• “The Wild West meets the wives of Windsor: Shakespeare and Music in the Mythological American West”

    Author(s):
    Kendra Leonard (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    American Musicological Society, Global Shakespeares, LLC Shakespeare
    Subject(s):
    Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616, Music
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Shakespeare
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6542J79X
    Abstract:
    North America has never had any trouble making Shakespeare its own. Since the first American performance of Shakespeare play in 1730, directors, actors, and musicians have been working to locate the works of the Bard in the United States and Canada. I will examine the music for two Shakespearean productions in the context of this Americanization and especially the ways in which musical material largely understood as “Western” is used to geo- and chronolocate their settings. Lone Star Love transports The Merry Wives of Windsor to the “Wild West,” where Col. John Falstaff finds himself in the boomtown of Windsor, Texas. There he schemes with the wives of cattle barons for their husbands’ fortunes, but the women are onto his plans and upend them. The music for Lone Star Love was performed by The Red Clay Ramblers band, featuring country and bluegrass tunes. While the setting provides Americanization of the work, it is the music that most clearly locates the action in the American West. A production of The Taming of the Shrew at Bard on the Beach of Vancouver, BC, musically locates the action of the play in the “Wild West” through the use of cues similar to those composed by Ennio Morricone for Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” Westerns. These cues, used in conjunction with the play’s conflicts between father and daughter, sister and sister, and wooer and beloved, create an aural atmosphere of satire while depicting Kate as a rough-and-ready modern woman of the American West.
    Notes:
    This essay appears in Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western, ed. Kendra Preston Leonard and Mariana Whitmer, Routledge, 2018.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Routledge
    Pub. Date:
    August 2018
    Book Title:
    Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western
    Author/Editor:
    Kendra Preston Leonard and Mariana Whitmer
    Chapter:
    1
    Page Range:
    13 - 26
    ISBN:
    9781138571532
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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