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, Musical Cosmopolitanism and New York City

image of Sweet Charity, Musical Cosmopolitanism and New York City

This chapter explores the musical means ways by which New York is represented in the 1960s Broadway musical Sweet Charity. These locations include both specific references – such as ‘under Manhattan Bridge’ and the Coney Island fairground – as well as idealised places such as a Midtown office or a suburban home. I argue that Sweet Charity is notable for its accumulation of diverse musicals styles that embody and reflect the varied places and locales of New York. Cy Coleman's score follows the likes of Gershwin and Bernstein in painting a musical picture of New York as a cultural melting pot, a practice which I connect to notions of musical cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: big band ; Broadway ; cosmopolitanism ; harmony ; music analysis ; musical theatre ; New York ; popular music ; rock music ; style

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References

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References

  1. Ballantine, Christopher (2020), ‘Against Populism: Music, Classification, Genre’, Twentieth-Century Music, 17:2, pp. 247–67.38
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Brantley, Ben (2016), ‘Review: A Thoroughly Modern “Sweet Charity” Who Abandons Hope’, New York Times, 20 November, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/theater/sutton-foster-sweet-charity-review.html. Accessed 22 July 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Buendía, Guillermo Castro (2016), ‘Rhythmic Evolution in the Spanish Fandango: Binary and Ternary Rhythms’, in K. M. Goldberg and A. Pizà (eds), The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance: Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 120–52.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Canby, Vincent (1969), ‘Screen: A Blow-Up of “Sweet Charity”’, New York Times, 2 April, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/04/02/archives/screen-a-blowup-of-sweet-charity.html. Accessed 22 July 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Collins, Sarah (2015), ‘The Composer as “Good European”: Musical Modernism, Amor Fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius’, Twentieth-Century Music, 12:1, pp. 97–123.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Everett, Walter (2009), The Foundations of Rock, New York: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Gooley, Dana (2013), ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 66:2, pp. 523–49.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Gulgas, Sara (2017), ‘Looking Forward to the Past: Baroque Rock's Postmodern Nostalgia and the Politics of Memory’, Ph.D. thesis, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Heetderks, David (2015), ‘Hipster Harmony: The Hybrid Syntax of Seventh Chords in Post-Millennial Rock’, Music Theory Online, 21:2, https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.2/mto.15.21.2.heetderks.html. Accessed 28 October 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Keightley, Keir (2008), ‘Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966’, American Music, 26:3, pp. 309–35.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Magaldi, Cristina (2016), ‘Cosmopolitanism and Music in the Nineteenth Century’, Oxford Handbooks Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.013.62.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Marcus, Kenneth H. (2018), ‘“Every Evening at 8”: The Rise of the Promenade Concerts in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston’, American Music, 36:2, pp. 194–221.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Mather, Olivia Carter (2013), ‘Taking It Easy in the Sunbelt: The Eagles and Country Rock's Regionalism’, American Music, 31:1, pp. 26–49.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. McVeigh, Simon (2013), ‘The London Symphony Orchestra: The First Decade Revisited’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 138:2, pp. 313–76.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Olwage, Grant (2013), ‘“The World Is His Song”: Paul Robeson's 1958 Carnegie Hall Concerts and the Cosmopolitan Imagination’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 7:2, pp. 165–95.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Pollock, Sheldon, Babha, Hobi K., Breckenridge, Carol A. and Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2002), ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, in C. A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Babha and D. Chakrabarty (eds), Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–14.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Tagg, Philip (2009), Everyday Tonality: Towards a Theory of What Most People Hear, New York and Huddersfield: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press.
     [Google Scholar]

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