This study investigated arts education programs in the Chautauqua Movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chautauqua Movement was a nationwide phenomenon that combined education with entertainment and sought to provide educational opportunities to rural communities with public gatherings and at-home learning offerings. This study focused on Chautauqua programs from the Movement’s founding in 1874 through 1930. Arts programs, in this study, included visual arts, music, and theatre. This research centered on the examination of published historical studies, memoirs, event programs, and photographs. Arts education programs in the Chautauqua Movement included lectures and demonstrations by visual artists, musical performances featuring a variety sizes and styles, and theatrical productions ranging from dramatic readings to hit Broadway plays. It was concluded in this study that a variety of art forms were present in these Chautauqua gatherings, which provided a rich body of entertainment and education in the arts for those who attended. / text

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1969. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Robert W. Lynn. Dissertation Committee: Patricia A. Graham. Includes bibliographical references.

For the majority of summers between 1917 and 1925, May Valentine presented popular operas to receptive audiences on the chautauqua circuits, conducting and managing her own operatic troupe for the Redpath Chautauqua Bureau from 1923 to 1925. During this time, Valentine produced and conducted “light opera”—English-language operettas such as DeKoven’s Robin Hood, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and The Gondoliers, Oscar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier, and Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl—throughout much of the United States to chautauqua’s demanding, predominantly rural crowds. That her company maintained relative operational autonomy, saw steady ticket revenues and an enthusiastic press reception, and garnered regular appearances in period entertainment magazines while on the summer circuits suggests that Valentine was a successful conductor and impresario. A case study of the May Valentine Opera Company, this thesis explores processes associated with the chautauqua-based dissemination of opera in order to address broader operatic tastes of the 1910s and 1920s in the United States. The capitalist enterprise of the chautauqua circuits proved to be an ideal outlet for the large-scale dissemination of a vernacular operatic repertoire. Throughout her career, Valentine expressed her egalitarian vision for opera in the United States and, with tour stops in upwards of forty-seven states, furthered her cause through the day-to-day operations of a touring, commercial troupe. Valentine’s public persona as a female operatic conductor further inspired a press reception that often focused on her position as a harbinger of the period’s increased attention to female participation in public music making. The chautauqua-circuit career of May Valentine represents not only a now-forgotten continuation of touring English-language opera, but an early twentieth-century operatic phenomenon propagated by standardized chautauqua-circuit business practices, both grounded in and promoted with period ideals of social edification and cultural egalitarianism.

This dissertation addresses the place of music in circuit chautauqua, the place of circuit chautauqua in American culture, and the role of music in defining that place. It takes into account the perception of chautauqua as a conduit by which higher culture and urban intellectual discourse could reach rural Americans, and the implications of this perception on musical programming. The heyday of the circuit chautauqua movement (1904-1932) occurred during a time of considerable interaction between, and discussion of, entertainment and education in the United States. Music was important to the self-image of those involved in the entertainment and education industries, and especially to those who could not easily be labeled as either entertainers or educators. Chautauqua performers, and the chautauqua movement itself, held an uneasy position on the continuum between pleasing crowds and bettering audience members’ lives. Music helped to define circuit chautauqua, both as an edifying factor and as an empty diversion. Popular music attracted crowds, while art music enhanced chautauqua’s image as a valid outlet for high culture. Music’s role in defining chautauqua’s identity was often more complex, however, as the lines between art and popular music, and thus between education and entertainment, were rarely clearly defined. Much of the programming billed as cultural outreach would have been more accurately labeled as novelty, while the popular music often espoused patriotism, loyalty, piety, and other sentiments that would cause audiences and critics to deem such music as edifying, if not purely educational. This dissertation seeks to clarify music’s role in establishing and maintaining circuit chautauqua’s reputation as a cultural conduit, an educational force, and an American institution.

abstract: For those familiar with the name of Bohumir Kryl, he may be known simply as a cornetist who regularly utilized the extreme pedal register of his instrument. However, his life was much more complex than that. Born in 1875 near Prague, Kryl was trained by his father as a sculptor, and, for a brief stint in his childhood, he was a circus tumbler. Returning to his family vocation, he traveled with them to America and spent much of the 1890s sculpting the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument and busts on the English Hotel in Indianapolis, as well as the friezes adorning the Lew Wallace study in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In the late 1890s, he left sculpting to become a professional cornet soloist, touring with the bands of John Philip Sousa and Frederick Innes, among others. Kryl soon garnered the title of World’s Greatest Cornetist. He formed his own band in 1906 and continued to solo and conduct well into the 1930s, eventually becoming known as one of the five greatest bandmasters in the world. He stopped soloing in the 1930s, but continued to conduct various orchestras until the late 1940s, gaining notoriety for his women’s orchestra. He also became infamous in the way he chose to parent his two daughters. He was financially successful, spending a short time as a bank president in the 1920s and amassing a significant art collection over the span of his life. When he died in 1961, he was worth nearly $2,000,000. This document is the first comprehensive biography of the extraordinary life of Bohumir Kryl. Many documents were reviewed in preparation for this biography, including thousands of newspaper articles, telegrams, and letters. Much of Kryl’s personal correspondence used for this study was acquired through the Redpath Chautauqua Collection, located in the University of Iowa Library in Iowa City. Because there are few secondary sources, this biography of Kryl is based on these primary sources, which were carefully organized, reviewed, and documented. Their wealth of information has allowed this study to offer a complete and multifaceted picture of the life and times of Bohumir Kryl. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2019

Thesis--University of Michigan. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-76). Also available in electronic format.

abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which childhood was perceived in the circuit Chautauqua movement. The methodology followed a threefold approach: first, to trace the development of the Chautauqua movement, thereby identifying the values and motivations which determined programming; next, to identify the major tropes of thought through which childhood has been traditionally understood; and finally, to do a performance analysis of the pageant America, Yesterday and Today to locate perceptions of childhood and to gain a better understanding of the purpose of this pageant. My principal argument is that the child's body was utilized as the pivotal tool for the ideological work that the pageant was designed to do. This ideological effort was aimed at both the participants and the audience, with the child's body serving as the site of education as well as signification. Through the physical embodiment and repetition of different roles, the children who participated performed certain values and cultural assumptions. This embodiment of values was expected to be retained and performed long after the performance was over - it was a form of training through pleasure. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Theatre 2012

This dissertation explores the impact of the permanent chautauqua movement in American culture, especially in the period from 1874 to 1935. It argues that chautauquas served as sites for the production of middle-class culture and the renegotiation of relationships among class, gender, race, and religion. Permanent chautauquas were popular vacation resorts throughout the United States, beginning with the founding of the Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly in upstate New York and increasing in number to about two hundred in 1900. They were associations of cottages offering community programs that were educational, religious, and entertaining. This dissertation examines the programs that the chautauquas planned, arguing that they espoused a burgeoning form of culture, one that supported a perceived morality and middle-class values like dedication to family, temperance, education, patriotism, piety, and fighting against temptation to sin. Particular emphasis is placed on how performance at permanent chautauquas led to new expectations of gender, class, race, and religion. Women had opportunities for leadership, were able to blur lines between public and private spheres, and could act out different expectations of their gender while on the grounds. While most chautauquans were middle class, attending a chautauqua meant that one's class was not important and all could enjoy a middle-class vacation. While the line between whites and non-whites remained stable, non-whites were granted performance opportunities at chautauquas that they might not have had; other non-whites participated as members of the work force that allowed white chautauquans the leisure they expected. Because chautauquas were Protestant communities, religion underlaid all activities on the grounds, redefining expectations of how religion and entertainment could be combined. Taken together, these renegotiations of identity at chautauquas impacted a broader American culture. This dissertation examines the performances at chautauqua, in particular the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and their Recognition Day graduation ceremony; historical pageantry; professional performers who visited as part of the circuit chautauquas; and early film exhibition. It places them in a broader American performance context and argues that permanent chautauquas played a role in their development and popularity. It draws upon archival records from the chautauquas to outline the kinds of programming presented. Additionally, the research is supported by anecdotal evidence from a series of oral history interviews conducted with individuals who recall their childhoods at permanent chautauquas.

No description available.