In February, Paris audiences are stunned by a recital by 10-year American violin prodigy, Yehudi Menuhin.
On October 6, 1927, the New York premiere of the first “talkie”(feature length talking movie), The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, causes audiences to stand up and cheer.
In December, jazz composer and pianist Duke Ellington opens at The Cotton Club, a famous Harlem nightclub.
On February 24, 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premieres at An Experiment In Modern Music concert at Aeolian Hall, New York.
The 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris featured track and field athletes from all over the world such as Harold Abrahams of the UK, Eric Liddell from Scotland, Jackson Scholz from the United States, and Paavo Nurmi of Finland. The 1924 Olympics is the setting for the 1981 Academy Award-winning film, Chariots of Fire.
In mid-1922 the magazine Vanity Fair coined the word “flapper” to describe the new “free’ young women who were beginning to embrace a more relaxed and libertine lifestyle, at least in the big cities and East Coast enclaves of sophisticated culture. These women “wore shorter skirts, cropped their hair and danced brazenly in public.” The music they danced to was new, too. Jazz music with its syncopated sounds was the successor to ragtime, and the Twenties became the Jazz Age as the fashionable set tried out dances such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.
In 1922, Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At the same time, Al Jolson, a white singer and entertainer who often performed in blackface, was making hit song recordings such as April Showers and Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!). According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, “Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock ‘n’ roll.”
Five year old Jackie Coogan stars with British comedian Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin’s first full length film, The Kid. In September, fans mob Chaplin when he arrives in London on his first visit to his native country in nine years.
Rudolph Valentino becomes the heartthrob of early twenties after his performance in The Sheik, a movie in which Valentino plays the starring role of Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, the romantic interest of English Lady Diana Mayo, played by actress Agnes Ayres. Women who see his silent movies swoon over Valentino, aka “The Latin Lover.”
A popular song of 1921 was My Little Margie, recorded by Eddie Cantor:
Here’s a link to a spotify playlist of favorite songs from the 1910″s:
The songs on the playlist are:
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
St. Louis Blues
COme Josephine in my Flying Machine
Keep the Home Fires Burning
K-K-K-Katy
Over THere
It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
Roses of Picardy
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
Colonel Bogey March
Rule Britannia/God Save the King
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile
Anyone have a favorite song from the 1910’s? Z-baby asked if I was alive during that decade. I assured her that I was not.
Felix the Cat is the newest cartoon character to appear on the movie screen in a 1919 film short called Feline Follies. Devised by Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan, Felix is popular for several years through the silent film era, and then in a reincarnation on television in the fifties and sixties.
A revolutionary new school of art is formed in Germany by architect Walter Gropius. It is called The Bauhaus School, and its goal is to combine visual arts, crafts, and architecture to design a new artistic approach to design that is suitable for a new industrial age. A couple of examples of “Bauhaus architecture.”
In April 1919, New Orleans-style jazz music arrives in Europe as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band debuts in London. THe group had already enjoyed great success in New York City from 1917 on.
May 30, 1913. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s new ballet, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps), premiered in Paris and caused a near-riot. The French audience booed Stravinsky’s dissonant and rhythmically complex music and Njinsky’s provocative and non-traditional choreography. The story is that there were fist fights in the aisles, and some concertgoers stormed out in disgust.
Then, in 1940 Disney’s Fantasia made the piece about, not primitive pagan rituals of spring, but rather the primitive pagan story of Evolution. It fits.
Also in 1913, silent film comedians Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin made their U.S. film debuts. Arbuckle was in two of the new Keystone Kops comedies, and Chaplin starred in a film called Making a Living.
On a much more somber note, Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner which premiered in Munich in 1913. Oddly enough, Drama Daughter just told me that she is playing the female lead in this influential German play in a production this fall. She also says the play is sad and depressing.
Go here to look at some amazing photographs from Tsarist Russia, taken in color circa 1910. I have a tendency to think that people lived in black and white that long ago whereas the beautiful colors of God’s world existed then, too. Look and see if you don’t have to keep reminding yourself that the photographs are of real people from the early twentieth century, not actors dressed up as Russian peasants.
Tango fever sweeps Europe and the United States as fashionable young people learn to dance the tango, a dance that originated in the slums of Argentina.
I’m not sure why this couple is dancing about on the edge of some kind of pier or marina, but you can see why many found this new dance to be quite shocking and suggestive.
Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 in 1906–07. The premiere was conducted by the composer himself in St. Petersburg on 8 February 1908.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken? was a popular hymn, published in 1908, writen by Ada R. Habershon and Charles H. Gabriel.
And here’s an entire playlist of popular music from the first decade of the twentieth century. Please listen, especially if you’re in my class, and tell me what you think. Any favorites? (You may have to have a free Spotify account to listen, but I have Spotify invitations to give away if you want one.)
What about the art? Favorites, anyone? Or comments?
Mariachi is a style of Mexican music that originated in the State of Jalisco, in Western Mexico. The story is that in 1907 General Porfirio Diaz ordered a mariachi band to play for visiting U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root, and the general told them to wear charro suits, which became the traditional dress of the mariachi bands. After the Revolution of 1910 mariachi music became more and more identified with Mexican nationalism and patriotism.
With his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso shocks the Paris art scene in 1907. The painting was presented on an eight foot square canvas at his studio. The painter Derain said “One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.” Matisse was outraged by the painting because he thought it was a joke, an attempt to make fun of the Fauvists and of his paintings in particular. You can read more about this revolutionary work of art at Wikipedia.
Scholastic free art lesson in the style of Picasso (cubism).