Selling Orchestral Music in the Vaudeville Age
The Duncan-Damrosch Tours, 1908–1911
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21789015 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chantal Frankenbach (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 60-98 |
| Publication date | 2021-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Society for American Music (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1752-1963 • E-ISSN: 1752-1971 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1752196320000474 |
| OpenAlex | W3129900939 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 55 |
Between 1908 and 1911, New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch engaged the modern dancer Isadora Duncan to perform with his orchestra in New York and on three tours of the Midwest. Posing considerable risk to his reputation as an elite conductor, this unusual alliance grew in part from his concert manager's wish to compete with the Salomé dance craze raging in vaudeville halls across the country. Damrosch's “pioneering spirit” allowed him a genuine appreciation of Duncan's expressive, transcendent dancing. Yet for his critics, the shockingly under-dressed dancer, just back from her conquest of Europe, represented yet another sensational Salomé eager to capitalize on the popular profanities of market-driven entertainment. Music critics and Protestant clergymen from St. Louis to Boston berated Damrosch for what they saw as an immoral capitulation to mass consumerism and a desecrating abuse of the sacred repertoire he guarded—a repertoire defined in part by its distance from dancing. This article draws on critiques in the daily press, Damrosch's personal papers, and scholarship in dance and religious studies to situate Damrosch's marketing experiment with Duncan in the wider context of Progressive-era devotional life, where similar concessions to mass entertainment arose in the urban revival movement of the Third Great Awakening. Damrosch's recourse to Duncan's “barefoot dancing”—oddly akin to the tactics of big tent revivalists espousing Muscular Christianity and epitomized by Billy Sunday's pulpit pantomimes—illuminates the collision of spiritual and economic concerns that shaped both musical and ecclesiastical arenas of the American “sacred.”
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dance · Entertainment · Literature · Musical · Sociology · Symphony · Theology · Veneration · Visual arts · Diversity and Impact of Dance · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History
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Disease and Representation
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Without God, Without Creed
After the Great Divide
Musicking
After the Great Divide
The Complete Guide to Modern Dance
"Sermons in Tones"
Theodore Thomas
Billy Sunday Was His Real Name
Modern Revivalism
Modern Dance Before 1914
The Damrosch Dynasty
God in the Stadium
They Gathered at the River
The NBC Music Appreciation Hour
Reformers and Visionaries
Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America
Preacher
The Making of Middlebrow Culture
Done into Dance
God in the Stadium
Sound Diplomacy
Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston
Billy Sunday Was His Real Name
Modern Revivalism
Orchestrating the Nation
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |