Music History II

1
Music History II

• Lecture Notes 10

2
Jazz Origins

• Slaves to the Americas 16th Century
• Functional music Dancing Ceremonies
  To celebrate important events Accompaniment
  for work
• Varied according the tribal customs
• Vocal simple melodies, complex rhythms

3
Call and Response

• From field hollers
• One farm hand shouting to another
• Evolved into singing or chanting
• Texts centered in work experiences
• Developed into the blues
• Jazz band alternation of soloist and ensemble

4
Mutual Influence

• Influence of African music in the U. S. until the
  late 19th century
• Plantation culture Religious
  practices Language and customs Music
  (melodies, harmonies, rhythm) while maintaining
  the African effect

5
Mixture of Styles

• Heterophony Improvised style of singing and
  playing using a diversity of sound media
• African musical dialect complex rhythms in
  contrast to the regular patterns of most Western
  music of the 19th and early 20th centuries
• Songs preserved by oral tradition

6
Jazz Antecedents

• On the plantation Songs Spirituals
• Ragtime syncopated pop lively melody over
  fundamental bass A composed genre

• Blues Field hollers 12-bar
  design Singing and playing in N. O. Other
  cities Rainey Smith Early bands Louis
  Armstrong W. C. Handy

7
The Jazz Band

• Birthplace of Jazz New Orleans
• Musical and multicultural city
• Brass band tradition well established
• Trained musicians
• Teachers instruments in good supply
• Sophisticated musical culture

8
Jazz Band Instrumentation

• Violin
• Cornet
• Clarinet
• Trombone
• Double Bass
• Guitar
• Drums

• Tuba in parades
• Banjo in string band

9
Playing Styles

• Hot Style blue notes, bent notes, slurs and
  glissandos, freedom with the melodic line
• Uneven 8th notes an essential characteristic of
  the swing style

10
3-fold development of jazz

• Blues rhythms and pitch inflections added to
  rags, pop songs, dance forms
• Basic 4/4 beat supporting rags and other 2-beat
  forms
• Uneven playing of 8th notes
• First jazz musician Buddy Bolden (1877-1931)

11
Jazz in American Culture

• Welcomed into dance halls, restaurants, cabarets,
  theaters
• Parallel development with movies and Broadway
  theater
• Became an integral part of the entertainment
  industry

12
More Jazz History

• Jazz in print San Francisco Bulletin, March 6,
  1913
• The Roaring 20s (the Jazz Age) Interest in
  Black American music Appetite for social dancing
  (c. 1910) Development of sound recordings Popular
  ity after Prohibition law
• First notable jazz musician to perform outside N.
  O. Jelly Roll Morton

13
Jazz History continued

• Johnny Stein band became the ODJB
• Nick LaRocca, a founding member, took the band to
  N. Y. first recording 1917
• L. Armstrong in the King Oliver Band (Chicago
  1922) to NY (1924) back to Chicago (1925) to
  form the Hot Five
• Post-N. O. style more polished and formal
  greater harmonic diversity

14
And the beat goes on ...

• Symphonic Jazz arrangements with elements of
  counterpoint, harmony, orchestration (works of
  Ferde Grofé)
• Homogeneous groups, contrapuntal lines for solo
  instruments
• Whiteman Denver Symphony violist other
  orchestras a navy band in WW I first dance band
  in San Francisco com. Gershwin to write Rhapsody
  in Blue

15
And on ...

• The stride style chord and single pitch
  alternation, sometimes in 10ths, in left hand
  with lively melody in right hand
• From the dance floor to the stage attracted
  entertainment industry, bands in large dance
  clubs, music for films and stage presentations
  popular leaders radio show business media
  coverage

16
Chapter 22

• The Tonal Tradition

17
Paul Hindemith on Tonality

• The triad is the basic building block in musical
  composition, its point of departure
• The triad corresponds to the force of gravity
• The triad Our guiding point Our unit
  of measure Our goal

18
Neoclassicism

• Deliberate imitation of an earlier style within a
  contemporary context
• Basic characteristics A return to the tonal
  idiom conventional genres and forms the
  ideal of absolute music transparent textures
  generally conciseness of expression

19
Classical Symphony

• The composer (Prokofiev) preserves the
  characteristic form and rhythms of the gavotte
  melody and harmony are transformed in ways that
  are distinctively 20th century
• In D major but avoids any strong cadence in the
  home key

20
Three Works by Stravinsky

• Pulcinella, Concerto for Piano and Winds,
  Symphony in C all embrace idioms of early music
  while building into each certain features that
  made them seem as products of the time in which
  they were composed

21
The New Objectivity

• Music that is detached unsentimental
  possibly a bit surreal
• Its quintessential act, the raised eyebrow
• Stravinsky the Octet is a musical object, not
  an emotive work
• Weill Brecht distance between actors,
  audience, words, music, etc.

22
Symphony Symphonic Poem

• The symphony a vehicle for nationalism
• Less important than in the 19th century
• 20th C. an era of musical pluralism
• Success for composers w/o symphony
• Symphonic poem appealed to composers who
  preferred to write within the bounds of tonality

23
Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

• Tonally centered? No triadic harmony?
• Unusual combination of instruments
• Themes with all chromatic pitches
• Opening phrase every chromatic note between A
  and E to avoid sense of triadic harmony
• Arch form symmetrical design with an odd number
  of formal sections

24
Silent Movies

• From 1891 to the advent of talkies
• Dialogue on the screen
• Live music by an organist, a pianist or a small
  ensemble
• Sometimes even an orchestra in the pit
• Much of the music was classical

25
Cinematic Composition

• R. Vaughan Williams
• William Walton
• Benjamin Britten
• Darius Milhaud
• Georges Auric
• Bernard Herrmann
• Elmer Bernstein
• Henry Mancini

• John Williams
• Max Steiner
• Dimitri Tiomkin
• Wolfgang Korngold

26
Khrennikovs Criticism

• Denounced decadent Western music
• Composers aloof from the people whose knowledge
  was limited to songs, marches, and film music
• Composers in his country wrote music that was
  anti-realistic, music tied to the era of
  imperialism
• Socialist realism write music favorable to the
  ideals of communism

27
Golden Ages of Ballet

• Before WW I in Paris
• Mid-20th Century in New York

28
Copland and Stravinsky

• Appalachian Spring
• Le Sacre du printemps
• Springtime rituals in rural societies
• Use of folk idioms
• Copland ballet choreography by Martha Graham
  portraying a bride and fiancé in a newly built
  farmhouse in early 19th century Pennsylvania

29
Stravinskys Influence

• Folk-derived melodies
• Polytonal harmonies
• Orchestration
• Shifting meters
• Propulsive rhythms
• Photo on page 607 Erik Hawkins, Elizabeth
  Sprague Coolidge, Martha Graham

30
Messiaens Quatuor

• For fellow inmates in a prisoner-of-war camp in
  Germany during WW II
• Instruments at his disposal clarinet, violin,
  cello, piano
• Inspiration from Revelation 10
• Harmonics on the cello touching the string
  lightly so as to produce a pitch 2 octaves above
  the one notated

31
Palindrome

• Non-retrogradable rhythm The same rhythm,
  forward as well as backward
• Palindrome Identical pattern forward and
  backward (madam, kayak, Madam, Im Adam, able
  was I ere I saw Elba)

32
Shostakovich Quartet

• Dedicated to the memory of the victims of
  fascism and war
• The composers musical monogram DSCH (and the
  pitches are?)

33
Descendents of Schubert et al

• From Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf to ...
• Gershwin
• Berlin
• Porter
• Ellington

34
Porter and Ellington

• Night and Day and Sophisticated
  Lady Harmonically tonal, richly
  chromatic Elegant and witty poetry Memorable
  melodies Advanced chromaticism
  (Ellington) The music supports the
  text Harmonic prolongation leading up to the
  final resolution on the tonic
• How popular was Night and Day?

35
And finally ...

• Can you name that tune?
• What is a Broadway musical?
• And the musicals?