Sounding Sentimental: American Popular Song from Nineteenth-Century Ballads to 1970S Soft Rock Emily Margot Gale Vancouver, BC B
Sounding Sentimental: American Popular Song From Nineteenth-Century Ballads to 1970s Soft Rock Emily Margot Gale Vancouver, BC Bachelor of Music, University of Ottawa, 2005 Master of Arts, Music Theory, University of Western Ontario, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia May, 2014 © Copyright by Emily Margot Gale All Rights Reserved May 2014 For Ma with love iv ABSTRACT My dissertation examines the relationship between American popular song and “sentimentality.” While eighteenth-century discussions of sentimentality took it as a positive attribute in which feelings, “refined or elevated,” motivated the actions or dispositions of people, later texts often describe it pejoratively, as an “indulgence in superficial emotion.” This has led an entire corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural production to be bracketed as “schmaltz” and derided as irrelevant by the academy. Their critics notwithstanding, sentimental songs have remained at the forefront of popular music production in the United States, where, as my project demonstrates, they have provided some of the country’s most visible and challenging constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and morality. My project recovers the centrality of sentimentalism to American popular music and culture and rethinks our understandings of the relationships between music and the public sphere. In doing so, I add the dimension of sound to the extant discourse of sentimentalism, explore a longer history of popular music in the United States than is typical of most narratives within popular music studies, and offer a critical examination of music that—though wildly successful in its own day—has been all but ignored by scholars.
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