Lecture N16 Cultural Life in the USA

The key word to American culture is diversity. America is not one place, or one people, or one culture. It is huge, various, diverse and different from place to place. But nobody will argue that the center of American cultural life is New York. Let's be honest: New York often irritates people in the rest of America and a good many people in the rest of the world as well. New Yorkers take for granted that their city is the financial, business, as well as news and commercial center of the world. But it is also called " the art capital of the world", " the great modern dance and ballet metropolis", " a place where actors outnumber beggars" and " the home of the Metropolitan Opera", the Met, as New Yorkers call it.

In New York alone there are more than 12, 000 artists and sculptors who are supporting themselves from their work. There are about 400 art galleries and hundreds of exhibitions and shows each season.

Then there are great museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art which houses the most complete collection of modern art in the world, comparable only with the British Museum and the Louvre.

New York's famous Broadway with its 40 professional stages and more than 350 off-Broadway experimental theaters, gives this city the status of the biggest theatrical center.

But New York is just the major, not the only cultural center in the US. The fact that three times as many Americans attend symphony concerts as go to baseball games, can be explained by the fact that there are about 1, 500 orchestras throughout the country. Five American symphony orchestras are included into the world's top ten, they are from New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Phila­delphia.

When people speak about America's cultural influence in the world, they probably mean popular culture. Regardless of why it is spread, it is usually quite rapidly adopted and then adapted in many countries, and as a result, American roots are often quickly forgotten. For example, the American source of the song " Happy birthday to you" is often not remembered.

The situation with American pop music is more complex because in the beginning, when it was still clearly American, it was often strongly resisted. Jazz was once thought to be a great danger to youth and their morals and was outlawed in several countries. Rock'n'roll and all its variations, blues, soul and most recently country and western music, all have more or less similar histories. They were first re­sisted —often in America as well — as being low-class musical trash and a danger to the nation's youth. And then the music became accepted, extended and developed, and later commonly exported back to the USA.

Література США Лекція 11

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