EFFECT ON THE YOUNGER GENERATION
The hip-hop-infused musical "Hamilton" by Lin-Manuel Miranda is verbally expressed to leave an indelible mark on both the viewer who optically canvasses it and the building that houses it. In an oeuvre so ingenious, Miranda inculcates viewers about a consequential piece of American history through rap and hip-hop that not only intrigues the audience but inculcates it as well, successfully communicating to the younger audience utilizing modern means to tell the life of our Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton.
It is an oeuvre that represents its time of reform, provides sundry conceptions of what it signifies to be an American, highlights the sedulousness of cultural and convivial thoughts, and discusses denouements in an incipient sense connected with the country's founding. In addition, the musical is highly propitious to contemporary American society in the sense that it raises vigilance of gregarious quandaries, promotes debates about the history of our country, and ineluctably enhances our perpetual endeavor to reinterpret our past and find a coalescing national identity. People, after watching this masterpiece of a musical, better understand their history and recollect it more through communicating history through musical means than when they are given a textbook. Through the better communication that appeals to the listener or reader, they are able to remember it better, causing history to be communicated between the edifier and the student.
The result is that almost every song works as a complex historical concert in the show, layering the musical history with the musical present, much as the historical past is combined with the political present. Through the music and ingenious storytelling, Lin-Manuel Miranda shows the younger and modern generation how American History can be interesting and fun, successfully communicating in a different way than that of a boring textbook.
Teaching Hamilton in an interdisciplinary perspective than from a musically opulent viewpoint provides students with an exceptional opportunity to develop incipient approaches to learning about music beyond the Western canon and to apply their musical concepts to a variety of paramount topics that too often remain outside the conventional classroom of music. Both puerile and old, people of sundry races and gregarious backgrounds, and people who love musicals and people who hate them, have captured the musical with fascination. Studying Hamilton in musical depth in a broader sense provides flexibility for thoughtful discussions on how music reflects American history, how music styles broaden Broadway musical cultural conceptions, how its libretto illuminates consequential perspectives on American contemporary (and eighteenth-century) culture, and how its characters and cast epitomize divergent political views both historically and in the present.
Hamilton's universal prominence involves students in a series of musical and interdisciplinary explorations of literature beyond the traditional Western canon and literature that is already very interesting to them in most cases. Through the different means of communication utilized by Miranda in "Hamilton," he is able to appeal to the younger audience and teach them the story of Alexander Hamilton and the Revolutionary War. Soon enough, this will be history, and the songs will be it's way of communicating to the people listening the story of Hamilton.
Miranda has loved musicals since childhood,
and has appeared in many of his high school performances. Les Misérables is one of his all-time classics, and that classic musical theater influenced Miranda's thoughts about Hamilton. |
"This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance. Our story should look the way our country looks. Then we found the
best people to embody these parts. I think it's a very powerful statement without having to be a statement." - Lin-Manuel Miranda on choosing a diverse cast |
Hamilton tells the tale of an orphaned
Caribbean immigrant who's decisions in his life resulted in him become the first secretary of the U.S. treasury, and remembered in history. |