Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era

Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense today, a century ago opera was deeply embedded within American popular music culture, and familiarity with opera was part of a widely shared cultural literacy. During the ragtime era, hundreds of humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjectsueither directly quoting music from operas or alluding to operatic characters and vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the moment when popular music in America began to move away from its European heritage and when the gap between highbrow classical music and lowbrow popular forms began to open up, with all the cultural snobbery and rebellion that came along with this divide.

Guiding us through this large but hitherto forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, Larry Hamberlin brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth century, new social forces were undermining the long-held view that European heritage was fundamentally superior to America's native vernacular culture. Because operauthat great inheritance from European forebearsusignified elite culture to the popular masses, operatic novelty songs became the ideal means to this humorous and socially critical end. Combining familiar operatic melodies with the new rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid portraits of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans. A rich, insightful, and delightful exploration of this music and the era that surrounded it, Tin Pan Opera reveals these novelties as striking symbols of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century.

Larry Hamberlin is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College, where he teaches courses in European and American popular and classical music.