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"Who's Selling Here?": Sounds Like The Music Man Is Selling and We're Buying
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 2008
- pp. 42-59
- 10.1353/mdr.0.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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With The Music Man, Meredith Willson deliberately positions himself (and his sympathies) in the middle of the "brows" controversy. The result is an extended panegyric on the superiority both of the middlebrow aesthetic – as epitomized especially by the boys' band, the barbershop quartet, and the genre of the musical itself – and of the fundamentally American values it supposedly generates.