Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna

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Introduction
Part 1: The Social Context of the Popular Music Revolution
Chapter 1 Professionalism and Commercialism
Concerts and Music Halls / The Sheet Music Trade / The Piano Trade / Copyright and Performing Right / The Star System
Chapter 2: New Markets for Cultural Goods
Entrepreneurship / Promenade Concerts / Dance Music / Music Hall and Cafe-Concert / Blackface Minstrelsy, Black Musicals, and Vaudeville / Operetta
Chapter 3: Music, Morals, and Social Order
Respectability and Improvement / Physical Threats to Morality / Public and Private Morality / Threats to Social Order / Threats to Public Morality
Chapter 4: The Rift Between Art and Entertainment
Light Music vs. Serious Music / Art, Taste, and Status / Opera vs. Operetta / Folk Music: Edification for the Uncritical
Part 2 Studies of Revolutionary Popular Genres
Chapter 5: A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz.
Unterhaltungsmusik and Popular Style / Stylistic Features / Music and Business / Class and the Metropolis / Artiness and Seriousness
Chapter 6: Blackface Minstrels, Black Minstrels and Their European Reception.
Reception in Britain / Seeking the Black Beneath the Blackface / England's Pre-eminent Troupes / Black Troupes / Minstrel Contradictions / The Minstrel Legacy
Chapter 7: The Music Hall Cockney: Flesh and Blood, or Replicant?
Phase 1: Parody / Phase 2: The Character-Type / Phase 3: The Imagined Real
Chapter 8: No Smoke Without Water: The Incoherent Message of Montmartre Cabaret.
The Chat Noir and Aristide Bruant / Other Cabaret Artists / Yvette Guilbert / The Proliferation of Artistic Cabarets / Cabaret and the Avant-Garde
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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The phrase "popular music revolution" may instantly bring to mind such twentieth-century musical movements as jazz and rock 'n' roll. In Sounds of the Metropolis, however, Derek Scott argues that the first popular music revolution actually occurred in the nineteenth century, illustrating how a distinct group of popular styles first began to assert their independence and values. He explains the popular music revolution as driven by social changes and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise, which ultimately resulted in a polarization between musical entertainment (or "commercial" music) and "serious" art. He focuses on the key genres and styles that precipitated musical change at that time, and that continued to have an impact upon popular music in the next century. By the end of the nineteenth century, popular music could no longer be viewed as watered down or more easily assimilated art music; it had its own characteristic techniques, forms, and devices. As Scott shows, "popular" refers here, for the first time, not only to the music's reception, but also to the presence of these specific features of style. The shift in meaning of "popular" provided critics with tools to condemn music that bore the signs of the popular-which they regarded as fashionable and facile, rather than progressive and serious. A fresh and persuasive consideration of the genesis of popular music on its own terms, Sounds of the Metropolis breaks new ground in the study of music, cultural sociology, and history.

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