popular art

Introduction

      any dance, literature, music, theatre, or other art form intended to be received and appreciated by ordinary people in a literate, technologically advanced society dominated by urban culture. Popular art in the 20th century is usually dependent on such technologies of reproduction or distribution as television, printing, photography, digital compact disc and tape recording, motion pictures (motion picture), radio, and videocassettes. By the late 20th century, television (q.v.) had unquestionably become the dominant vehicle for popular art and entertainment. Motion pictures are also an important medium of popular art but, in contrast to television, can more often attain the enduring significance and appeal of works belonging to the fine or elite arts.

      Popular art in general tends to be narrative, to reinforce uncontroversial beliefs and sentiments, to support popular institutions, and to create identity in a social group. It is distinguished by the rapidity of its changes of style, by its revivals from earlier periods, and by its constant borrowings from elite art, folk art, foreign cultures, and modern technology for its song tunes and lyrics, radio and television broadcasts, novels, dances (dance), and many other entertainments, objects, trends, and fads.

Popular dance

      Dancing performed in public or in private solely for the enjoyment of the participants is known as popular dance, or social dance. It was practiced as early as 3,000 years ago at both community and family levels. Dancers arranged themselves in circles, or sometimes lines, which gradually developed into chain dances. From the Middle Ages in Europe there was a widening gap between country dances, which subsequently tended to survive in a folk tradition, and the genteel court variety, which influenced social developments in recreation from the Industrial Revolution onward.

      In 16th-century Europe the stately pavane and energetic galliard were popular in Renaissance court circles. Such dances by then were performed in couples, side-by-side, and utilized swaying movements, hops, and complex capers. At the 17th-century French court of Louis XIV, new dances were notated for the first time. Such measures as the minuet and gavotte emerged, and in England Charles II imported many such dances after 1660. The cotillion, originally a lively measured square dance from the French court, became popular in the late 18th century. It was performed by four couples arranged in a square facing inward, with pairs of couples alternately executing various geometric figures.

      The main century of the waltz lasted from the Napoleonic period to World War I. The waltz—performed by turning couples in a step-slide-step pattern—originated in central Europe and was popular in Vienna and Paris during the Napoleonic Wars. Ultimately the whole of western Europe adopted the measure, and it became socially acceptable for a man publicly to hold a woman in his arms while dancing.

      “Cheek-to-cheek” dancing became popular in the second decade of the 20th century. Such exotic numbers as the turkey trot, the bunny hug, and the maxixe were influenced by the new music of jazz. The tango, purged of its more erotic elements, became acceptable to the clientele of the thé dansant (tea dance), and the Charleston epitomized the Jazz Age. When the quickstep and the slow fox-trot emerged, competitions began to be held, reflecting dancing's wide attraction as a leisure activity. Large public ballrooms flourished in the 1930s and '40s, especially in Britain and North America, while private dances grew relatively infrequent. It also became fashionable to go to hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, and wherever else there were large dance floors and popular bands and orchestras.

      The late 1930s, the early '40s, and World War II (with its large population dislocations) saw the spread of American cultural influence. The jive, jitterbug, and many such dances that were virtually improvisational originated in the United States, often among the black population, and were subsequently adopted in Europe.

      Mainstream popular dance in the 1950s adopted Latin rhythms—including the rumba, samba, and cha-cha. In general from about 1960, starting with the twist, popular dance among the young involved little or no touching between the partners. By the late 1970s and early '80s, discotheques had taken the place of the old-fashioned ballroom. Echoes of many styles could be seen in disco dances, but popular dancing had become essentially improvisatory and eclectic.

Popular literature.

      Popular literature includes those writings intended for the masses and those that find favour with large audiences. It can be distinguished from artistic literature in that it is designed primarily to entertain. Popular literature, unlike high literature, generally does not seek a high degree of formal beauty or subtlety and is not intended to endure. The growth of popular literature has paralleled the spread of literacy through education and has been facilitated by technological developments in printing. With the Industrial Revolution, works of literature, which were previously produced for consumption by small, well-educated elites, became accessible to large sections and even majorities of the members of a population.

      The boundary between artistic and popular literature is murky, with much traffic between the two categories according to current public preference and later critical evaluation. While he was alive William Shakespeare could be thought of as a writer of popular literature, but he is now regarded as a creator of artistic literature. Indeed, the main, though not invariable, method of defining a work as belonging to popular literature is whether it is ephemeral, that is, losing its appeal and significance with the passage of time.

      The most important genre in popular literature is and always has been the romance, extending as it does from the Middle Ages to the present. The most common type of romance describes the obstacles encountered by two people (usually young) engaged in a forbidden love. Another common genre is that of fantasy, or science fiction. Novels set in the western frontier of the United States in the 19th century, and called westerns, are also popular. Finally, the detective story or murder mystery is a widely read form of popular literature. Popular literature has also come to include such genres as comic books and cartoon strips.

Popular music

      Unlike traditional folk music, popular music is written by known individuals, usually professionals, and does not evolve through the process of oral transmission. In the West, since the 1950s, “pop” music has come to mean the constantly changing styles derived from the electronically amplified music form known as rock and roll.

      Historically, popular music was any non-folk form that acquired mass popularity—from the songs of the medieval minstrels and troubadours to those elements of fine art music originally intended for a small, elite audience but that became widely popular. After the Industrial Revolution, true folk music largely disappeared, and the popular music of the Victorian era and the early 20th century was that of the music hall and vaudeville, with its upper reaches dominated by waltz music and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach, Victor Herbert, and others. In the United States, meanwhile, minstrel shows (troupes of white performers disguised as blacks) performed the compositions of such songwriters as Stephen Foster.

      Popular music styles tended to move westward from Europe to the United States until the early 20th century, when such new American forms as ragtime and the musical comedy of Broadway found ready audiences in Britain and on the continent. Since then, Western popular music has been dominated by developments in the United States. In the 1890s New York's Tin Pan Alley emerged as the world's first self-contained popular song-publishing industry, and in the ensuing half century, its prolific lyricism was combined with European operetta in a new kind of musical play known as the musical comedy, or musical, which achieved great sophistication in the hands of such American composers as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II. In the meantime, beginning with ragtime in the 1890s, black Americans had begun combining complex African rhythms with European harmonic structures to create what would become the most important new musical style of the century, jazz (q.v.).

      The audience for popular music (as distinct from the music of the concert hall) greatly expanded in the first half of the 20th century, partly because of wider technological developments. By 1930, for example, phonograph records had replaced sheet music as the chief source of music in the home, thereby enabling persons without any musical training to hear popular songs. At the same time, the use of the microphone relieved vocal artists of the need for trained voices that could penetrate large concert spaces, thereby enabling more intimate vocal techniques to be commercially adapted. The new ability of radio broadcasting to reach rural communities aided the dissemination of new musical styles, notably country music, a dance and narrative style derived from the ballads of white Anglo-Americans in the South and West that began to achieve wide commercial success in the 1940s. By contrast, the folk-rooted rural blues music of southern blacks never achieved commercial popularity.

      Jazz enjoyed its only period of mass popularity in the late 1930s and '40s with the swing style of the big bands and with such vocalists as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, who were known as crooners. Meanwhile, the blues was also changing: black singers from the South moved north to industrial cities to seek work, and the older rural blues evolved into the harsher urban blues style, marked by freer vocal phrasing and larger ensembles. The blues bands that emerged in Chicago in the 1940s used amplified electric guitars, often backed with electric bass and drums—the instruments borrowed later by many rock and roll bands.

      American popular music achieved unquestioned international dominance in the decades after World War II. By the 1950s, the migration of America's blacks to northern cities had resulted in the cross-fertilization of the forms and vocal styles of blues with the uptempo rhythms of jazz to create rhythm and blues. rock and roll, which emerged in the mid-1950s with Elvis Presley and other figures, arose as an amalgam of black rhythm and blues with country music, adapting the powerful rhythms and melancholy vocalizations of urban blues to a quicker tempo and an exuberant emotional tone. In the 1960s more complex forms of rock and roll became known simply as rock. British rock was the first to become influential in the 1960s through the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other four- or five-member groups. Rock's keynotes were a driving backbeat, harshly emotional vocals, and heavily amplified guitars. Rock quickly attracted the allegiance of Western teenagers, who, with new disposable incomes resulting from higher living standards in the postwar decades, replaced young adults as the chief audience for most new forms of popular music. Rock reached its height in the late 1960s and early '70 with a plethora of British and American bands. At the same time, black pop music achieved greater sophistication and a wider audience with the work of the Motown singing groups and such individual performers as Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. The history of popular music in the 1970s and '80s is basically that of rock music, which, with its variants, including disco, punk, and rap music, spread throughout the world and became the standard musical idiom for young people in many countries.

Popular theatre

      The term popular theatre denotes performances in the tradition of the music hall, vaudeville, burlesque, follies, revue, circus, and musical comedy, as distinguished from legitimate, high, or artistic theatre. The singers, dancers, comedians, clowns, puppeteers, jugglers, acrobats, conjurers, and ventriloquists of popular theatre make up much of what is known as “show business.”

      Music, movement, and humour are all essential ingredients used by popular theatre throughout its history. Movement most often presents itself through eroticism, exaggeration, or acrobatics. England's traditional music hall (music hall and variety), virtually identical to vaudeville, originated in working-class alehouses but became a standard entertainment for all classes of society. As with revue and vaudeville, it generally offered a variety of short pieces—sentimental and patriotic songs, dances, comic turns, and magicians, jugglers, and acrobats.

       humour itself may distort reality—crudely, as in slapstick, or corrosively, as in the mockery of a stand-up comic. Its effect—earthy, ribald laughter—has been sought in all kinds of theatre.

      The effect of music (musical performance) as a form of communication has always been highly valued in popular theatre. Music aids the suspension of disbelief and joins performer and viewer more closely in a shared event in which there is no pretense of realism. musical comedy evolved from a wide variety of musical, dramatic, and dance styles going back to the Elizabethan dramatists, who used simple ballads to reinforce their narratives, through the tradition of Viennese operetta and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan in England. The 20th century saw these traditions, although Americanized, flowering again in the United States in a seemingly endless procession of popular Broadway musicals.

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