Jazz and Post-War Avant-Garde Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers the development of Jazz from the Swing Era to Bebop, as well as the Post-War Avant-Garde movements of Zero Hour including Integral Serialism and Indeterminacy.

West End Blues

A musical piece where the main melody is played in the beginning and chorus, featuring a back-and-forth structure between the melody and improvisation.

The Swing Era

The peak period of Jazz popularity during the $1930 ext{s}$ and $1940 ext{s}$, characterized by large Big Bands, standardized instrumentation, and more structured, written music.

Big Band

A Jazz ensemble of this era typically consisting of $20+$ members, including saxophones, trombones, trumpets, drums, string bass, and piano.

Swing (Musical Characteristics)

A style defined by a rapid, predictable tempo and syncopation, where instruments play around the beat rather than directly on it to create 'grooviness'.

Duke Ellington

A DC-born composer and pianist who rejected the label 'Jazz composer' and was influenced by early jazz as well as classical composers like Debussy and Stravinsky.

Cotton Club

A venue for exclusively white clientele where Duke Ellington played from $1927$ to $1931$, often featuring plantation or jungle-themed scenery.

Bebop

A complex Jazz style emerging from the mid-$1940 ext{s}$ onwards, designed for listening rather than dancing, and typically performed by small groups of $3-5$ musicians.

Head

The main melody in a Bebop performance that all members play together before and after individual solo sections.

Zero Hour

The post-WWII period in Europe characterized by an existential feeling of cultural resetting and the rebuilding of society and identity from the ground up.

Carmina Burana (1935/6)

A work by Orff associated with Nazi Germany, characterized by a conservative, grandiose, and extremely tonal musical aesthetic capable of being used as propaganda.

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961)

A programmatic work by Penderecki for string orchestra that uses novel notation, pitch bending, and a stopwatch instead of a meter to create anxious, screeching textures.

Integral Serialism

A movement in post-war music where composers like Pierre Boulez sought to assert maximum control over every musical element, including rhythms, dynamics, and articulation.

Pierre Boulez

A leading post-war French composer and conductor who opposed Romanticism and Neoclassicism, famously writing an obituary titled 'Schoenberg is Dead'.

Structure 1A

A work by Boulez that applies the $12$-tone technique to all stylistic elements, resulting in music that is rhythmically random, unemotional, and detached from traditional melody.

Indeterminacy (Chance)

A trend where composers remove themselves from their works by leaving elements to the universe, heavily influenced by Buddhism and Daoism.

John Cage

An American self-taught composer based in NYC who pioneered the use of chance in composition and explored the sounds and timbres of 'noise'.

Prepared Piano

A piano that has had various objects placed between its strings to change the timbre, resulting in unique sounds for every performance even if the written work is fixed.

Music of Changes (1951)

A John Cage composition created by flipping coins and using a Chinese divination text to determine musical elements like rhythm, articulation, and dynamics.