ABSTRACT
This chapter produces effects and valorizes moods, identities, and ideas that no other music does. It discusses closing decades of the twentieth century were witness to the 'disappearing middle', and even those styles once regarded as raw and proletarian, like Rockabilly, are jumping genre categories. Light music and easy listening often yield high-society success, and this adds to its connotations of sophistication. Light music is a term that, for much of the twentieth century, embraced a great deal of the musical terrain now known as easy listening, such as the music of dance bands. Variety theatre and vaudeville played host to a range of musical styles. The British Broadcasting Corporation's Variety Department was responsible, in addition to variety entertainment, for dance bands, operettas, revues, and cinema organs; these were all beneath the dignity of the Music Department. There are, three types of chanson: the music-hall chanson, the operette chanson, and the chanson realiste associated with the poet-composer-performers of artistic cabaret.
