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Popular Music in 1900

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Title: Popular Music in 1900


1
Popular Music in 1900
  • Race and Romance

2
Minstrelsy
  • The Minstrel Show
  • Featured mainly white performers who artificially
    blackened their skin and carried out parodies of
    African American music, dance, dress, and dialect

3
Minstrelsy
  • From the 1840s through the 1880s, the predominant
    genre in the United States
  • An important influence on the mainstream of
    American popular song
  • Minstrel troupes toured the United States
    constantly, helping create a national popular
    culture.

4
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley
  • By the end of the nineteenth century, the
    American music publishing business had become
    centered in New York City.
  • After 1885, the established publishers were being
    challenged by smaller companies specializing in
    the more exciting popular songs performed in
    dance halls, beer gardens, and theaters.

5
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley
  • These new publishing firmsmany of them founded
    by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europehad
    offices in a section of lower Manhattan, a dense
    hive of small rooms with pianos where composers
    and song pluggers produced and promoted popular
    songs.
  • This stretch of 28th Street became known as Tin
    Pan Alley, a term that evoked the clanging sound
    of many pianos simultaneously playing songs in a
    variety of keys and tempos.

6
Vaudeville
  • Theatrical form descended from music hall shows
    and minstrelsy
  • By the turn of the century, it had become the
    most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan
    Alley songs.
  • Vaudeville shows typically consisted of a series
    of performances presented one after the other
    without any overarching story line.

7
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley
  • The 1890s saw the rise of the modern American
    music business.
  • Sheet music sold for between twenty-five and
    sixty cents.
  • The wholesale value of printed music in the
    United States more than tripled between 1890 and
    1909.

8
After the Ball
  • Harris paid a well-known singer in a traveling
    theater production to incorporate After the
    Ball into his performance.
  • It soon became the most popular part of the play,
    and audiences requested that it be repeated
    several times during each performance.
  • Harris published the song himself and was soon
    clearing around twenty-five thousand dollars a
    month.
  • After the Ball was performed by John Philip
    Sousas band at the Worlds Columbian Exposition
    in Chicago (1893).

9
Ragtime Music
  • Emerged in the 1880s
  • Its popularity peaked in the decade after the
    turn of the century.
  • Ragtime initially was a piano music but gradually
    came to identify any syncopated music.
  • The term ragtime was used to describe any music
    that contained syncopation.

10
Ragtime Music
  • The word derives from the African American term
    to rag, meaning to enliven a piece of music by
    shifting melodic accents onto the offbeats (a
    technique known as syncopation).
  • It began as an obscure folk-dance music played up
    and down the Mississippi valley during last
    quarter of the nineteenth century.
  • Ragtime energized popular music in America by
    adding rhythmic vitality (syncopation) to the
    music.

11
The Banjo
  • A stringed instrument developed by slave
    musicians from African prototypes during the
    early colonial period.
  • The basic patterns of ragtime music were
    transferred from the banjo.

12
Ragtime Songs
  • Coon song
  • Popular among white audiences from the 1890s
    until World War I
  • Usually accompanied by a simplified version of
    the syncopated rhythms of ragtime piano music

13
All Coons Look Alike to Me
  • The first piece of sheet music to bear the term
    rag
  • Composed by the African American songwriter
    Ernest Hogan
  • Published (complete with racist caricatures on
    the cover) in 1896

14
Ragtime Songs
  • The growing market for ragtime songs at the turn
    of the century suggests a continuation of the
    white fascination with African American music
    first seen in minstrelsy.
  • Most popular ragtime songs were vigorous
    march-style songs with a few irregular rhythms
    added for effect.

15
Scott Joplin (18681917)
  • The most famous ragtime composer of the era
  • Best known for his piano rags
  • Born in Texas
  • Began to play piano around the town of Texarkana
    during his teens and received instruction in
    classical music theory from a German teacher
  • His first regular job as a pianist was in a cafe
    in St. Louis.

16
Scott Joplin (18681917)
  • Developed a ragging piano style, improvising
    around the themes of popular songs and marches in
    a syncopated style
  • Between 1895 and 1915, Joplin composed many of
    the classics of the ragtime repertoire
  • Helped popularize the style through his piano
    arrangements, published as sheet music

17
Scott Joplin (18681917)
  • Joplins rags were also widely heard on player
    pianos.
  • Player pianos were elaborate mechanical devices
    activated by piano rollsspools of paper with
    punched holes that controlled the movement of the
    pianos keys.

18
Maple Leaf Rag (1898)
  • Scott Joplins first successful piece
  • Named after the Maple Leaf social club in
    Sedalia, where he often played
  • The piece was published in 1899 and became a huge
    hit, spreading Joplins fame to Europe and
    beyond.
  • Maple Leaf started a nationwide craze for
    syncopated music.

19
The Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley Song
  • During the 1920s and 1930s, certain
    characteristic musical structures and styles of
    performance dominated popular song.
  • Professional tunesmiths wrote some of the most
    influential and commercially successful songs of
    the period.
  • The potential for fame and financial success on a
    previously unknown scale lured composers and
    lyricists with diverse skills and backgrounds.

20
Jewish Immigrants
  • From Central and Eastern Europe
  • Played a central role in the music business
    during the early twentieth century as composers,
    lyricists, performers, publishers, and promoters

21
Irving Berlin
  • Born Israel, or Isadore, Baline
  • The most productive, varied, and creative of the
    Tin Pan Alley songwriters
  • His professional songwriting career started
    before World War I and continued into the 1960s.
  • It has been said that Berlin often composed from
    three to seven songs a week.
  • In 1969, the catalog of Irving Berlin
    compositions still available in print included
    899 songs.

22
Irving Berlin
  • His most famous songs include
  • Alexanders Ragtime Band,
  • Blue Skies,
  • Cheek to Cheek,
  • Theres No Business Like Show Business,
  • White Christmas, and
  • God Bless America.

23
George Gershwin (18981937)
  • His songs set new standards in excellence in
    terms of harmonic complexity and melodic flow.
  • More classically trained and ambitious than other
    songwriters
  • Sought and achieved success in the world of
    concert music and popular music
  • Influenced by jazz and blues

24
Alexanders Ragtime Band
  • Published in 1911
  • The song that first brought Berlin mass acclaim
  • Actually had little to do with ragtime as
    performed by the great black ragtime pianists of
    the day
  • Sold 1.5 million copies almost immediately

25
Broadway and Film
  • Berlin wrote songs for the Broadway stage and for
    sound film.
  • Blue Skies, performed by Al Jolson in the first
    talkie, The Jazz Singer
  • Wrote the entire score for the Marx Brothers
    debut movie, The Cocoanuts, in 1929
  • The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced White
    Christmas.
  • The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun
  • Berlin was the most prolific and consistent of
    Tin Pan Alley composers.
  • His songwriting career spanned almost sixty
    years.

26
Tin Pan Alley Song Form
  • Song forms inherited from the nineteenth century
  • The AABA structure
  • Verse-and-chorus form of After the Ball
  • Verse-refrain form, with an AABA refrain
  • Tin Pan Alley song form had two major sections
    the verse and the refrain/chorus.

27
Listening My Blue Heaven, performed by Gene
Austin (1927)
  • Austin was one of the first crooners
  • Singers who mastered the intimate style of
    singing made possible with the electric
    microphone.
  • This recording was one of the bestselling records
    of the era.
  • Form verse-refrain
  • Introduction
  • Verse two sections of equal length with nearly
    identical music
  • Refrain four sections, AABAthe A sections all
    end with the words my blue heaven
  • The B section, or bridge or release,
    provides variety.

28
Listening My Blue Heaven, performed by Gene
Austin (1927)
  • The song depicts the deepest aspirations of the
    Tin Pan Alley listening public.
  • The lyrics poetically reinforce a familiar and
    comfortable motif of the American dream home and
    family.
  • Gene Austins performance reinforces the
    sentiments expressed in the lyrics quiet
    intimacy and tranquility.

29
Listening April Showers, performed by Al
Jolson (1921)
  • This recording reveals the sound and style of the
    premicrophone period.
  • Jolsons singing style reflects the performance
    techniques used on the vaudeville stage.
  • His vocal style was declamatory rather than
    lyrical.
  • Form verse-refrain (ABAC structure)

30
What Are Tin Pan Alley Songs About?
  • Predominately aimed at white, urban middle- and
    upper-middle-class Americans
  • Said little in the way of social or political
    commentary
  • Were generally escapist
  • Privacy and romance

31
Tin Pan Alley and Broadway
  • Mutually beneficial relationship between Tin Pan
    Alley Songs and Broadway shows
  • Close proximity
  • Fruitful relationship in the 1920s and 1930s
  • The so-called Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley song

32
What Makes a Song a Standard?
  • Standards
  • Songs that remain an essential part of the
    repertoire of todays jazz musicians and pop
    singers
  • Possess a continuing appeal that surpasses
    nostalgia
  • Tin Pan Alley composers produced many standards.

33
Rock n Roll
  • When rock n roll took over the pop charts in
    the later 1950s, the connection between Broadway
    and mainstream popular song had completely
    dissolved.

34
Conclusion
  • Popular song both reflected and helped shape the
    profound changes in American society during the
    1920s and 1930s.
  • The intermixing of high and low cultures
  • The adoption of new technologies
  • The expansion of corporate music industry
  • The increasingly intimate interaction of white
    and black cultures during a period of strong
    racism
  • The emergence of a truly national popular culture

35
Conclusion
  • Tin Pan Alley and the singing style known as
    crooning were important influences on rhythm
    blues and rock n roll during the 1950s and
    1960s.
  • Many Tin Pan Alley songs are still used by
    contemporary jazz musicians as a basis for
    improvising.
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