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“In response to the new challenges created by the internet and the converging of communications media, the industry is working very hard on systems of encryption and watermarking and collaborates with the government to set up a strong legal framework and to educate the public about the value of music.” Frances Lowe, Director, British Music Rights, The Performing Rights Society “It is sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is.” Lars Ulrich, drummer of heavy metal band Metallica “There was this bloke and there was me and we really got along. Our friendship was founded on our mutual passions for pop music, indolence and substance abuse. We would sit around together, heroically stoned, and play records all day long: punk records, soul records, horny disco records like ‘Hot Stuff’ by Donna Summer . . . ” Dave Hill, music journalist Twentieth-century listening and its spaces Artists, fans, and the music business share an uneasy but symbiotic partnership. Dave Hill's homosocial friendship, exploring music not through performance but through listening to purchased recordings, is a deeply twentieth-century subjectivity, reflecting the basic premise of much musical entertainment since the invention of sound recording. This involves a set of paradoxical relationships. For one thing, ‘music’ is a phenomenon that can and perhaps should be considered and enjoyed in and for itself – but to facilitate this enjoyment it has become a commodity, bought, sold, and consumed, to the regret of many composers and performers such as Lars Ulrich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems and definitions It should be stated at the outset that light music and easy listening are not diluted forms of heavy music and difficult listening prepared for those with delicate musical digestions. The music discussed in this chapter produces effects and valorizes moods, identities, and ideas that no other music does. When, for example, the crew of HMS Amethyst sailed down the Yangtse under fire from Chinese guns during the Second World War, they chose to demonstrate British composure by singing ‘Cruising Down the River’ (Beadell/Tollerton, 1945). Three types of easy listening need to be distinguished, and in none of these cases does that necessarily entail the meaning ‘facile’, nor imply that it is appropriate to describe the music as easy technically. First, there is the type that is often tightly controlled but perceived as cool, sophisticated, relaxed, and classy, which ranges from the crooners to the more varied song stylists like Frank Sinatra. Second, there is the type that evokes a nostalgic mood and whose present reception therefore differs from its original meaning (it is usually categorized as nostalgia or, in France, as rétro); an example would be a song like ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (MacDonald/Carroll, 1913) sung by Laurel and Hardy, the corny and sentimental quality of which may now be valued as offering an experience of something vulnerable and human that high art generally guards against. Third, there is the apparently easy listening that proves emotionally difficult listening, as often occurs in the French chanson réaliste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The old world In the opening scene of the American musical Music in the Air (1932), with music by Jerome Kern and words by Oscar Hammerstein, we see and hear a provincial German, Dr Walther Lessing, composing straight out of bed on a sunny morning. A linnet sings outside his window, represented by flute and piccolo in the pit orchestra. After silencing competition from his cuckoo clock, Lessing whistles the linnet's motif, harmonizes it on his on-stage house organ as the first two bars of a 2/4 polka, extends them to an eight-bar period, and stops to write it down, his scribbling represented by orchestral counterpoint to the motif. Trying it over on the organ, he is disturbed by children singing on their way to school, represented as more counterpoint to his music. They end abruptly as he calls on them to stop, with a two-quaver/crotchet rhythm from which he then tries, unconvincingly, to improvise a B section in the dominant for his polka. As he struggles with this at his desk, the pit orchestra telling us that an emotional, Wagnerian motif of a four-quaver upbeat in 4/4 is also very much on his mind (indeed it opened the scene before the curtain went up, and so was probably in his head as he awoke), yet another interruption occurs: his daughter bangs at the door with his breakfast tray. While she kicks, she also speaks: ‘Father dear, let me in. Both my hands are full.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘What composer hasn’t flirted with this seductive temptress? ’ Louis Gruenberg, ‘Der Jazz als Ausgangspunkt’, Anbruch 7 (April 1925). The remarks of Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964) quoted above appeared in a Sonderheft of the Musikblätter des Anbruch, the in-house organ of Universal Edition, widely known for its publications of new music. Devoted entirely to jazz, the issue included articles by critics and composers including Gruenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Percy Grainger, representing Germany and the United States (through Gruenberg's German–American residence and training), as well as France and Britain. While the authors did not agree on the extent of jazz's influence on their compositions or the works of others, they all acknowledged a fascination with and desire to utilize this kind of popular music as a transnational aspect of 1920s musical modernity. In identifying jazz ‘as a point of departure’ for the composition of new music, Gruenberg drew upon long-standing views of popular culture and its music as accessible, irresistible, and personified as female. Coming into its own in the 1920s, jazz was thus not unlike another social phenomenon of the time, the New Woman. Both were perceived as youthful, urban, and free from past conventions of propriety and morality. While more women did enter the public workplace during the 1920s, and often in ways that utilized modern technology, the new woman of the modern city was in many respects an overdrawn fiction. Similarly jazz and its seductive temptations were also potent fantasies of modernism, fantasies that originated in the dichotomies of mind and body, classical and popular, cultural insiders and outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]