标题: Tap Dancing [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 11-21-2015 15:08 标题: Tap Dancing Tap dancing | It’s Got That Swing; An engaging history of one of America’s great creative inventions. Economist, Nov 21, 2015 http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... tions-its-got-swing
(book review on Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hear; A History of tap dancing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)
Note:
(a) "Closely associated with jazz music * * * According to one dancer, tap was 'one of [America’s] two really indigenous forms,' with jazz the other. As late as the 1950s that statement certainly held true. This complex history needs unpicking. * * * A history of tap dancing is thus what EP Thompson, a Marxist historian, called a 'history from below' at its most extreme."
(i) unpick (vt): "to undo (as sewing) by taking out stitches" www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unpick
(ii) EP Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson
(Edward Palmer Thompson; 1924 – 1993; British)
(b) "Tap also drew inspiration from slavery. Africans, transported across the Atlantic alongside Irish people who had been press-ganged into naval service, swapped moves and rhythms on deck. * * * James Smith, a slave in the 1860s. One of Smith’s companions could 'make his feet go like trip hammers and sound like [a] snaredrum.' " (brackets original)
(i) impressment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment
(colloquially "press gang")
(ii) trip hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_hammer
宋应星 天工开物
(iii) snare drum
(A) snare (n): " 'string across a drum,' 1680s, probably from Dutch snaar 'string,' from same source as snare (n.1 ['noose for catching animals']). From 1938 as short for snare-drum (1873)" http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snare
(B) snare drum. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated. http://www.britannica.com/art/snare-drum
the beating of the upper head 鼓面 transmits vibrations via air to the lower head -- the latter has snares/ strings across the surface)
(C) Grover Pro G3™ Standard Snare Drum https://drummersworld.com/store/ ... tandard-snare-drum/
(photo of the drum displaying the bottom head)
(D) 小鼓 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/小鼓
(具有响弦 snare 横置在鼓面)作者: choi 时间: 11-21-2015 15:11
(c) “As tap dancing became more popular, it held an ambiguous relationship with American racial politics. On the one hand, tap dancing (and an associated act, minstrelsy) could reinforce the subjugation of black people, especially when whites used burned cork to darken their faces and then impersonated them. Discrimination ensured that white performers (like Astaire, Kelly and Rogers) took the lion’s share of the fame, even though, in the words of Miles Davis, a jazz musician, ‘they weren’t nothing compared to how [black] guys could dance.’ On the other hand” (brackets original)
(i) minstrelsy (n) : "the singing and playing of a minstrel” www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minstrelsy
(ii) minstrel (n): http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minstrel
(iii) Miles Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis
(1926 – 1991; an American jazz musician)
(d) “Such interpretations are helped along by Mr Seibert’s excellent writing. He liberally employs the lingo of whatever period is under discussion. He describes one actor in the post-Depression era as specialising in playing ‘hayseeds’ (a derogatory word for a yokel)”