Music
Michael Dunne analyzed the episode "All Singing, All Dancing" in his book American Film Musical Themes and Forms, and gave examples from it while explaining that singing and dancing performances are generally not seen as acceptable in the television medium. He notes that Homer calls singing "fruity" and "the lowest form of communication" during the episode. However, Dunne also notes the fact that Homer himself sings "his objection that musicals are fake and phony." Dunne describes the frame narrative as establishing Marge as "..more favorably disposed toward musicals than the males in her house." Dunne concluded that "musicals come out on top in this episode, but the victory is marginal at best." Of the episode itself, Dunne wrote that "..the parodies contained in the show demonstrate that its creators are familiar enough with various forms of musical performance to echo them and confident enough that their viewers will catch the references."
In the episode "The Springfield Connection", Homer and Marge went to a performation by the Springfield Pops orchestra. Kurt M. Koenigsberger analyzes Homer's comments about the Springfield Pops rendition of the Star Wars theme in Koenigsberger's piece: "Commodity Culture and Its Discontents: Mr. Bennett, Bart Simpson, and the Rhetoric of Modernism" published in the compilation work Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture edited by John Alberti. Koenigsberger comments: "The joke in this opening scene involves a confusion of high and popular artistic production: Marge treats the Springfield Pops as 'culture' and expects that the usually boorish Homer will need to be drawn into the spectacle." However, Koenigsberger notes that Homer actually regards Star Wars as a "classic", implying that a "classic" work must have a musical composer that is deceased, and be devoid of light-shows or glitter balls. Koenigsberger uses this example to discuss Homer's application of "a strategy characteristic of literary modernism".
Read more about this topic: Media In The Simpsons
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things with one another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him who mourns; for him who is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.”
—Baruch (Benedict)
“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)