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Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class
"An elegant, erudite, and thorough study . . . 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 . . . 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."
---Choice"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. 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."
---American Theatre
"A book about the fracturing of the theater audience in the 1920s using jazz as a lens. [Savran] points to jazzy composers such as Gershwin, who never got his due while he was writing because of his embrace of jazz . . . What is intriguing about Savran's book is how these class distinctions still hold true today."
---All About JazzHighbrow/Lowdown explores the twentieth century's first culture war and the forces that permanently transformed American theater into the art form we know today. The arrival of jazz in the 1920s sparked a cultural revolution that was impossible to contain. The music affected every stratum of U.S. society and culture, confusing and challenging long-entrenched hierarchies based on class, race, and ethnicity. 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. 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. 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.David Savran is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
---Choice"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. 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."
---American Theatre
"A book about the fracturing of the theater audience in the 1920s using jazz as a lens. [Savran] points to jazzy composers such as Gershwin, who never got his due while he was writing because of his embrace of jazz . . . What is intriguing about Savran's book is how these class distinctions still hold true today."
---All About JazzHighbrow/Lowdown explores the twentieth century's first culture war and the forces that permanently transformed American theater into the art form we know today. The arrival of jazz in the 1920s sparked a cultural revolution that was impossible to contain. The music affected every stratum of U.S. society and culture, confusing and challenging long-entrenched hierarchies based on class, race, and ethnicity. 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. 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. 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.David Savran is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
- GenresHistory
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2009
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June 15, 2010
Savran's book could/should be read in tandem with Amy Koritz's Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s, though there is no indication in either book that the writers were aware of the other study. Both scholars find ambivalence about class identity at the heart of modern theatrical responses to the expansion of the mass media and the new model of bureaucratic professionalism. Both Koritz and Savran chart this ambivalence through references to rhythm, cast in one of two ways, either the insistent repetition of the machine age or the instinctive drive of jazz music.
Savran does a fabulous job connecting "jazz" as a symbol and commodity in the 1920s to both the fear of/fascination with machines and the fear of/fantasy about primitivism. His early chapters exploring middle class spectatorship(s), the hybridity of jazz art forms, and the modernist cult of cultural hierarchy are tremendously helpful for the cultural critic of the U.S. between WWI and WWII. Savran is both witty and teacherly, presenting evidence and theory clearly and persuasively, and he's admirable in his cautious presentation of statistics and multiple class identities. We should all be so careful in our analytical definitions of social class.
Savran's beef with modernist criticism and the fetishization of "letigimate theatre" becomes rawest and bloodiest in his final chapter on Eugene O'Neill and his epilogue on the contemporary theater. Doubtless, Savran has targeted an important cultural moment when a certain brand of projected interiority and Europeanized formalism served as a token of dramatic loftiness. I can't say that he's wrong; I can only say that his withering analysis of biographies and critical studies that paint O'Neill as a "canonized" saint (pun intended) doesn't seem to me to account for the aesthetic dimensions of O'Neill's ascendance in a nuanced enough way. (I think that Savran's retort would be that aesthetic standards are culturally determined and that his book is about the historical and social process of constructing cultural hierarchies, not primarily about O'Neill's aesthetics. I would reply that he does seem to do justice to the appeal of Gershwin and Antheil's aesthetics, even during the process of documenting their critical characterization and cultural cachet.)
While I can agree with Savran's lamentation of an institutional drive for an "unmixed" serious theatre, lifted above its roots in vaudeville, cabaret, burlesque, jazz act, etc., I find it ironic that Savran condemns George Jean Nathan for a "homicidal" tendency in his theatre criticism while at the same time placing O'Neill's head on the guillotine for his aristocratic sensibility about American art.
The epilogue also offers trenchant criticisms of the American cult of the British in serious theater circles versus the mass cultural exports of Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia!, etc. (Savran sees both trends as severely problematic.) But this more didactic and dour vein in his conclusion vitiates some of the nuance and specificity that characterized his analyses of cultural and theater history earlier in the book. Savran literally ends the book with these lines: "are shows like Legally Blond and Hairspray a symbol of U.S. imperial culture at its most glittering? Are they the native equivalent of gladiatorial combats and chariot races, lavish entertainments designed to keep the wealthy, excited crowds from remembering that every empire must fall?"
This allusion to the "wealthy, excited crowds" indulges in the same kind of abstraction that Savran warns against earlier in the book when he criticizes a tendency to romanticize the working class. And its extreme voice feels less persuasive that the earlier sections of the book where his arch wit augments his sharp readings to produce a canny exposition of Broadway in the 1920s as white cultural producers, theater critics, and middle-class audiences tried to figure out their relationship to mass culture and to African-American people and art forms. These categories found their emblem in "jazz," both the quintessence of exportable American modernity and the object of white bourgeois anxiety.
Savran presents some of the best considerations of American cultural hierarchies and class identities from this period that I have read. I wish his final chapter and epilogue didn't sound quite so strident, though I do understand his frustrations at the contemporary theater industry.
Savran does a fabulous job connecting "jazz" as a symbol and commodity in the 1920s to both the fear of/fascination with machines and the fear of/fantasy about primitivism. His early chapters exploring middle class spectatorship(s), the hybridity of jazz art forms, and the modernist cult of cultural hierarchy are tremendously helpful for the cultural critic of the U.S. between WWI and WWII. Savran is both witty and teacherly, presenting evidence and theory clearly and persuasively, and he's admirable in his cautious presentation of statistics and multiple class identities. We should all be so careful in our analytical definitions of social class.
Savran's beef with modernist criticism and the fetishization of "letigimate theatre" becomes rawest and bloodiest in his final chapter on Eugene O'Neill and his epilogue on the contemporary theater. Doubtless, Savran has targeted an important cultural moment when a certain brand of projected interiority and Europeanized formalism served as a token of dramatic loftiness. I can't say that he's wrong; I can only say that his withering analysis of biographies and critical studies that paint O'Neill as a "canonized" saint (pun intended) doesn't seem to me to account for the aesthetic dimensions of O'Neill's ascendance in a nuanced enough way. (I think that Savran's retort would be that aesthetic standards are culturally determined and that his book is about the historical and social process of constructing cultural hierarchies, not primarily about O'Neill's aesthetics. I would reply that he does seem to do justice to the appeal of Gershwin and Antheil's aesthetics, even during the process of documenting their critical characterization and cultural cachet.)
While I can agree with Savran's lamentation of an institutional drive for an "unmixed" serious theatre, lifted above its roots in vaudeville, cabaret, burlesque, jazz act, etc., I find it ironic that Savran condemns George Jean Nathan for a "homicidal" tendency in his theatre criticism while at the same time placing O'Neill's head on the guillotine for his aristocratic sensibility about American art.
The epilogue also offers trenchant criticisms of the American cult of the British in serious theater circles versus the mass cultural exports of Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia!, etc. (Savran sees both trends as severely problematic.) But this more didactic and dour vein in his conclusion vitiates some of the nuance and specificity that characterized his analyses of cultural and theater history earlier in the book. Savran literally ends the book with these lines: "are shows like Legally Blond and Hairspray a symbol of U.S. imperial culture at its most glittering? Are they the native equivalent of gladiatorial combats and chariot races, lavish entertainments designed to keep the wealthy, excited crowds from remembering that every empire must fall?"
This allusion to the "wealthy, excited crowds" indulges in the same kind of abstraction that Savran warns against earlier in the book when he criticizes a tendency to romanticize the working class. And its extreme voice feels less persuasive that the earlier sections of the book where his arch wit augments his sharp readings to produce a canny exposition of Broadway in the 1920s as white cultural producers, theater critics, and middle-class audiences tried to figure out their relationship to mass culture and to African-American people and art forms. These categories found their emblem in "jazz," both the quintessence of exportable American modernity and the object of white bourgeois anxiety.
Savran presents some of the best considerations of American cultural hierarchies and class identities from this period that I have read. I wish his final chapter and epilogue didn't sound quite so strident, though I do understand his frustrations at the contemporary theater industry.
Displaying 1 of 1 review