American Musical Midterm Terms 1 minstrelsy 2 banjo 3 bones 4 Mr Interlocutor 5 blackface The continued stereotyping behavior and appearance of African American character actors on stage and screen American entertainment consisting of comic skits variety acts dancing and music performed by white people in blackface or especially after the Civil War black people in blackface The instruments in minstrel shows included most commonly the banjo fiddle tambourine and bones The minstrel show purported to re create plantation life and presented in its early stages as idealized genteel version of American slavery that was partly undercut in some of the humorous exchanged between the central interlocutor and the percussion playing end men of the classic minstrel show lineup A musical instrument like a small guitar with a round body a long neck and four or five strings Derivatives of folk song and sentimental parlor song or lively dances deriving from Scotland or Ireland Instrumentation from plantation The Minstrel Show Are a musical instrument more specifically a folk instrument which at the simplest consists of a pair of animal bones or pieces of wood or a similar material Instrumentation from Plantation The Minstrel Show Derivatives of folk song and sentimental parlor song or lively dances deriving from Scotland or Ireland Person who is having a conversation with you A man in the middle of the line in a minstrel show who questions the end men and acts as leader An interlocutor is the master of ceremonies of a minstrel show A black face character like the other performers the interlocutor nonetheless had a somewhat aristocratic demeanor a codfish aristocrat A form of theatrical makeup used by performers to represent a black person A mask that was put on so that the performers could say inappropriate things perform objectable music and generally misbehave The mas of blackface was a particularly effective enabling device allowing audiences to take pleasure in kinds of humor and music to which loftier sensibilities had otherwise denied them access The mechanism is one of deflection as it seeks out the most vulnerable targets available and makes them ridiculous and even more vulnerable through exaggeration and then uses them as a conduit for whatever might be seen as culturally dangerous The most difficult dimension of this heritage as it manifests itself in musicals is the tradition of blackface minstrelsy which has stained the history of musical theatre in America with the seemingly indelible imprint of burned cork grotesquely painted smiles and whitely protruding eyes A joyous musician reappeared in minstrel shows throughout the nineteenth century One of the end men on the side of the Interlocutor middle man 8 Mr Bones reappeared in minstrel shows throughout the nineteenth century One of the end men on the side of the Interlocutor middle man The central device of the minstrel show was the juxtaposition of various racially demeaning stereotypes comically rendered with crude verbal humor and in dialect and the quite diverse music shows these shows offered The music in Gilbert and Sullivan s shows in America music more distinctly European than American with little or none of the diverse African American inflections already then present to some extent in American music in minstrelsy and spirituals that would eventually develop into the idioms of jazz and blues Like Gospel music music that has spiritual lyrics 6 burnt cork 7 Mr Tambo 9 dialect 10 spirituals 11 endmen They come from a merger between the traditions of the circus and the opera house repertoire companies plays and Vaudeville Mr Tambo and Mr Bones The men in between Mr Interlocutor Raise of outdoor entertainment i Beer gardens 12 tent shows 13 Broadway 14 Bowery is theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway in the Manhattan borough of New York City A rough more lawless area in Southern Manhattan Peter Gaunt and Charles H Hoyt Through its perennial popularity helped establish more securely the New York based comic waltz song as a type distinct from the more sentimental waltz song Delineates a series of fairly lengthy comic verses each capped with a refrain that is musically more memorable The humor stems mainly from verbal misunderstandings entirely contained in the verses so that the song may easily be represented either in part or with additional verses written for the occasion Self contained narrative 15 marriage trope i Long verse 16 camp Couples whose individual issues mirror or embody larger ones that turn out to be what the musical in question is really about an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing or humorous because of its ridiculousness to the viewer i intentionally exaggerated The highly charged camp atmosphere that devolved from this circumstance is and has long been a central component of American musical theatre gay presence in musical theatre Sense of recognition i Deflection and double meanings A dance with a strutting step based on this promenade Dance developed from the Prize Walks held in the late 19th century generally at get togethers on slave plantations in the Southern United States America in the 1870s from Vienna to New York In which the chorus and usually the verse adopts a waltz style in triple meter with a strong downbeat and lilting double up beat on the second and third beats Although the tempo for the waltz song could range from fairly slow to moderately fast its association with the dance itself would have been undermined if the tempo were too slow fast to permit dancing 17 cakewalk 18 waltz song 19 comic waltz song The Bowery 1891 i Peter Gaunt and Charles H Hoyt ii Comic Waltz song Irish New York iii Self contained narrative long verse 20 sentimental waltz song The success of a sentimental waltz song depends on how well and subtly the chorus embodies the overall meaning of the narrative verses since for the listeners who will scarcely remember the specific words or music of the verse the chorus must inevitably stand for the whole song After The Ball i Admixture of operetta type 21 coon song Since 1880s displaced waltz song as dominant type Although they had been around as an adjunct of the minstrel stage coon songs enjoyed their greatest vogue when they merged with ragtime near the turn of the century the latter type a derivative of the cakewalk and its