Music History II Exam 4

The Stars and Stripes Forever - 1987

• Military bands attached to regiments during the civil war

• Community bands sprung up everywhere after the war

• Professional bands—played dances, marches, and showpieces of all sorts; also played transcriptions of classical music

The composer: John Philip Sousa (1854-1987)

Called the “March King”

• Led the United States Marine Band, 1880-1892

• Led his own band starting 1892 — very rigorous bandmaster; required high standards of commitment and excellence

The Piece - Stars and Stripes Forever

• March with several contrasting strains

• Includes a break strain or a “dogfight” (a call and response clash)

March Form

A B → Trio/Minuet → into the “dogfight”

On parts of the strains, the dynamics increase drastically

Maple Leaf Rag - 1899 (Scott Joplin)

• African-American music, late 19th century: an amalgam of many African musics and European/American Musics

Ragtime

• Ragged time—syncopation, most popular around 1890-1910

• Constant offbeats against a steady pulse; traced back to African poly-rhythm

• Played on small bands or piano

The Composer: Scott Joplin (1869-1917)

“The King of Ragtime”

• son of a former slave

• born in Texas; worked in Missouri and New York

• Wanted to elevate ragtime to a serious art form; actually slowed down the tempos to avoid overt slowness

• Had ambitions to be an art-music composer; but his opera Treemonisha not performed during his lifetime

The Piece - Maple leaf Rag

• Recorded by Joplin himself on a player piano roll

• Typical ragtime form: series of repeated sections with optional return of first section

• This rag: A A B B A C C D D

• Steady pulse in left hand; syncopation in right hand

• In RH, every third 16th-note emphasized with octaves → 3 against 4 -? Poly-rhythm

Backwater Blues (1927)

Context: slavery and sharecropping in the rural American south

The Blues

• Exact origins are obscure; probably derived from work songs and other African-American oral traditions

• Themes: mistreatment and hardships of all kinds, including love

• externalizes the emotions as a way to gain strength and overcome the hardships

The singer-songwriter: Bessie Smith (1894-1937)

“The Empress of Blues”

• Major performer in the Classic Blues style—arranged for vocalist and small band

• height of popularity in the 1920’s

The Piece Backwater Blues

• speaks of misfortune and displacement due to flooding

• exhibits typical blues characteristics

• AAB verse form

• 12-bar blues harmonic progression

• blue notes (lowered 3rds, 5ths, 7ths)

• Free vocal rhythm - pitch and tempo bending

• Progressive storytelling

• Piano player mashes notes to create a pitch bend effect

West End Blues (1928)

Context: Jazz in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, an ethnic melting pot

• Surplus band instruments were a ready resource for music-making

• Jazz benefited from both Creole-culture (mixed-race; educated, music-literate and black culture (spirited, virtuoso improvisation)

• Jazz absorbed ragtime and blues without extinguishing them

• Some musicians took the style northward, e.g. to Chicago, the style was also called Dixieland in retrospect

The composers/ performers / improvisers

King Oliver’s (1885-1928) Creole Jazz Band

King Oliver’s (1885-1928) Creole Jazz Band

Joe Oliver: a prominent New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader

• Louis Armstrong played in this band for a time

Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and His Hot Five

Armstrong (trumpeter,singer): one of the jazz greats

• Started in New Orleans, moved to Chicago, then took jazz around the world

• Armstrong formed this group in Chicago for recording sessions

The Piece: West End Blues

Features typical New Orleans style jazz band

• “Front line” melody instruments: clarinet, trumpet, trombone

• rhythm section: banjo, piano, drums

• Flexible pitch (slides. etc.:from the blues)

• Uses the 12-bar blues harmonic progression

• Several “choruses” (repetitions of the progression); instruments take turns improvising over choruses; also creates polyphony together

• Armstrong (on trumpet) also vocalizes on one chorus

George Gershwin. “I Got Rhythm” (1930)

Context:

America, between the World Wars — Popular music ↔ musical theater ↔ ragtime/jazz/blues

• Popular: Tin Pan Alley—sheet music publishers in New York (roughly 1885-1930)

• Songs from musicals were published by Tin Pan Alley, became hit songs

• Popular songs became jazz standards

The Composer: George Gershwin (1898-1937)

• Successful writer of popular songs and musicals — also jazz-inflected classical music

• e.g. Rhapsody in Blue (1924) for solo piano and jazz ensemble, later scored for orchestra

The Piece— “i Got Rhythm” (1930)

• Broadway show song, from Girl Crazy (Eastern only slicker goes out west, starts a nightclub, falls in love)

• Broadway show song, from Girl Crazy (Eastern city slicker goes out west, starts a nightclub, falls in love)

• Single verse and refrain (immediately repeated)

• Refrain structure: AABA

• Punchy syncopation

• Harmonic progression of refrain used for countless jazz improvisation —> “rhythm changes”

Duke Ellington, Cotton Tail (1940)

The context: big band jazz

Jazz moves into larger venues, e.g. theaters, dinner clubs —”front line: of New Orleans style bands are expanded to fill up the space

• Reed section, trumpet section, trombone section

• Rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass, drums)

Made to accompany dancing

• More pre-composed, but still places for solo improvisation

• Swing style—polished arrangements, hard-driving jazz rhythms

The Composer: Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

Pianist, composer, arranger

• started career in Washington, D.C; moved to New York in 1923

• Part of the Harlem Renaissance (Harlem: New York borough, predominantly African-American, fostered a creative boom)

• Long-term stability in his bands; tailored his writing to specific musicians

• Also wrote extended compositions; helped people hear jazz as art music

The Piece — Cotton Tail (1940)

Parker/Gillespie. Anthropology (1945)

The Context: Bebop

• Funding for big bands dried up after WWII, they went back to small combos: one or more of trumpet, saxophone, trombone, plus one or more of piano, bass, and drums.

• Music for listening, not dancing

Typical Structure:

• Head (unison tune in melody instruments)

• Series of imrpovised choruses on the harmonic progression (”changes”)

• Repeat of head

The performers:

• Charlie “Bird” Parker - Alto sax

• Dizzy Gillespie - Trumpet

The Piece: Anthropology

focuses on a series of choruses on “rhythm changes”.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Biography:

• Learned music from his father, a bandmaster, who encouraged an expiramental approach to sound

• Taeltned organist at a young age

• Attended Yale

• Founded a highly successful insurance firm, composed on the side

• Worked in obscurity for most of career; eventually gained recognition

• Regarded as the first to create a distinctly American art music

Major works:Charles Ives

• 4 symphonies

• Three Places in New England

• The Unanswered Question

• String quartets, violin and piano sonatas (including “Concard” Sonata)

• About 200 songs

His Style:Charles Ives

Drew upon 4 traditions:

• Americal Vernacular Music

• Protestant church music

• European classical music

• Experimental music (polytonality, tone clusters, atonality—developed these independently of European modernists)

Synthesized these traditions into a heterogeneous style in mature works.

His place in history:Charles Ives

• Initially isolated from European modernism; learned of it later

• Influenced the next generations—founder of the experimental-music tradition of the United States (e.g. Cowell, Varese, Cage)

General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1914)

• An art song, with elements of band music and popular song

• On a poem by Vachel Lindsay: founder of Salvation Army (Booth) leads a march into heaven

• Praphrase a hymn: “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

• Cumulative form: hymn theme is heard first in fragments / paraphrases; appears complete only at the end

• Bass drum simulated in piano with dissonant clusters

• Rhythmic and metrical complexity

Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)

Nationality: Mexican

• Assistant conductor of the first professional orchestra in Mexico

Sensamaya

Genre: Symphonic poem

• Program: An African-Cuban magical rite; a dancer carries a large figure representing a snake, which is ritualistically put to death

Edgard Varese (1893-1965)

Birthplace: France

• Moved to New York in 1915

• “Ultramodernist” — A strong movement that pushes the boundaries of music, exploring new, radical techniques and ideas.

Hyperprism

• Work for winds, brass, and percussion

• Non-rhetorical, non-organic

• Features sound masses — “intelligent bodies of sound moving in space”

• Also called spatial music

Henry Cowell (1897-1965)

Born in California

Early style: Ultramodernist

• New sounds out of traditional instrumentsBorn in California

  Early style: Ultramodernist

• New sounds out of traditional instruments

The Banshee (1925)

• Banshee - a spirit in Irish legend

• Damper pedal held down while player strums, plucks, and rubs the strings of the piano

Later style: Americanist

• Founded a periodical called New Music to publish and promote Ultramodernist music

William Grant Still (1895-1978)

“The dean of Afro-American composers”

first African-American to:

• Conduct a major symphony orchestra

• Have an opera produced

• Have an opera televised

Afro-American Symphony (1930) first movement

• First theme in 12-bar blues structure

• Second theme suggests a spiritual

• Incorporates harmonies and rhythms from jazz

• incorporates jazz timbres: brass instruments played with mutes

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

• First woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in in music

• Studied with and then married composer-musicologist Charles Seeger

• Cultivated a distinctly American modernism; avoided contact with European modernists

• Influenced by Schoenberg’s radical ideas but also wanted to be independent from him

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

• First of many American composers to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger

• 1920’s style: stringent dissonance; use of jazz elements

• Style in 1930’s and following: combines modernism with national American Idioms

• Change in style brought about by his left-leaning/ socialist politics and a desire to appeal to a larger audience through the new media of radio and records

Appalachian Spring (1944) (excerpt)

• Variations on a shaker hymn

• Stylistic features widely spaced as the “American sound”.

• Transparent, widely spaced sororities

• Empty octaves and fifths

• Diatonic dissonances