Good afternoon, Authors, Translators and Publishing companies!

Today we continue to discover the book “The Story of Music” by Howard Goodall and its next chapter “The popular age I, 1918-1945”.

Main aspects of the chapter:

1. bright event of the age: first radio broadcasting of music in the year 1906 by radio inventor Reginald Fessenden;
2. the following events:
   • by 1922 about 10 million American households had their own radio receiver;
   • in 1920 in Argentina a radio station transmitted Wagner’s opera “Parsifal” from The Teatro Colloseo in Buenos Aires to thirty local households in the city;
   • in the year 1922 in Britain the world’s first national broadcaster BBC (British Broadcasting Company) came into being;
3. developments in technologies changed popular and classical music:
   • for pop: broadcast technology stimulated new sounds, new voices, explosion of popular songwritings across the world (1920s – George Gershwin and Cole Porter; 1960s – Dylan, Lennon, McCartney; 1970s - Stevie Wonder; 1980s – Michael Jackson; 1990s – Prince; our times – Adele);
   • classical music has been changed, but it was also embedded everywhere in the popular mainstream (stage musical, cinema, albums (for example, The Beatles);
4. in New York in February 1924 in the concert “An Experiment in Modern Music” American composer George Gershwin presented his work “Rhapsody in Blues”, something hybrid between jazz and classical music (it was sold million of copies within a year in 1927);
5. in Europe in 1920s-1940s there was a military nationalism, one example of which is decision of Mussolini to bring back to Italy the remains of Italian composer Luigi Boccherini, who settled in Madrid (his most memorable music collection “Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid”, Musical Nights in the Streets of Madrid);
6. in 1922 a method of synchronizing the sound with film was appeared, which stimulated the following events:
   • in 1926 Warner Brothers released ”Don Juan”, the first Hollywood film, containing a musical score embedded on the film’s soundtrack;
   • Charlie Chaplin set up a music publishing company and in the year 1931 released his first film with a synchronized music soundtrack “City Lights”, for which he composed five songs;
7. thanks to radio, records and film such jazz stars of the 1920s became very popular: James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington;
8. the prevailing music style of 1930s-1940s was swing, technique that is felt by the player in the performance rather than written down and rehearsed methodically, non-standardised (major components are rhythmic syncopation and lilting effect);
9. in the 1930s new genre of musical in Broadway is appeared, the turning point for this was “Snowboat” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein;
10. in May 1917 in Paris it was written the first performance in the form of surrealism, it is called “Parade”, collaboration of composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso, writer-dramatist Jean Cocteau, it was a response of classical composers for pressure from popular styles;
11. several famous classical things of that times:
    • “Les Noces” by Stravinsky (1923);
    • opera “Turandot” by Giacomo Puccini (1926);
    • “The three penny opera” by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht (1928), with Berlin cabaret style, popular dances foxtrot and tango, in sentimental romanticism, translated into 18 languages;
    • American folk opera “Porgy and Bess” by George Gershwin (1935);
    • classical work “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff;
    • “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste” (1936) and “Sonata for 2 pianos and Percussion” (1937) by Hungarian modernist Bela Bartok (author of music study ethnomusicology);
    • opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1934), “The Fifth Symphony” (1937), symphony “Leningrad” (1942) by Shostakovich.

For those, who are interested in music

Yours faithfully,

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