Reviewed by: A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era by Geoffrey Block Megan Woller A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era. By Geoffrey Block. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. [xxiii, 344 p. ISBN 9780197501733 (hardcover), $35; also available as ebook, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Since the beginning of sound film, the relationship between the Broadway musical and Hollywood has been profound. In recent years, many scholars have begun to explore this connection in more depth, as evidenced by The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations, edited by Dominic McHugh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). In A Fine Romance, Geoffrey Block, one of the genre's leading scholars, presents a welcome addition to the growing body of work on film musical adaptations. Block centers his study around the studio system, providing a clear delineation of time in which to delve into case studies. Given the major industry changes that occur within these decades, beginning with the 1930s and ending with Cabaret in 1972, his self-imposed limit works well to highlight trends and changes in Hollywood musical adaptations. Block addresses the idea of adaptation and quality up front, taking issue with the somewhat dated view within adaptation studies that the source material "does it better." In fact, he often espouses his own highly informed opinion that several of the adaptations within A Fine Romance actually improve upon their stage sources. And this assessment forms the central argument for the analysis of Roberta, Call Me Madam, and Flower Drum Song, for instance. For those who unapologetically share Block's love of film musical adaptations (present author included), his critical frame is welcome. At the same time, the focus on quality can sometimes feel like adherence to older models within adaptation theory. Nevertheless, Block's assertion that there is a golden age of Hollywood film musical adaptation offers a refreshing perspective; additionally, his incisive discussion of trends in fidelity during this time frames an important analysis of these musicals. In A Fine Romance, Block takes twelve musical adaptations as case studies in order to explore the process and [End Page 489] products of adaptation in the Hollywood studio era. With his meticulous attention to detail, close comparison of stage and film versions, and extensive archival work, he provides a rich examination of each musical. Chosen for being "historically and aesthetically significant" (p. xviii), the case studies range from niche musicals known by connoisseurs or scholars to some of the most famous film musical adaptations of the twentieth century (West Side Story and Cabaret). The resulting book includes a fascinating mixture of less-familiar and well-known material, giving readers with varying levels of base knowledge something to grab onto throughout. Block begins with a brief survey designed to orient readers chronologically, to give an overview of the studio system, and to outline the basic trends in adaptations during these decades. For students or musical-theater scholars with less background in Hollywood especially, Block offers a good foundation. He then proceeds to case studies with a trio of film adaptations of musicals by Jerome Kern: Show Boat (1936), The Cat and the Fiddle (1934), and Roberta (1935). While his analytical approach varies from film to film (as appropriate, based on the varying levels of familiarity as well as each filmmaker's individual approach), Block uses the case studies in chapter 2 to illustrate some significant themes throughout his book. For example, his discussion of Show Boat delves into the complexities of the show's treatment of race. While an important landmark for the time, on both stage and film, Block does not shy away from the problematic aspects of the depiction of Black people. Yet he also illustrates how changes made for the film, including a new song for Joe and Queenie that shows a stable, loving marriage between Black characters, add a richness to their characterization. Indeed, Block sensitively contextualizes yet calls out problematic material from these films throughout A Fine Romance. Block's inclusion of The Cat and the Fiddle deserves further consideration, as he points out that the show has received limited scholarly...

Reviewed by: Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt by Andrew Simon Melissa Camp Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt. By Andrew Simon. (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. [xiii, 279 p. ISBN 9781503629431 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9781503631441 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9781503631458 (ebook), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In his book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt, Andrew Simon portrays the recent history of Egypt by examining the "social life" of a simple, everyday object: the audiocassette tape. Simon argues that the cassette, although appearing as an innocuous artifact, was important in forming Egypt's modern cultural, political, and economic history in the late twentieth century. Simon's book is a crucial intervention into not only how Middle East studies should approach sound's role in history, but also how scholars in all disciplines should discuss how quotidian objects can shape a nation. The cassette tape has often been one overlooked material that, until recently, has sat on the shelf and been left un-examined by historians, musicologists, and media scholars alike. In Media of the Masses, Simon combines the work of musicologists and sound-studies scholars to add a new sensory perspective of Egyptian history to the field of Middle East area studies. As Simon demonstrates in his monograph, the audiocassette tape has been one of the most popular music playback devices in the Middle East. In Egypt, throughout the presidencies of Anwar Sadat (1970–81) and Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011), the cassette became a widely used medium for Egyptians to consume old and new forms of music. The seemingly simple mechanism of the cassette tape and player allowed Egyptians to listen to music in a myriad of new spaces, connecting sound to politics, consumerism, and a more modern culture. Music scholars of the Middle East have discussed the importance of mass media on the formation of an Arab modernity in the twentieth century. The phonograph, radio, and television have all amplified politics and cultural ideas—such as nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and modern Islamic values—for everyday Arabs to consume. Yet, as Simon mentions, most of these accounts surround material objects during the nahda (awakening, 1907–40) and presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952–70) or are contemporary descriptions of Middle Eastern media today. The one exception to this phenomenon is Charles Hirschkind's The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), but Hirschkind does not focus on music on cassettes as much as Islamic sermons and Quranic recitations. Media of the Masses is a contribution to Middle Eastern media studies through its narratives of how music on cassette became an important respondent and contributor to the Egyptian soundscape. Much like the design of a cassette tape, Media of the Masses is split into two parts, or sides. Part 1, the "A" side, [End Page 544] features the birth of cassette culture and consumption in Egypt, and in part 2, the "B" side, Simon discusses the impact of cassettes, the circulation of their content, and the subsequent writing of Egyptian history. The materiality of the cassette tape is central to Simon's narrative of how Egypt transformed into a consumer-driven, modern society. Sadat's infitah, or "open" economic policy, called for a "materialization of modernity" for Egyptians to redefine their part in a growing economy through buying new products (p. 42). The oil boom of the early 1970s, as discussed in chapter 1, encouraged Egyptian migrant workers to travel throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf, earn higher incomes, and contribute to the economy. Simon argues that the cassette t ape's portability, mobility, and circulation allowed everyday Egyptians to experience and perform music. Moreover, placing cassette tapes at the center of Egypt's burgeoning economy provides "a more panoramic account of cassette players specifically and consumer goods more generally" (p. 73) in a way that shows how cultural products can play "an active part in the fashioning of history" (p. 146). With this bustling new economic and trade policy, however, Egyptian authorities felt the need to restrict certain cultural goods considered to be...

Reviewed by: Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical by Laurie Winer Geoffrey Block Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical. By Laurie Winer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. [x, 356 p. ISBN 9780300223798 (hardcover), $32.50; ISBN 9780300269123 (ebook), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Laurie Winer is a longtime theater critic, a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the author of Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical. She might have considered a different title for the latter. For starters, she doesn't take into account Hammerstein's early mentor and collaborator, fellow librettist–lyricist Otto Harbach (1873–1963), who, as Hammerstein (1895–1960) readily acknowledged, "taught him 'ninety percent' of what he knows about writing libretti" (p. 275). More significantly, Hammer-stein would continue to rely on others, especially composers Jerome Kern (1885–1945) and Richard Rodgers (1902–1979). In fact, Hammerstein was not a lone genius, as Winer's title implies, but a brilliant collaborator. Winer covers Hammerstein's life and thoughts fairly well but shortchanges his creative work with words and his remarkably creative collaborations with other artists. The volume also fills a gap as the first (and only) Hammer-stein biography to appear since Hugh Fordin's Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II (New York: Random House, 1977), whereas his most famous collaborator, Rodgers, has received considerable biographical attention (including by this reviewer). Unfortunately, readers of Winer's new volume will likely come away with the misguided impression that Kern as well as Rodgers were for the most part bystanders along for the ride in the creation of such classics as Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. In defense of the title of this worthy biography, Winer does not expressly state that Hammerstein was the sole inventor of the musical, although her approach supports such a reading. Indeed, Kern and Rodgers are reduced to bit players because Winer is virtually silent on the indispensable role played by music itself in Hammerstein's musicals. When taking into account Hammerstein's collaborative achievement with Kern and Rodgers (among others) [End Page 494] and his mentorship of Stephen Sondheim, few would dispute that Hammer-stein was a central figure and an innovator within, if not the inventor of, the genre. After some early successes in the 1920s with Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg, Hammerstein, with Kern, created Show Boat in 1927, an acknowledged music theater milestone. Sixteen years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein (R&H) created the revolutionary Oklahoma!, after which Hammerstein's spirit would live on in the remarkable career of Sondheim, who died in 2021. Certainly in life and even in death, Hammerstein was a giant in the history of the Broadway musical and deserves a starring role in a book of his own. But he did not invent the musical, at least not without some creative assistance. Winer does cover some collaborative episodes well—for example, Rodgers's cavalier neglect of Hammerstein's lyrics for "Hello, Young Lovers" from The King and I (p. 254). Rodgers's hurtful behavior prompted Hammerstein to commiserate with director Joshua Logan, who knew firsthand what it was like to be treated dismissively and unfairly by Rodgers—and Hammerstein too, for that matter, when the two deprived Logan of the financial remuneration he deserved as the colibrettist of South Pacific. While these interactions are well known, Winer offers a perceptive analysis of Rodgers and Hammer-stein's dealings with Logan, separately and together, and seems correct in her insight that "Logan's worship incited a kind of disdain in Rodgers" (p. 218). But lamentably, Winer leaves unmentioned the extent to which the first R&H (Rodgers's twenty-seven years with Lorenz Hart before teaming up with Hammerstein) contributed to the history of musical comedy, in a series of inventive shows that precociously anticipated numerous elements erroneously attributed to the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution. At the top of this list are the integration of words, music, stories, dream ballets, and other innovative uses of dance (thanks to the contributions of George Balanchine in On Your Toes...

Reviewed by: Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by Carol A. Hess Jennifer L. Campbell Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics. By Carol A. Hess. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. [xi, 317 p., ISBN 9780252044854 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9780252086953 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780252054006 (ebook), $14.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Supplemental material at https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086953. In her book Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics, musicologist Carol A. Hess tenaciously seeks to answer the ever-lingering, periodically revisited question, "Who was Copland?" (p. 9) The composer (and his music) certainly received considerable attention from journalists, biographers, and academics during his lifetime; in 1999, however, Howard Pollack arguably broke open the floodgates of posthumous Copland scholarship with his magnum opus, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Holt, 1999). Since then, music historians and theorists have explored Copland's life, music, and prose from multitudinous points of inquiry, desiring to comprehend the man whose compositional style now epitomizes the sound of the US American West, and whose stature and influence led him to be called the "Dean of American Music" (Beth E. Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012], and John Rockwell, "Copland, Dean of American Music, Dies at 90," New York Times, 3 December 1990). Hess, too, takes up the biographical mantle but narrows the scope of investigation: as her vantage point, Hess concentrates on Cop-land's diplomatic service as a cultural emissary to Latin America on behalf of the US government during the Good Neighbor Period and the Cold War, specifically examining the four US state-sponsored tours to the region that he completed between 1941 and 1963. She also broadly traces Copland's shifting musical priorities from the 1920s to the 1970s by closely reading the lectures, radio broadcasts, and comments he gave to the Latin American public and composers during his tours, as well as the formal government reports he filed upon returning from the field. Additionally, his writings and interviews that reflected his thoughts on Latin American music found their way to the US public via journals articles, [End Page 517] newspapers, radio, and even television, revealing a composer who sometimes contradicted his earlier self at later points in his life. The seemingly tightly circumscribed breadth of Hess's inquiry belies the nearly overwhelming wealth of available source material. Hess sifts through daunting amounts of documents available in the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, as well as other repositories, and she skillfully weaves the archival sources of committee minutes, government memos, press clippings, and personal diaries together with published articles and newspaper reviews. She integrates secondary-source materials from the vast bibliography of Cop land scholarship, and she adroitly navigates the interdisciplinarity of her topic, drawing upon relevant works from the fields of history, diplomacy, Latin American studies, and beyond. She also relies on her own publications to inform the historical narrative, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Hess has spent over a decade thinking and writing about Copland as composer, advocate, and diplomat and explicating his role in supporting North–South music migration between the Americas. Hess reworks portions of material from both her 2013 journal article "Copland in Argentina: Pan Americanist Politics, Folklore, and the Crisis in Modern Music" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 191–250) and book Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), which she admittedly repackages into chapters 3, 5, 9, 10 and 11 of Aaron Copland in Latin America (see title page verso for this acknowledgement). To a less seasoned author, this bounty of textual riches might have seemed unwieldy, even impossible to navigate, but Hess expertly weaves together a cohesive exposition that allows the diverse texts to intermingle and inform one another throughout the entire book. A masterful assimilator, Hess constructs an impressively researched and engagingly written contribution to Cop-land biography vis-à-vis historical narrative and reception history that holds appeal for...

ABSTRACT: How best to classify musical medium of performance? We welcome the advice and expertise of the community of Notes readers to inform our deliberations. Specifically, when referring to the sources of musical sound, should we be describing the objects (e.g., aerophone), the properties (e.g., piccolo), or some combination of the two? The Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure convened a research group to discuss “the phenomena of music for classification.” What does it mean to classify the phenomena of music rather than musical documents or documents containing texts about music? How might we represent music apart from its documentary representations (scores, recordings, etc.)? We considered the Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT) and Hornbostel-Sachs (H-S) classification. The universal Basic Concepts Classification (BCC) is interdisciplinary and is organized around phenomena (things), relators (the relationships that exist among phenomena), and the properties that phenomena and relators may possess. We sought a comprehensive classification of medium of performance for the BCC. H-S focuses on the physical nature of instruments and how they make sound, the LCMPT effectively identifies specific instruments by name. H-S does not provide the level of granularity that we need but LCMPT’s larger set of terms are organized with only a few layers of hierarchy. H-S avoids local nomenclature, LCMPT embraces it. The two are attractive because they provide well-developed vocabulary and because their differences manifest as different strengths for a Semantic Web application. Ultimately our analysis reaches no specific conclusion. Instead, we have reflected thoroughly on the panoply of phenomena associated with the representation of medium of performance as phenomena of music in nondocumentary contexts.