Peter Bailey, editor. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. (Popular Music in Britain.) Philadelphia: Open University Press; distributed by Taylor & Francis, Inc., Philadelphia, Pa. 1986. Pp. xxiii, 166. $19.00 paper. - J. S. Bratton, editor. Music Hall: Performance and Style. (Popular Music in Britain.) Philadelphia: Open University Press; distributed by Taylor & Francis, Inc., Philadelphia, Pa. 1986. Pp. xv, 175. $19.00 paper.

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
Roy T. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Open University ◽  
Music Hall

‘… into another kind of life in which anything might happen …’ Popular music and late modernity, 1910–1930

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Baxendale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
As If

One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document