Description
About the Author
Todd Decker is the Paul Tietjens Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and many articles and book chapters on popular music and media in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Decker has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London's Victoria and Albert Museum and was featured in a 2019 BBC World Service documentary on the song "Ol' Man River."
Reviews
In wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity. * Raymond Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities, UCLA *
Todd Decker's Astaire by Numbers deftly pairs quantitative analysis with archival research to examine both the material labor of Fred Astaire's dancing body and his position of power within the Hollywood studio era. Through a novel and careful parsing of musical choreography and production practices, Decker illustrates how Astaire's identity as a cisgender, heterosexual white male allowed him to dominate the Hollywood Studio era's film musicals in a way no other musical star has. * Colleen T. Dunagan, California State University, Long Beach *
Astaire by Numbers provides an in-depth look into the fastidious creative processes of Fred Astaire and how the dancer's work and persona shaped the concept of the male dancer during his time... Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice *
Book Information
ISBN 9780197643594
Author Todd Decker
Format Paperback
Page Count 456
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 667g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 236mm * 26mm