ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the light music element of popular music. At the beginning of the twentieth century the terms highbrow and lowbrow started to be used4 to denote opposite cultural tastes, true ‘art music’, being highbrow and music for the masses, lowbrow. Changes in public taste during the early years of the twentieth century were nowhere more apparent than in the ballroom. In Britain the dance band was essentially an imported concept from the States, and though in the twentieth century it developed alongside the brass band, becoming the professional wing of the band world in its wider sense, it would be quite wrong to claim that the British dance band had its roots in the British brass band. The revolution in dance music could not have taken place without the emergence of the dance band.
