Music Fundamentals and American Popular Music History

Vocabulary flashcards covering musical elements, genres, traditions, and historical terms from the lecture notes.

Pitch

A note or tone, describing how high or low a sound is.

Interval

The space or distance between two pitches, describing notes moving low-to-high, high-to-low, or played simultaneously.

Melody

A horizontal series of pitches played in succession that form a coherent musical unit.

Phrases

A series of pitches played in succession that form a coherent unit within a melody.

Contour

The shape and direction of a melodic line, focusing on the relative movement of pitches.

Flat Contour

A melodic contour characterized by a narrow range between the highest and lowest notes.

Jagged Contour

A melodic contour featuring wide intervals and lots of leaps over pitches.

Accompaniment

The musical part that provides rhythmic and harmonic support for the main melody.

Harmony

The simultaneous sounding of two or more pitches, providing harmonic context for a melody.

Consonant Harmony

Harmony that sounds stable, pleasant, or relaxed.

Dissonant Harmony

Harmony that sounds unstable and contains musical tension that needs to be resolved.

Chords

Three or more pitches stacked together, usually spaced three pitches apart.

Meter

The structural organization of musical beats or pulses into regular repeating groups.

Tempo

The speed of the musical pulse or beat.

Duple Meter

Meter where the pulse is organized into repeating groups of two, alternating strong and weak pulses.

Triple Meter

Meter where the pulse is organized into repeating groups of three.

Unmetered

Music that lacks an underlying steady pulse or meter, often heard in song introductions.

Rhythm

The actual duration of musical sounds and pitches over time.

Syncopated Rhythm

A rhythm where the strong or accented pulses do not align with the strong beats of the meter.

Straight Rhythm

A rhythm where the strong pulses align directly with the strong beats of the meter.

Texture

The element describing how much is going on in the music and how the layers relate to each other.

Syllabic

A word-music relationship where there is exactly one musical pitch per syllable of text.

Melismatic

A word-music relationship where a single syllable of text is sung across more than three pitches.

Timbre

The unique quality or tone color of a sound that distinguishes one voice or instrument from another.

Oral Traditions

Musical or cultural traditions that are passed down through performance rather than written down.

Ballads

Storytelling songs predominantly of British origin passed down through oral tradition.

Syncretism

The blending or combination of elements from two or more distinct cultural traditions.

Polyrhythm

The simultaneous layering and performance of multiple contrasting rhythmic patterns. ex: percussion

Conjunto

A borderland dance music genre featuring an ensemble of accordion, bajo sexto, and bass with polka influences.

Parlor Song

A simple, newly composed 19th-century song designed for amateur performance in the home, often featuring sentimental or melancholy themes.

Glee

An energetic type of parlor song written to be sung by three or four voices in multi-part harmony.

Vaudeville

A popular traveling variety entertainment system (1880s–1940s) featuring acrobats, comedians, musicians, and other acts.

Tin Pan Alley

The centralized sheet music publishing industry located on a block in New York City from 1890 to 1950.

Blackface Minstrelsy

A 19th-century American entertainment practice in which performers used blackface paint to present racist caricatures of African Americans.

Exploitative Cultural Appropriation

A form of syncretism where a dominant culture adopts styles from a minority culture, claims authenticity, and monopolizes the economic and cultural rewards.

Stock Characters

Stereotypical theatrical characters not tied to specific actors, such as Jim Crow or Zip Coon in minstrel shows.

Disrespectful Cultural Appropriation

A form of syncretism where a dominant culture adopts elements of a minority culture disrespectfully, creating an inaccurate picture of that culture.

Concert Spiritual

Post-emancipation arrangements of traditional African American spirituals adjusted to conform to European classical harmonic and formal conventions.

Work Songs

Rhythmic songs sung by laborers during work to coordinate group movements and pass the time.

Race Records

Gramophone recordings from the 1920s to 1940s made by Black musicians and marketed specifically to African American audiences.

Country Blues

A rural, acoustic blues style originating in the Mississippi Delta, typically performed by a male soloist with guitar or banjo.

Classic Blues

An urban blues style popular in vaudeville, performed by female singers accompanied by a small jazz ensemble.

Ragtime

A syncopated musical style (1890s–1910s) featuring short-long syncopated melodies over a steady march-like bass rhythm.

Harlem Renaissance

An African American cultural and artistic movement (1920–1945) centered in Harlem and Chicago aimed at creating high art and celebrating Black cultural identity.

Southern Gospel

A white sacred music style originating around 1900 in Lower Appalachia, combining sacred texts with parlor song sensibilities.

Black Gospel

A sacred music genre created by combining expressive blues vocal techniques and rhythms with sacred Christian hymn texts.

Hillbilly Records

Commercial recordings from the 1920s marketed to white working-class rural audiences, laying the groundwork for country music.

Carter Style

A guitar technique developed by Maybelle Carter where the thumb plays melody on lower strings while fingers brush upper strings for harmony.

Western Swing

A dance-oriented country subgenre developed in 1930s Texas that merged honky-tonk and polka beats with jazz structures and steel guitar.

Integration

A musical theatre innovation (pioneered in Oklahoma!) where every song and dance directly advances the storyline.

Rhythm and Blues (R&B)

An up-tempo, dance-oriented music category adopted in 1949 as a catch-all term replacing Race Records.

Cover Song

A new recording of a previously recorded song, frequently used by major labels to re-record Black R&B hits with white pop artists.

Nashville Sound

A smooth, polished production style of country music developed in Nashville during the 1950s–1960s, replacing raw honky-tonk with pop arrangements.

Bakersfield Country

A twangy, hard-driving subgenre of country music developed in Bakersfield, California as an authentic alternative to the polished Nashville Sound.

Ring Shout or Ring Spiritual

a traditional African American sacred dance and worship practice

What is habanera rhythm?

Caribbean musical influence, especially from **Cuba

Under Ring Shout or Ring Spiritual slide, list ensemble :

• Leader: one issuing call

• Sticker: pound a stick on the ground not beat the rhythm

• Basers: people issuing the response

• Shouters: are dancing in a circle

What is jubilee

Jubilee music is an African‑American vocal tradition that emerged in the 1870s, defined by close four‑part harmony, call‑and‑response singing, and rhythmic, often a cappella performances rooted in spirituals popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1871.

Dancing at the Southern Border

• Cultural Mixing

  • Border changes

  • Revolutions

  • Migrant Workers

• Conjuncto: its dance music

  • Southeast Texas, Northeast Mexico

  • Ensemble:????

•  Accordion, Baji Sexto, Bass

• Influence of polka (polish dance)

What decade did the industrial revolution start?

1760

In the 1830s what started

beginning of music industry

what happened in beginning of music industry

• growing of middle class

  • man to work and women as a homemaker is new

  • Everyone worked until the mid 19th century. 

  • It became a sign of status for male breadwinner and women as homemaker

  • Many musical instruments and sheet music became much cheaper. 

  • If you had a keyboard back then, it meant you were wealthy

• Mass produced instruments

• Rearranged society 

  • Women’s job was to make home beautiful

  • Women making music

  • Sit down at piano and play music to make house beautiful

What is the Parlor Song?

• Played by women amateurs (mean someone who doesn’t play for women)

• Get simple songs

  • “Feminine” taste

    • simple, melancholy

    • Songs that were wanted by the men 

• Sources

  • Folk music

  • Hymnes

  • Theatre

  • Minstrel Songs

  • Newly composed

• Ideal Women: is simple and a little bit sad (melancholy)

Who was Stephen Foster?

• First professional composer (1830s - 1850s)

  • first person to make a living as a composer

• Born in Pittsburgh

  • got involved with a menstrual troop

• Died in poverty

  • got ripped off by his business partners

Who were the Hutchinson Family

Parlor Music in performance.

an American family singing group from Milford, New Hampshire, who became the most popular entertainers and social protest singers in the United States during the 1840s.

• Social reforms

  •  They used their role as entertainers to sway people and shared their political beliefs.

    • Abolition

    • Temperance: was a movement to ban alcohol

What is vaudeville?

It is a structure of entertainment, traveling entertainment system.

From 1880s-1940s

• Touring variety acts

• Music from Tin Pan Ally

• Pay a nickel to go to a vaudeville show in town.

  • Acrobat

  • clown

  • ballerina

• American entertainment was placed around vaudeville at this time.

What is Tin Pan Alley

It is a center of popular music industry

• 1890 - 1950

• A block in New York where they sell centralized sheet music publishing business

  • Vaudeville would come here and would choose the song.

  • They play this song in performance 

  • Then other people would like that song and buy sheet music and take it home and listen to it .

• Song (SHEET MUSIC) is the unit of sale (not the artist)

• Kind of songs

  • Sentimental

  • Bawdy

  • Clever

  • Ethnic

  • Most famous song of the era: “After the Ball,” 1892

What is Blackface Minstrelsy

It is an American entertaining practice (began in the 1820s).

• Traveling shows centered in NYC

• Consists all white men painting their faces and dressing up like African Americans and putting up plays like African Americans.

• Female characters were men in drag

• Were mostly making it up

• Through minstrelsy is where most people had contact with something with African Americans. 

• Would be able to readily access minstrel show

• said they showed “authentic” African america

• most shows showed slaves

• minstrel songs were popular parlor songs

• homogenousization of African culture

Minstrel show consists of what influences?

• African American influence: banjo, percussion, syncopation

• European influence: fiddle, dance tunes

What are stock characters?

• are characters that aren’t matched to a particular actor and can be played by anybody, folklore, think of SNL

What is Exploitative Cultural Appropriation?

• A type of syncretism(combining 2 or more cultural traditions) in which the dominant culture borrows or adopts a style developed by a minority culture, and in doing so, stakes a claim to authenticity and earns all rewards (cultural and/or economic) for investing the tradition.

What is Disrespectful Cultural Appropriation?

• A type of syncretism in which the dominant culture borrows or adopts a style developed by a minority culture, and in doing so, it disrespectfully, thus painting an inaccurate picture of the minority culture. 

In 1871 what happened?

It was post emancipation time and we had Fisk Jubilee Singers: University chorus and sand spirituals

• They made their music to conform to standard European style harmonies, melodies, rhythms

• ”Respectable” spirituals

  • Presentational & Double consciousness

What does Presentational and Double Consciousness Mean?

“presentation” and “double consciousness” describe the strategic, dual identity Black musicians had to maintain to survive, achieve racial uplift, and find commercial success in a deeply racist post-Civil War society

Who was Bert Williams

He was a black in blackface.

• Play Jim crow

• he would also paint his face

• His version of Jim Crow was lonely and sad

• Broadway: “Nobody,” 1905

What are work songs?

song you sing while you work

What are chain gangs?

• Chain prisoners together to prevent them from running away during work

What happened in the 1920s?

New Markets in the 1920s. You have  Race Records: are record labels that they think black audiences will like (1920s-1940s)

In the 1920s New market, what were the technological innvoations?

• phonograph

  • Wasn't invented in the 1920s but was more prominent then. Same goes for records and radio. 

  • People can bring music into their homes through these recordings. 

  • Prominent among white middle class (had lot of money)

  • Record players became cheaper in the form of recording among both black and white working class.

  • 
    

• Independent labels (independent record labels)

  • Started looking for black artists

  • Go to black vaudeville and start recording folks and sell those records.

  • Music for white working class was disrupted over radio (urban area) whereas for black it was through record (rural).

What dominated during the Race Records?

BLUES!!!

Blues - genre of music -reacted around 1900s.

12-bar blues: is a form, NOT a genre

What is the chord progression for 12-bar blues?

• 1111

• 4411

• 5411

What were the classic blue and who was the singer?

type of blues in the 1920s.

• Was performed Vaudeville

  • Most people singing the blues were black

• Small ensembles

  • Piano, bass, trumpet, drum set

• Female Singers

  • mostly black or black face?

  • Bessie Smith

    • Known for spectacular vocal timbre

    • She had good vocal expression

    • Lot of timbre range

    • Bend pitches, approach them, expressive singer

What was Ragtime Craze?

Ragtime Craze (1896-1918)

• Ragging a song meant making it fun, syncopated, maybe speeding up the tempo.

• “Ragging” songs

  • short-long syncopation in the melody

• Lot of dancing in ragtime

  • Influence of the march/two-step

    • Steady “Odom-path” accompaniment

What roots does Ragtime come out of?

African American Roots

Who was Scott Joplin?

Scott Joplin (1867/68-1917)

• Wanted to be a high art composer

• Born just after emancipation proclamation

• ”King of Ragtime”

• Goal: Make ragtime acceptable to middle class

Was Ragtime used as dance music?

Yes!!! White audiences for black dance

• ragtime was really good dance music

• Ragtime for dance bands

  • its being written for them

  • Piano, banjo, brass instruments, wood winds

• Dance instructors

  • Vernon and Irene Castle

• The castle walk

Who was James Reese Europe

Under the Ragtime concept.

• A black musician

• born in middle class family

• military musical training

• Clef club: a 1910 New York–based society, labor union, and concert

• Work with the Castles

Who was Irving Berlin?

• Tin Pan Alley songwriter

• Jewish Immigrant

• Ethnic novelty songs

• Was racist

• He wrote the song —> "Alexander's Ragtime Band” and Cultural Appropriation

  • Berlin made ragtime mainstream

  • economic support

  • more “respectable”

  • exploitative cultural appropriation

    • not as bad as zip coon

  • Systemic racism: system is set to benefit white people even when the individuals themselves are not racist. 

    • They listened to black music but ONLY if it had a white face on it

    • Systemic racism doesn’t care what is in your heart

What is Southern Gospel?

• Originated ca. 1900 in Lower Appalachia

• Sacred(ish) text, parlor song sensibility

  • Text is open to interpretation

  • 
    

• Small ensembles

  • Families

  • started when families started singing together

• Southern Gosepl:”Twilight is Stealing,” 1877

What are Blues + Hymns?

is singing a sacred text in blues style