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The article focuses on the genre blurring of film musicals, specifically the film "What's Up, Doc?" by director Peter Bogdanovich. The author discusses the film's stars Cole Porter and Barbara Streisand, explores the film's use of music, and examines the conventional genres created during Hollywood's studio era.

Through a broad analysis of musical, textual, and dramatic similarities between the framing and framed shows in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate and a more specific analysis of “So in Love” and “Were Thine That Special Face,” this article identifies an overall musical/dramatic structure with three formal rotations, cutting across the show's two acts. In tying the sometimes-masked song resemblances to the show's overall dramatic arch, Kiss Me, Kate's narrative structure is ultimately portrayed as united rather than bifurcated. As a springboard, this article scrutinizes Knapp's (2006) reading of “doubles” in the show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which the biguine (or ‘beguine’) circulated as a French West Indian musical genre and as a signifier for colonial and island exoticism in non-biguine musical genres during the early to mid-20th century. I begin by suggesting the ways in which the colonial and transnational conditions of its performance have left a history of ideological tensions within popular and academic discussions about the biguine. I then suggest some of the specific ways in which the biguine's circulation functioned in the context of the interwar years and resonated with the discourse and dynamics of ‘Jazz Age Paris’, negrophilia and le tumulte noir. Finally, I offer a close reading of the ways in which French comedian-singer Dranem's ‘La Biguine’ and Cole Porter's ‘Begin the Beguine’ playfully represent the genre in French chanson coloniale and popular song. Rather than viewing the biguine's conditions of performance, or the re-appropriation of the biguine in name only, as the equivalent of the complete musical colonisation and erasure of the genre, I propose that we extend biguine discussion beyond its empirical musicological elements, and lay claim on the echoes of biguine discourse as they resonate through other genres. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a philosophical analysis of jazz vocal interpretation. The author argues that singers of jazz are at liberty to deviate from the standard chart or score of the song, with freedoms that include changes of meter, substitutions of words and alteration of rhythms. The author addresses the differences between jazz vocal interpretation and instrumental interpretation and examines the question of how to distinguish between what a singer conveys about a song and what they convey about his or herself. Special focus is paid to the song "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" by Cole Porter.

Critics have long noted the association between the Broadway musical and gay men as both producers and consumers. But rather than claim that musicals are gay, lesbian, or queer, this essay analyzes the circulation of desire in the work of two composer-lyricists, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, by focusing on their mastery of the list or catalog song, a form that requires only that its lyric contains an inventory of people, places, or things. The essay argues that the list song functions as a kind of desiring-machine, an assembly line of words that represents a musical consequence and signature of the Fordist means of production. The list songs of Porter and Sondheim, which herald the beginning and end of Broadway's so-called Golden Age, divulge in their differing ways the contrasting sets of desires and anxieties that swirl around the closet--and the Broadway musical--in the decades before and after the Stonewall riots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kiss Me, Kate, a 1948 musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Sam and Bella Spewack, responded not only to Shakespeare's play's gender conflict, but also to post-war discourses concerning the return to domesticity of women mobilized into the wartime workforce, anxieties around female fidelity for returning servicemen and issues of racial equality and integration. By setting up contrasting onstage and offstage storylines, the former all-white, focussed on domesticity and full of double entendres, the latter multiracial, focussed on professional life and characterized by plain speaking, the musical-within-a-musical format accommodated conflicting approaches to theatrical, political and social integration, suggesting the viability, for white Americans at least, both of an ironic performative assimilation to hegemonic social norms as a cover for an unassimilated lifestyle, and the creation of an open society in which individuals negotiate their own paradigms for living with others. In the process, the musical also draws attention to the role of cultural products in maintaining a white hegemonic order and in the 'taming' of women. The radical nature of the original production is emphasized by the changes imposed for the highly conservative 1953 Hollywood film version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies about jazz piano often discuss the defining performers, improvisation techniques, composers, songs, and stylistic underpinnings of various jazz eras. This article aims to enhance these studies by offering a different angle from which to view this topic. By limiting this article to how jazz pianists of different eras approached one particular standard— Cole Porter's “What is This Thing Called Love?”— I aim to highlight the diversity of approaches taken by different jazz pianists as they built upon the traditions of their art form. Through this model of analysis, an understanding of both the differences between the artists' approaches, and the underlying common language of the jazz piano art form emerge concurrently. Also, similar to the narrative-like structures heard in many of these solos, a larger historical artistic narrative created by these performers over the past eighty years becomes apparent. The jazz pianists whom I discuss are Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Erroll Garner, Marian McPartland, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, and Richie Beirach. A large number of jazz standards were considered as the basis of this study, but “What is This Thing Called Love?” was chosen because jazz pianists with such a wide range of approaches have recorded it, and these particular approaches lent themselves well to the aims of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses music at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The author discusses composers of classical music educated at Yale including Charles Ives and Lewis Spratlan and lists popular music songs about Yale including "The Down the Field March" and "The Yale Society Two-Step." Other topics include the Yale Glee Club and Yale-educated musicians including Cole Porter, Rudy Vallee, Sam Tsui, and Anthony Lavelli.

Since it was first performed in the 1936 film "Born to Dance," Cole Porter's "I've Got You under My Skin" has proven to be an important pop standard for a wide range of artists, not the least of whom is Frank Sinatra. When polled, Sinatra's fans and critics frequently rank "Under My Skin" among the greatest ever Sinatra recordings. Commentators have tried to explain the song's immense appeal in terms of its supposedly straightforward, if feverish, sexuality. This essay suggests that a turn back to Porter's lyrics reveals a more complicated picture. "Under My Skin" is less about achieving heterosexual unity than it is about probing and confronting an interior multiplicity—much as the textual surface of Sinatra's recording reveals two constitutive but finally discrete and irresolvable American musical selves. This essay returns Porter's lyrics to their historical and literary context to argue that "Under My Skin" represents a popular expression of the modernist anxiety over the split self—a trope that characterizes many of Porter's great songs, which contain the high and the low, the bottom and the top, beneath the same shining skin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the sheet music "Seven by Porter: Contemporary Settings of Seven Classic Songs by Cole Porter," arranged by Mark Hayes and published by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.; "12 Folk Songs for Solo Singers," compiled by Sally K. Albrecht and published by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.; and "Singer's Library of Arias," complied by Patrick M. Liebergen and published by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

In this article I use psychoanalytic feminist theory to consider the integration of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948). Despite often being considered his most integrated musical the show seems to flaunt its undecidability, its resistance to integration between number and narrative. The dominance of the narrative over the numbers is a motif that dominates all standard accounts of musical theatre history, central to the notion of integration. This account pivots around 1943, the date of the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! Musicals before 1943 tend to be considered either as precursors to Oklahoma! or are retrospectively dismissed in the light of what was to come. This article builds Martin Sutton's suggestion that the relationship between the narrative and the musical numbers is a battle between psychic freedom and social repression, but rejects his conclusion that the narrative must win out. I look once again at Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate to reveal its instabilities and dis-integration, using concepts drawn from Cixous and Kristeva to argue for a sexual-political content to this musical's play with form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era, the second quarter of the twentieth century, wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters. Golden Era songwriters improved with experience and were generally at their best during their 30s and 40s, whereas since the mid-1960s, popular songwriters have been most imaginative early in their careers and have consistently done their best work during their 20s. The conceptual revolution in popular music occurred at a time when iconoclastic young innovators were making similar transformations in other arts: Jean-Luc Godard and his fellow New Wave directors created a conceptual revolution in film in the early 1960s, just when Andy Warhol and his fellow Pop artists made visual art an overwhelmingly conceptual activity. In each of these arts, there have been a number of common consequences of these revolutions, including the progressive balkanization that is a product of conceptual innovators' disregard for conventional disciplinary boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into secondary school students’ experiences of participating in a school production of the Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes. The study was prompted by the absence in the research literature of any qualitative investigation of the extra-curricular activities that form a vital part of many young people's musical development. The project therefore focused on individual motivation and experience, exploring the effects of the school show not just on its participants, but also on the broader school community. Questionnaires and audio diaries were used to capture the views of a representative sample of the school population, before focusing in more detail on the experiences of a smaller number of participants. Results showed a widespread awareness of the show amongst non-participants, and a general belief that it made a valuable contribution to school life. Amongst participants, the costs and benefits of participation were evident in descriptions of the intensity and commitment involved in rehearsals, the effects on friendship groups of spending time with like-minded people, and the challenges to participants’ own musical, personal and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the harm done to bisexual youth by negative stereotypes and invisibility in film, as well as a recent trend in biographical films (biopics) to give bisexual people their sexuality back. The recent Cole Porter biography, De-Lovely, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews four music recordings. "Kiss Me, Kate," by Cole Porter; "The Music Man," by Meredith Willson; "Bells Are Ringing," by Jule Styne; "42nd Street," by Harry Warren.

Attempts to characterize the relationship between music and desire by analyzing some of Cole Porter's songs. Analyses of musical line, structure, and lyrics; Presence of desire in the lyrical meanings and patterns of sounds; Examination of rhythms and semiotics in language and sound; Discussion of metonymy's ability to multiply discourses.

Describes the beauty of old love songs that should be revived by the young singers of the twenty first century. Discussion on the songs of George Gershwin; Compositions of Richard Rodgers; Songs of Cole Porter.

Examines line and design in the songs of Cole Porter (1891-1964). Surface melodic features of the songs; Long-range lines; Lines in complete songs.

Presents information on the educational achievements of Cole Porter at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, while highlighting his accomplishments as a music composer. Personal information on Porter; Relationship between Porter and his family; Identification of several of his musical compositions.