesters, police cars, and RVs offering “crisis pregnancy” care and free pregnancy tests. Individual protesters sometimes run out in front of the approaching vehicles, waving their hands and shouting, “No!,” “Stop!,” and “Don’t go in there!” When I visited, the first wave of protesters arrived and started setting up before the clinic opened at 7:30 a.m. A handful of protesters, the majority of whom were white men, gathered on the sidewalk under a","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43330149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0365
David Verbuč
I start this article, which is about the role of nonmusicians in creating and sustaining music doityourself (DIY) scenes in the United States, with a short ethnographic and biographical insight into the article’s main concerns. I introduce in this regard a DIY organizer named Rick Ele and some of his ruminations on the topic. Rick was a longtime live music organizer in the Davis and Sacramento, California, DIY scenes, and in that way, although he is not a musician himself, significantly contributed to the local music DIY culture. He booked a significant proportion of all the DIY shows in the area in the late 1990s and the 2000s, and he also arranged regional and national tours for local DIY musicians. Rick often organized shows in multiple local DIY houses (including DAM Haus in Davis, where he lived for several years), in other local DIY spaces (e.g., the Hub in Sacramento), and in some local bars and community centers. He was also an active organizer of DIY shows in Portland, Oregon, for a brief period of time when he was studying there in the early 1990s. In addition, Rick was a radio DJ at the local student and community radio KDVS in Davis, where he also ran his own radio show, Art for Spastics, between 1995 and 2005. He also held various administrative positions at KDVS and was responsible for managing educational radio seminars for new volunteers in each new school term.
{"title":"Nonmusicians as “Pillars” and “Icons” of US DIY Music Scenes","authors":"David Verbuč","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0365","url":null,"abstract":"I start this article, which is about the role of nonmusicians in creating and sustaining music doityourself (DIY) scenes in the United States, with a short ethnographic and biographical insight into the article’s main concerns. I introduce in this regard a DIY organizer named Rick Ele and some of his ruminations on the topic. Rick was a longtime live music organizer in the Davis and Sacramento, California, DIY scenes, and in that way, although he is not a musician himself, significantly contributed to the local music DIY culture. He booked a significant proportion of all the DIY shows in the area in the late 1990s and the 2000s, and he also arranged regional and national tours for local DIY musicians. Rick often organized shows in multiple local DIY houses (including DAM Haus in Davis, where he lived for several years), in other local DIY spaces (e.g., the Hub in Sacramento), and in some local bars and community centers. He was also an active organizer of DIY shows in Portland, Oregon, for a brief period of time when he was studying there in the early 1990s. In addition, Rick was a radio DJ at the local student and community radio KDVS in Davis, where he also ran his own radio show, Art for Spastics, between 1995 and 2005. He also held various administrative positions at KDVS and was responsible for managing educational radio seminars for new volunteers in each new school term.","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42949060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0325
David C. Paul
The second act of the musical Show Boat begins on the bustling Midway Plaisance, storied entertainment district for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (figure 1). In the original production, which premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, on November 25, 1927, and made its Broadway debut on December 27 of that same year, the exposition visitors were played by members of an all- white chorus. A second chorus, constituted of Black singers, did not appear onstage until near the end of the scene. Dressed as Dahomians, they sallied forth from the entrance to their “village,” stage right on Joseph Urban’s set (figure 2). Jerome Kern, the musical’s composer, heralded their arrival with primitivist fare: a rhythmic ostinato played in unison by the orchestra, joined by an ominous melody in the lower brass. The men in the Black chorus sing first, laying into an aggressive motive. Eight measures after their entry the whole complex shifts up a half step, and the intervallic content is amplified, the prominent perfect fourth replaced by a minor sixth. At this juncture the women enter and engage in antiphonal exchanges with the men. The section culminates with the Black chorus—men and women—singing together, emphatically land-ing on an F- sharp dominant seventh chord. The lyrics, penned by Oscar Hammerstein II, are the chanted nonsense syllables of a stereotypical David C. Paul
{"title":"Race and the Legacy of the World’s Columbian Exposition in American Popular Theater from the Gilded Age to Show Boat (1927)","authors":"David C. Paul","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0325","url":null,"abstract":"The second act of the musical Show Boat begins on the bustling Midway Plaisance, storied entertainment district for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (figure 1). In the original production, which premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, on November 25, 1927, and made its Broadway debut on December 27 of that same year, the exposition visitors were played by members of an all- white chorus. A second chorus, constituted of Black singers, did not appear onstage until near the end of the scene. Dressed as Dahomians, they sallied forth from the entrance to their “village,” stage right on Joseph Urban’s set (figure 2). Jerome Kern, the musical’s composer, heralded their arrival with primitivist fare: a rhythmic ostinato played in unison by the orchestra, joined by an ominous melody in the lower brass. The men in the Black chorus sing first, laying into an aggressive motive. Eight measures after their entry the whole complex shifts up a half step, and the intervallic content is amplified, the prominent perfect fourth replaced by a minor sixth. At this juncture the women enter and engage in antiphonal exchanges with the men. The section culminates with the Black chorus—men and women—singing together, emphatically land-ing on an F- sharp dominant seventh chord. The lyrics, penned by Oscar Hammerstein II, are the chanted nonsense syllables of a stereotypical David C. Paul","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42590463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0394
Eduardo Herrera
1. For example, see Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), Music in Mexico, a Historical Survey (New York: Crowell, 1952), The Music of Peru: Aboriginal and Viceroyal Epochs (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1960), Music in Aztec & Inca Territory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), and Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington, DC: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1970). Ever prolific, Stevenson also published and contributed articles and reviews to the journal Inter-American Music Review, as well as writing literally hundreds of entries for various reference works, especially the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
{"title":"The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History by Pablo Palomino (review)","authors":"Eduardo Herrera","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0394","url":null,"abstract":"1. For example, see Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), Music in Mexico, a Historical Survey (New York: Crowell, 1952), The Music of Peru: Aboriginal and Viceroyal Epochs (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1960), Music in Aztec & Inca Territory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), and Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington, DC: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1970). Ever prolific, Stevenson also published and contributed articles and reviews to the journal Inter-American Music Review, as well as writing literally hundreds of entries for various reference works, especially the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43285803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0265
Elisabeth Le Guin
{"title":"“One Fine Night in Veracruz”","authors":"Elisabeth Le Guin","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0265","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47738795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0391
W. Clark
{"title":"Músicas coloniales a debate: Procesos de intercambio euroamericanos ed. by Javier Marín López (review)","authors":"W. Clark","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.3.0391","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47341019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0169
Elizabeth Randell Upton
Disneyland plays with time and space, presenting fantasies based on displacement from the present. Frontierland invites guests to visit America’s past, while Tomorrowland sends them to the future; Adventureland draws on settings around the globe, while Fantasyland builds on stories of the European medieval past. As with the films on which it draws, Disneyland uses music as an element of theming, along with architecture, color, greenery, scent, and other background noises, to help set the stage for guests’ imagination of different places and times. However, when using music as scenery, historical accuracy often takes second place to emotional impact. The soundtrack for the 1973 (non-Disney) film The Sting provides a good example: while set in 1936, the film’s soundtrack features ragtime music by Scott Joplin written decades earlier. The anachronism doesn’t register for listeners because of the way the past is fungible; our sense of what is old-fashioned isn’t tied to some particular year, so anything “old-timey” can help create a sense of “pastness.” The Main Street Electrical Parade, introduced on the evening of June 17, 1972, was the first nighttime parade at Disneyland. With all the lights on Main Street turned off, twenty-two individual floats covered in six hundred thousand colored light bulbs create a dazzling and glittering effect.1 The twenty-minute parade ran at Disneyland for twenty-four
{"title":"Nostalgia for a Past Futurism: The Main Street Electrical Parade","authors":"Elizabeth Randell Upton","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0169","url":null,"abstract":"Disneyland plays with time and space, presenting fantasies based on displacement from the present. Frontierland invites guests to visit America’s past, while Tomorrowland sends them to the future; Adventureland draws on settings around the globe, while Fantasyland builds on stories of the European medieval past. As with the films on which it draws, Disneyland uses music as an element of theming, along with architecture, color, greenery, scent, and other background noises, to help set the stage for guests’ imagination of different places and times. However, when using music as scenery, historical accuracy often takes second place to emotional impact. The soundtrack for the 1973 (non-Disney) film The Sting provides a good example: while set in 1936, the film’s soundtrack features ragtime music by Scott Joplin written decades earlier. The anachronism doesn’t register for listeners because of the way the past is fungible; our sense of what is old-fashioned isn’t tied to some particular year, so anything “old-timey” can help create a sense of “pastness.” The Main Street Electrical Parade, introduced on the evening of June 17, 1972, was the first nighttime parade at Disneyland. With all the lights on Main Street turned off, twenty-two individual floats covered in six hundred thousand colored light bulbs create a dazzling and glittering effect.1 The twenty-minute parade ran at Disneyland for twenty-four","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45092403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0237
Colleen Montgomery
Since the 1990s, international box-office revenue has come to account for an increasingly large share of the major Hollywood studios’ theatrical profits, particularly for animated and family-oriented feature films.1 Reflecting this broader trend in the media industries over the last two decades, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ feature films have consistently derived 60 percent or more of total box-office income from international markets. As global film markets have become critical to Disney’s boxoffice success, the studio has concomitantly expanded its efforts significantly to localize its animated features for non-English-language audiences through voice dubbing. Since its establishment in 1988, the studio’s dubbing division, Disney Character Voices International (henceforth DCVI), has not only dramatically expanded its dubbing production budgets but also roughly doubled the number of dubbed versions it produces of each Disney animated feature. For example, whereas The Lion King (1994) was originally dubbed into fifteen languages, DCVI now routinely crafts upward of forty dubbed versions of each new Disney animated feature film. Indeed, Moana (2016), the focus of this study, was dubbed into a record forty-six languages and dialects. The studio’s heightened allocation of resources to its dubbing operations speaks not only to largescale economic trends in the global film industry but also to an awareness
{"title":"From Moana to Vaiana: Voicing the French and Tahitian Dubbed Versions of Disney's Moana","authors":"Colleen Montgomery","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0237","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1990s, international box-office revenue has come to account for an increasingly large share of the major Hollywood studios’ theatrical profits, particularly for animated and family-oriented feature films.1 Reflecting this broader trend in the media industries over the last two decades, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ feature films have consistently derived 60 percent or more of total box-office income from international markets. As global film markets have become critical to Disney’s boxoffice success, the studio has concomitantly expanded its efforts significantly to localize its animated features for non-English-language audiences through voice dubbing. Since its establishment in 1988, the studio’s dubbing division, Disney Character Voices International (henceforth DCVI), has not only dramatically expanded its dubbing production budgets but also roughly doubled the number of dubbed versions it produces of each Disney animated feature. For example, whereas The Lion King (1994) was originally dubbed into fifteen languages, DCVI now routinely crafts upward of forty dubbed versions of each new Disney animated feature film. Indeed, Moana (2016), the focus of this study, was dubbed into a record forty-six languages and dialects. The studio’s heightened allocation of resources to its dubbing operations speaks not only to largescale economic trends in the global film industry but also to an awareness","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47179621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0262
Sophia M. Enriquez
{"title":"Earl Scruggs and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”: The Making of an American Classic","authors":"Sophia M. Enriquez","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0262","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41480101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0138
Daniel Batchelder
Historians tend to gravitate toward beginnings. Accordingly, the sizeable body of literature surrounding the Walt Disney Studios’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) offers scholars a tantalizing collection of “firsts” that indicate the film’s momentous achievements in the history of cinema with little uncertainty.1 While Snow White was not the world’s first feature-length animated film, it was the first with sound, the first with color, and the first created using the technique of cel animation, requiring studio workers to hand-paint and individually photograph hundreds of thousands of celluloid panes. More broadly, Snow White also stands as the first animated feature to find lasting critical and popular success. The film received near unanimously glowing reviews in the American press, suggesting that the Walt Disney Studios’ herculean effort to create a movie without recourse to a direct predecessor had paid off handsomely. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s W. Ward Marsh, for example, was not alone when he claimed that Snow White “is the greatest cartoon ever made. In many respects it is the greatest film ever produced.”2 Yet too concerted a focus on the film’s technical and critical achievements can blind us to the contemporary historical and cultural events that surrounded its creation. With a few noteworthy exceptions, film histories have tended to overlook a significant facet of Snow White’s many accomplishments: its status as the world’s first feature-length animated
历史学家往往倾向于开创历史。因此，围绕华特迪士尼工作室（Walt Disney Studios）的《白雪公主与七个小矮人》（Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs，1937）的大量文献为学者们提供了一系列诱人的“第一”，这些“第一”表明了这部电影在电影史上取得的重大成就，几乎没有什么不确定性。1虽然《白雪公主》不是世界上第一部长篇动画电影，第一个是彩色的，第一个是使用cel动画技术创作的，需要工作室工作人员手工绘制并单独拍摄数十万块赛璐珞窗格。更广泛地说，《白雪公主》也是第一部在评论界和大众中获得持久成功的动画长片。这部电影在美国媒体上获得了几乎一致的好评，这表明华特迪士尼工作室在不求助于前一部电影的情况下创造了一部电影，取得了丰厚的回报。例如，《克利夫兰平原商人》（Cleveland Plain Dealer）的沃德·马什（W.Ward Marsh。除了少数值得注意的例外，电影史往往忽略了《白雪公主》诸多成就的一个重要方面：它是世界上第一部长篇动画
{"title":"Snow White and the Seventh Art: Sound, Song, and Respectability in Disney's First Feature","authors":"Daniel Batchelder","doi":"10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.39.2.0138","url":null,"abstract":"Historians tend to gravitate toward beginnings. Accordingly, the sizeable body of literature surrounding the Walt Disney Studios’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) offers scholars a tantalizing collection of “firsts” that indicate the film’s momentous achievements in the history of cinema with little uncertainty.1 While Snow White was not the world’s first feature-length animated film, it was the first with sound, the first with color, and the first created using the technique of cel animation, requiring studio workers to hand-paint and individually photograph hundreds of thousands of celluloid panes. More broadly, Snow White also stands as the first animated feature to find lasting critical and popular success. The film received near unanimously glowing reviews in the American press, suggesting that the Walt Disney Studios’ herculean effort to create a movie without recourse to a direct predecessor had paid off handsomely. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s W. Ward Marsh, for example, was not alone when he claimed that Snow White “is the greatest cartoon ever made. In many respects it is the greatest film ever produced.”2 Yet too concerted a focus on the film’s technical and critical achievements can blind us to the contemporary historical and cultural events that surrounded its creation. With a few noteworthy exceptions, film histories have tended to overlook a significant facet of Snow White’s many accomplishments: its status as the world’s first feature-length animated","PeriodicalId":43462,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47820878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：