To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Musical composition|African American studies|Music.
Journal articles on the topic 'Musical composition|African American studies|Music'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Musical composition|African American studies|Music.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Legg, Andrew. "A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music." Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 103–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990407.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.
2
Legg, Andrew, and Carolyn Philpott. "An analysis of performance practices in African American gospel music: rhythm, lyric treatment and structures in improvisation and accompaniment." Popular Music 34, no. 2 (April 30, 2015): 197–225. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143015000264.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractAfrican American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.
3
Dhakal, Lekha Nath. "Musical Tradition and Cultural Vision in Langston Hughes’s Poetry." Literary Studies 33 (March 31, 2020): 41–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v33i0.38034.
Full textAbstract:
In American music, Langston Hughes is one of the literary figures that hold a place similar to the aforementioned luminaries. In the literary field, Hughes is respected as one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. With the rise of African American Studies as an academic field in the 1970s, his life, writing, and influence has received frequent attention. What has not been documented in more specific terms is his importance to America’s musical culture in the twentieth century. Whether directly or indirectly, Langston Hughes has been a fixture in American musical culture, both popular and concert music, since the 1920s. In addition to his personal affinity for blues, jazz and other specifically African American musical forms such as gospel music, his vast contribution to American music specifically and American music culture in a broader sense can be separated into four general categories.
4
Shank, Barry L. "Sound + Bodies in Community = Music." JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 1, no. 2 (December 30, 2020): 177–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v1i2.120.
Full textAbstract:
The analytical framework of sound studies is transforming our understanding of the political force of music. Following the lead of scholars like Nina Eidsheim and Salomé Voegelin, this essay considers the resonating force of listening bodies as a central factor in the musical construction of political community. This essay traces the tradition of African American music from congregational gospel singing through early rhythm and blues up to the twenty-first-century rap of Kendrick Lamar, showing how particular musical techniques engage the bodies in the room, allowing communities of difference to find their rhythms together.
5
Burke, Patrick. "Tear down the walls: Jefferson Airplane, race, and revolutionary rhetoric in 1960s rock." Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 61–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990389.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractWhile the notion of the ‘rock revolution’ of the 1960s has by now become commonplace, scholars have rarely addressed the racial implications of this purported revolution. This article examines a notorious 1968 blackface performance by Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, to shed light on a significant tendency in 1960s rock: white musicians casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting an idealised vision of African American identity. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by black music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. Jefferson Airplane's references to black culture and politics were multifaceted and involved both condescending or naïve radical posturing and sincere respect for African American music. The Airplane appear to have been engaged in a complex if imperfect attempt to create a contemporary musical form that reflected African American influences without asserting dominance over those influences. Their example suggests that closer attention to racial issues allows us to address the revolutionary ambitions of 1960s rock without romanticising or trivialising them.
6
Dorsch, Hauke. "“Indépendance Cha Cha”: African Pop Music since the Independence Era." Africa Spectrum 45, no. 3 (December 2010): 131–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000203971004500307.
Full textAbstract:
Investigating why Latin American music came to be the sound-track of the independence era, this contribution offers an overview of musical developments and cultural politics in certain sub-Saharan African countries since the 1960s. Focusing first on how the governments of newly independent African states used musical styles and musicians to support their nation-building projects, the article then looks at musicians’ more recent perspectives on the independence era.
7
Demers, Joanna. "Sampling the 1970s in hip-hop." Popular Music 22, no. 1 (January 2003): 41–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143003003039.
Full textAbstract:
Musical borrowings, or samples, have long been a means of creating lineage between hip-hop and older genres of African-American music such as funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. DJs who sample from this so-called ‘Old School’ attempt to link hip-hop to older, venerable traditions of black popular music. This article investigates the importance of 1970s pop and culture to hip-hop music. This era is depicted as a time in which African-American identity coalesced, and a new political consciousness was born. The primary source for images of the 1970s was and continues to be blaxploitation film, a genre of low-budget, black-oriented crime and suspense cinema. This article will detail how blaxploitation distilled certain societal concerns of the 1970s, and how in turn hip-hop feeds off blaxploitation both dramatically and musically, reusing its story lines and sampling its soundtracks.
8
Witek, Maria A. G., Jingyi Liu, John Kuubertzie, Appiah Poku Yankyera, Senyo Adzei, and Peter Vuust. "A Critical Cross-cultural Study of Sensorimotor and Groove Responses to Syncopation Among Ghanaian and American University Students and Staff." Music Perception 37, no. 4 (March 11, 2020): 278–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.4.278.
Full textAbstract:
The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.
9
PRUETT, LAURA MOORE. "Porch and Playhouse, Parlor and Performance Hall: Traversing Boundaries in Gottschalk'sThe Banjo." Journal of the Society for American Music 11, no. 2 (May 2017): 155–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196317000050.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis article reconsiders the cultural significance and historical impact of the well-known virtuosic piano compositionThe Banjoby Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the banjo and the piano inhabited very specific and highly contrasting performance circumstances: black folk entertainment and minstrel shows for the former, white middle- and upper-class parlors and concert halls for the latter. InThe Banjo, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lifted the banjo out of its familiar contexts and placed it in the spaces usually privileged for the piano. Taking its inspiration from both African American and minstrel banjo playing techniques, Gottschalk's composition relaxed and muddled the boundaries among performance spaces, racial and class divisions, and two conspicuously different musical instruments in an egalitarian effort to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions of some mid-nineteenth-century musical critics and tastemakers, both the piano and the banjo have a place in the shaping of American music culture.
10
Lewis, George E. "Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager." Leonardo Music Journal 10 (December 2000): 33–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/096112100570585.
Full textAbstract:
The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a computer-driven, interactive & “virtual improvising orchestra” that analyzes an improvisor's performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musician's playing and independent behavior arising from the program's own internal processes. The author contends that notions about the nature and function of music are embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and that interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them. Thus, Voyager is considered as a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices.
11
Weisenfeld, Judith. "“The Secret at the Root”: Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson's Run, Little Chillun." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 21, no. 1 (2011): 39–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rac.2011.21.1.39.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractFrancis Hall Johnson's (1888–1970) work to preserve and promote Negro spirituals places him among the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of African American religious music. Johnson was most closely associated with Marc Connelly's 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Green Pastures, for which he served as musical arranger and choral conductor. His participation in this production, which became a lightning rod for discussions about the nature of black religious thought, made him sharply aware of the complex terrain of popular culture representations of African American religious life for the consumption of white audiences. This article examines Johnson's 1933 “music-drama,” Run, Little Chillun, through which he hoped to counter the commonly deployed tropes of African Americans as a simple, naturally religious people. Moderately successful on Broadway, the production did particularly well when revived in California in 1938 and 1939 as part of the Federal Theatre and Federal Music projects.Most critics found Johnson's presentation of black Baptist music and worship to be thrillingly authentic but were confused by the theology of the drama's other religious community, the Pilgrims of the New Day. Examining Johnson's Pilgrims of the New Day in light of his interest in Christian Science and New Thought reveals a broader objective than providing a dramatic foil for the Baptists and a platform for endorsing Christianity. With his commitment to and expertise with vernacular forms of African American religious culture unassailable, Johnson presented a critique of the conservative tendencies and restrictive parochialism of some black church members and leaders and insisted on the ability of the individual religious self to range freely across a variety of spiritual possibilities. In doing so, he presented “the secret at the root” of black culture as not only revealing the spiritual genius of people of African descent but also as offering eternal and universal truths not bound by race.
12
HEILE, BJÖRN. "Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism." Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (September 2004): 161–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572205000162.
Full textAbstract:
There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.
13
McMillan, Ros. "‘To say something that was me’: developing a personal voice through improvisation." British Journal of Music Education 16, no. 3 (November 1999): 263–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265051799000352.
Full textAbstract:
The study and practice of improvisation in music departments of Australian colleges and universities tends to be dominated by jazz and other African-American styles. However, the School of Music of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne has developed a course of study with a different focus. While rooted in the fundamentals of jazz performance, the philosophy of the course is that students at the end of the twentieth century should endeavour to develop their own musical ‘voice’. An important means of assisting this development is the encouragement for students to compose their own music as the basis for improvisation. In many cases personal concerns and events form the basis for these original pieces and allow performers to develop their own compositional concepts. This is also a significant means of allowing the music to reflect the era and culture of the performers. This article outlines an investigation of ten students conducted over the three years of their degree studies. The investigation aimed to ascertain the conditions under which a personal voice might be acquired and the extent to which composition was employed in the participants' major performances.
14
Knox, Katelyn. "The 7th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay." Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 46, Issue 1 46, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2021.1.
Full textAbstract:
Popular music abounds in Afropean literature, yet to date scholars have primarily read novels’ musical elements through author biography. In this article, I focus narrowly on the rich musical peritexts and musico-literary intermediality of two novels by Insa Sané: Du plomb dans le crâne (2008) and Daddy est mort…: Retour à Sarcelles (2010). In addition to the abundant diegetic musical references, both novels also feature two structural musical layers. I argue that these three musical elements constitute critical sites through which the novels’ narratives, which center around young, black, male protagonists who seek to escape vicious circles of violence through recognition, emerge. Ultimately, these novels’ musical elements situate the narratives’ discussions of black masculinity within much broader conversations transpiring between French and African American communities, thereby providing a much larger cultural genealogy to supplement the characters’ fraught literal ones.
15
PERCHARD, TOM. "New Riffs on the Old Mind-Body Blues: “Black Rhythm,” “White Logic,” and Music Theory in the Twenty-First Century." Journal of the Society for American Music 9, no. 3 (August 2015): 321–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s175219631500019x.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractContemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest within European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always shown as transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented twenty-first-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized fault lines, the relationship between “sensory” music, its “intelligent” comprehension, and its analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars. And so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives, and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.
16
Lorre, Sean. "‘Mama, he treats your daughter mean’: Reassessing the narrative of British R&B with Ottilie Patterson." Popular Music 39, no. 3-4 (December 2020): 482–503. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143020000574.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThe phenomenon of British R&B is most often understood in terms of young, white, middle-class British men turning to the ‘down-home’ sounds of black American men for musical motivation. This article offers a revision to this dominant narrative by reinserting ‘slim, lively Irish girl’ Ottilie Patterson, the UK's most popular blues singer before 1963. I analyse the content and context of Patterson's 1961 album, Rhythm and Blues with Ottilie Patterson, drawing from contemporaneous mass-media discourse as well as Patterson's own notebooks held at Britain's National Jazz Archive. Patterson's performances captured on this record demonstrate how R&B was first publicly (re-)presented and understood in the UK. I argue that Patterson's work challenges the assumptions that (a) British R&B began with the formation of Alexis Korner's Blue Incorporated and (b) the R&B revival was predominately motivated by the appropriation and vicarious expression of African-American hypermasculinity.
17
Dzivaltivskyi, Maxim. "Historical formation of the originality of an American choral tradition of the second half of the XX century." Aspects of Historical Musicology 21, no. 21 (March 10, 2020): 23–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-21.02.
Full textAbstract:
Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.
18
Wallace, Maurice. "“Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel." Religions 10, no. 4 (April 23, 2019): 285. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10040285.
Full textAbstract:
Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.
19
SPRINGER, ROBERT. "Folklore, commercialism and exploitation: copyright in the blues." Popular Music 26, no. 1 (January 2006): 33–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001110.
Full textAbstract:
Though federal law in the United States provides for the protection of artistic property, including music, African-American blues musicians, since the appearance of their first commercial records in the 1920s, have generally not received their due. Part of the problem came from the difficulty of squaring the discrete notions of folk composition and artistic property in those early days. But the exploitation of black artists was largely attributable to common practices in the record industry whose effects were multiplied in this case by the near total defencelessness of the victims. Imitations and cover versions led to a veritable despoliation of black talent which has only belatedly received legal compensation and public recognition.
20
Barg, Lisa. "Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn." Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (2013): 771–824. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.771.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.
21
WALL, TIM. "Out on the floor: the politics of dancing on the Northern Soul scene." Popular Music 25, no. 3 (September 11, 2006): 431–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143006000985.
Full textAbstract:
The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African–American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity.
22
Cashner, Andrew A. "Imitating Africans, Listening for Angels." Journal of Musicology 38, no. 2 (2021): 141–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2021.38.2.141.
Full textAbstract:
Church ensembles of Spaniards across the Spanish Empire regularly impersonated African and other non-Castilian characters in the villancicos they performed in the Christmas Matins liturgy. Although some scholars and performers still mistakenly assume that ethnic villancicos preserve authentic Black or Native voices, and others have critiqued them as Spaniards’ racist caricatures, there have been few studies of the actual music or of specific local contexts. This article analyzes Al establo más dichoso (At the happiest stable), an ensaladilla composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla for Christmas 1652 at Puebla Cathedral. In this performance his ensemble impersonated an array of characters coming to Christ’s mangers, including Indian farm laborers and African slaves. The composer uses rhythm to differentiate the speech and movement of each group, and at the climax he even has the Angolans and the angels sing together—but in different meters. Based on the first edition of this music, the article interprets this villancico within the social and theological context of colonial Puebla and its new cathedral, consecrated in 1649. I argue that through this music, members of the Spanish elite performed their own vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society. Gutiérrez de Padilla was himself both a priest and a slaveholder, and his music elevates its characters in certain ways while paradoxically also mocking them and reinforcing their lowly status. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “three worlds of the text,” the article compares the representations imagined within the musical performance with archival evidence for the social history of the people represented and the composer’s own relationships with them (the world behind the text). Looking to the world projected “in front of” the text, I argue that these caricatured representations both reflected and shaped Spaniards’ attitudes toward their subjects in ways that actively affected the people represented. At the same time, I argue that Spanish representations mirrored practices of impersonation among Native American and African communities, especially the Christmastide Black Kings festivals, pointing to a more complex and contradictory vision of colonial society than what we can see from the slaveholder’s musical fantasy alone.
23
Sandu-Dediu, Valentina. "Towards Modern Music in Romania." East Central Europe 30, no. 2 (2003): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187633003x00117.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractToo little known in the West, modern Romanian scores are being gradually discovered nowadays, beginning with those of George Enescu. For decades underestimated as a creator, Enescu has been re-evaluated and recently recognized as an original and authentic representative of an Eastern European music school, comparable with JanáČek or Szymanowski. The Romanian music of the past fifty years, due to the political and ideological situation of Romania, similar to other countries of the ex-communist Eastern European bloc, has been isolated geographically but not aesthetically. The great diversity of modern or avant-garde trends in Western European and North American music is also present in the output of Romanian composers of the same period, combined in various degrees with autochthonous nuances. Originating primarily in the two major oral traditions, namely peasant folk music and religious Byzantine music, these have compelled Romanian composers to find their own musical language. However, Romanian composers coming of age in the second half of the 20th century took their first steps on a well-established territory, from the standpoint of composition, style, and aesthetics. A solid school of music - built on structural foundations that gave it a distinct language - had already been established in Romania in the first half of the 20th century. Therefore, the following essay is a chronological outline of the historical development of Romanian composition, a process governed primarily by the tension between national elements and global trends.
24
Shemet, L. "Genre and style priorities of accordion performance in traditional common culture of USA." Culture of Ukraine, no. 72 (June 23, 2021): 150–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.31516/2410-5325.072.21.
Full textAbstract:
The relevance of the study is determined by the wide popularity of accordion in various genres and styles of American folk music, significant achievements of American accordionists in preserving and developing performing traditions in accordance with the ethnocultural specifics of a particular region of the country and presentation of creative achievements of famous American folk groups in the world music space, as well as by lack of the studies on this issue in the field of musicology in Ukraine.
The aim of the study is to define the genre and style priorities of accordion performance in the traditional common culture of Americans, highlight the regional specifics of styles and genres of American folk music, in the reproduction of which the accordion is directly involved, as well as describe textural, articulatory and picking, metric and rhythmic features of playing the instrument.
The methodology. The methodological basis of the study is the interaction of scientific approaches, among which an important place is occupied by historical, cultural, systemic, structural and functional, musicological methods.
The results. In the traditional common culture of Americans, the performance on the accordion is presented quite diversely in terms of the instruments, distribution areas, genre, and style palette of music performed. Historical, sociocultural and geopolitical factors, ethnocultural influences, multicultural tendencies determined the regional specificity of the instruments. The Cajun accordion, the diatonic button accordion, and the chromatic piano accordion have gained considerable popularity in the traditional common culture of various regions of the United States. Each of them took leading positions in the reproduction of a certain musical style: Cajun accordion — Cajun and Zydeco, diatonic button accordion — Cojunto, chromatic piano accordion — Zydeco. The button (diatonic or chromatic) and piano accordions were mainly used in the instrumental composition of dance music groups, in particular in the genre of polka, depending on the region with the corresponding ethnic specificity. The accordion performance vividly embodies the genre and style features of American folk music in the context of its historical dynamics and capability of artistic expression, including intonation expressiveness and characteristic techniques of playing, inherent in a certain design model of the instrument.
The topicality of the study is to reproduce the genre and style specifics of accordion performance in the traditional common culture of Americans.
25
Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Literary Ellington." Representations 77, no. 1 (2002): 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2002.77.1.1.
Full textAbstract:
The literary plays an indispensable role in the creative process and compositional technique of the great jazz composer and orchestra leader Duke Ellington. It is well known that he based a number of his pieces on literary sources and that many of his larger works in particular rely on narrative written by Ellington and/or his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, whether it was programmatic, recitative, or lyric. In all his music, Ellington was concerned with ''telling tales'' in language, not only in sounds - or more precisely, in both: composing in ways that combined words and music. This imperative is evidenced in the pieces Ellington called ''parallels,'' a word he chose in particular to highlight the formal relationship between music and literature. In some, such as the ''Shakespearean Suite'' known as ''Such Sweet Thunder,'' he used various structural approaches and instrumental techniques to achieve portraiture through the interrelationship between the musical and the literary. In other pieces, such as ''My People'' and especially ''Black, Brown and Beige,'' Ellington attempted to integrate literary texts into his music in a manner that is not programmatic. The longer pieces demonstrate that for Ellington's aesthetic, the representation of African American history necessitated a mixed, multimedia form.
26
Ahisheva, Kseniia. "Three Preludes for piano by G. Gershwin in the context of the composer’s instrumental creativity." Aspects of Historical Musicology 19, no. 19 (February 7, 2020): 449–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-19.26.
Full textAbstract:
Background. George Gershwin is often considered as a composer who wrote mainly songs and musicals, but this is a misconception: beside the pieces of so-called “light” genres, among the composer’ works – two operas, as well as a number of outstanding instrumental compositions (“Cuban Overture” for a symphony orchestra, two Rhapsodies, Variations for piano and orchestra and Piano Concerto etc.). Gershwin had a natural pianistic talent, and there was almost not a single piece of his own that he did not perform on the piano, and most of them were born in improvisation (Ewen, 1989). The basis for the creation of this study was the desire to increase interest in the work of Gershwin as a “serious” composer and to draw the attention of domestic academic pianists to the value of his piano works, presented not only the “Rhapsody in Blue”, which has been mostly played lately. The purpose of our research is to prove the relevance of the performance of Gershwin’s instrumental works in the academic concert environment as the music of the classical tradition, tracing the formation of specific features of the composer’s instrumental creativity and their reflection in the cycle of “Three Preludes for Piano” in 1926. Studies of the life and work of G. Gershwin, illuminating a special path in music and the unusual genius of an outstanding musician, were created mainly in the 50–70s of the XX century. D. Ewen – the author of the most detailed biography of the composer (first published in 1956, the Russian translation – in 1989) – was personally acquainted with the great musician and his family, took numerous interviews from the composer’s relatives, friends and teachers, had access to his archives (Ewen, 1989: 3–4). The author of the book enters into the details of the life and creative work of the genius and creates a portrait of the composer as a person “in relationships” – as a son, brother, friend. A separate chapter devoted to the music of Gershwin is in the fundamental work of V. Konen (1965) “The Ways of American Music”, an extremely useful study of the folklore origins and musical foundations of jazz. Cognitive is the “popular monograph” by V. Volynskiy (1988) about Gershwin, carefully structured chronologically and thematically. The Internet-pages of A. Tikhomirov (2006–2020) on the resource “Classic Music News.ru” are also very valuable, in particular, thanks to retrospective photographs and audio recordings posted there. From the point of view we have chosen, the piano Preludes by G. Gershwin have not yet been considered by domestic researchers. Research methodology is based on comparative analysis and then synthesizing, generalization and abstraction when using data from biographical literature, and tested musicological approaches when considering musical samples and audio recordings of various versions of the Preludes (including the author’s playing). The results of reseaching. G. Gershwin, despite his Jewish-Slavic family roots (his parents emigrated to America from the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century), is undoubtedly a representative of American culture. Outstanding artists have almost always turned to the folklore of their country. In Gershwin, this trait manifested itself in a special way, since American folklore, due to historical and political circumstances, is a very motley phenomenon. Indian, English, German, French, Jewish, African, Latin American melodies surrounded Gershwin everywhere. Their rhythms and intonations, compositional schemes were melted, transformed in professional music (Konen, 1965: 231–246). The first musical teacher of Gershwin was the sound atmosphere of New York streets. This is the main reason that the style of his musical works is inextricably linked with jazz: Gershwin did not encounter this purely American phenomenon, he grew up in it. Among the numerous other teachers of Gershwin who significantly influenced on the formation of his music style, one should definitely name the pianist and composer Charles Hambitzer, who introduced his student to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel (Ewen, 1989: 30–32). The most part of Gershwin’s creativity consisted of working on musicals, a typically American genre. The work with the musicals gave the composer the basis for writing his first jazz opera “Blue Monday“, 1922 (other name – “135th Street”), which became the predecessor of the famous pearl of the new genre, “Porgy and Bess” (1935). Following the production of “Blue Monday”, Gershwin began collaborating with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, who was impressed by the piece. On the initiative of the latter, Gershwin created his masterpiece, “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), which still remains a unique musical phenomenon, since the composer brought jazz to the big stage, giving it the status of professional music (Ewen, 1989: 79–85; Volynskiy, 1988: part 4). V. Konen (1965: 264–265) believes that Gershwin is a representative of symphonic Europeanized jazz, since he uses it in musical forms and genres of the European tradition. However, we cannot agree that Gershwin “used” jazz. For him, jazz was organic, inseparable from the author’s style, and this is what makes his music so attractive to representatives of both classical and pop traditions. For Gershwin, due to life circumstances, turning to jazz is not an attempt at stylization, but a natural way of expression. “Three Preludes for Piano” are significant in the composer’s work, because it is the only known concertо work for solo piano published during his lifetime. At first, Gershwin planned to create a cycle of 24 Preludes, but only seven were created in the manuscript, then the author reduced the number of works to five. A year after the creation of the Piano Concerto, in 1926, Gershwin presented this new opus. The pieces performed by the author himself sound impeccably technically and even austerely-strictly (audio recording has been preserved, see ‘Gershvin plays Gershvin 3 Preludes’, video on You Tube, published on 2 Aug. 2011). It can be noted that Gershwin is close to the European pianistic style with its attention to the accuracy of each note. The cycle is built on the principle of contrasting comparison: the first and third Preludes are performed at a fast pace, the second – at a slow pace (blues-like). The analysis of the cycle, carried out by the author of the article, proves that “Three Preludes” for piano reflect the main features of Gershwin’s creative manner: capriciousness of syncopated rhythms, subtle modulation play, improvisational development. Breathing breadth, volumetric texture, effective highlighting of climaxes bring the cycle closer to the composer’s symphonic works. Jazz themes are laid out at a high professional level, using traditional European notation and terminology. Thus, although Gershwin was a brilliant improviser, he made it possible for both jazz pianists and academic performers to master his works. Conclusions. The peculiarities of Gershwin’s development as an artist determined the combination of the jazz basis of his works with the compositional technique of European academic music. The versatility and musical appeal of the Preludes are the key to their long stage life. Plays are well received both in cycles and singly. Their perception is also improved by the fact that the original musical speech is combined in them with the established forms of academic music. The mastery of the Preludes by pianists stimulates the development of technical skill, acquaints with jazz style, sets interesting rhythmic problems. The pieces are bright and winning for concert performance. Thus, the presence of the composer’s piano pieces and other his instrumental works in the programs of classical concerts seems appropriate, useful and desirable.
27
Yakhno, О. І. "Paradigms of rock music and jazz: comparative discourse." Problems of Interaction Between Arts, Pedagogy and the Theory and Practice of Education 53, no. 53 (November 20, 2019): 161–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum1-53.10.
Full textAbstract:
Objectives and methodology. The article is devoted to the revealing of the relation and differences between rock music and jazz, as the phenomena of the “third” layer. It is noted, that, in methodological terms, such a comparative approach is advisable to implement with the use of a paradigm apparatus that fixes a certain commonality in the development of each of the studied phenomena at different stages of evolution. The application of this concept to the phenomena of art is a characteristic feature of modern musicology. In the broadest sense, the paradigm is the possibility of “thinking by analogy” (according to Aristotle), and in music it relates both to the field of theory (views on music as a form of art) and practice (musical and artistic phenomena as the products of composer and performing art).The article proposes a classification of rock music paradigms, which are based on the available data on the aesthetics and communication of jazz and notes that rock music on the path of its evolution has passed a number of stages, which in general can be designated as paradigms. The article suggests a comparative description of the movement of aesthetic and communicative paradigms of jazz and rock music. It is noted that in jazzology this issue has long been relevant, which is not the case for the study of rock music. Despite all the differences in the time of emergence and the nature of evolution, vocabulary and semantics, social functions, jazz and rock have many “common points”. The results of the research. Such features, of jazz and rock music, as improvisational nature, a variety of intonational sources that combine multinational and diverse trends are revealed and systematized as common points. Among the special features are distinguished such as the reliance of jazz mainly on the instrumental and rock music on a mixed vocal and instrumental basis; first is referring to “elitist”, second is referring to “mass”. Various syntheses are also common in jazz and rock music, as well as the correlation of composition and improvisation, performing and authorial principles. It is not so much about mutual influences and syntheses, but about the directions of evolution, the general nature of which is defined as the movement from “realistic” to “phenomenological” (A. Soloviev on the jazz paradigms). At its onset, rock music, like jazz, has been “embedded” in the system of the social and political movement, where its autonomous aesthetic function was not yet identified (youth movements of the 1960s, within which the corresponding “protest music” arose). In the process of mastering vocabulary specific to rock music as a phenomenon of the “third” layer, a new paradigm arose, characterized first as conventionally realistic, and then as conventionally autonomous, where rock music reaches the level of professional art in which laws and rules are established by its representatives themselves (this period begins from the Beatles and will continue further by their followers – “Rolling Stones”, “Led Zeppelin”, “Deep Purple” and other groups). It is noted that “people of rock” as well as “people of jazz” are a special social and communicative community, in which the idea of free communication is the main and determining one, where social, interpersonal, and actually musical factors intertwine. The unifying communicative factor in jazz and rock music is the art of improvisation, in which, in symbiosis, the processes of creating and performing music coexist spontaneously, but are subject to certain paradigm settings. It is emphasized that in the social context, jazz and rock differ in ethnic and age factors, which, however, is eventually overcome in modern global society through consolidation (convergence of African-American and European sources of jazz, transition of rock groups to a more general theme that differs from the original youth focus). It is also noted that rock music, unlike jazz, is too deeply connected with social factors and is always based on topical themes, generalized with varying degrees of artistry. Therefore, its degree of autonomy is much lower than that of elite jazz, which by the last decade of the 20th century had turned into the officially recognized salon art, or into a “conglomerate” consisting of pop elements of various kinds close to the aesthetics of the show industry. It is proved that the differences between jazz and rock music are most clearly manifested at the level of radical-and-phenomenal paradigm, which means plunging into the realm of banal “nothing”, where acts (but actually – does not act) the principle of “no wave” (A. Soloviev about jazz) . While jazz in the post-bop period developed towards elite art under the Free rubric, the extreme expression of which was spontaneous collective “impersonal” (lack of leadership, lack of frontman), the style of rock music developed in a different direction, the vector of which can be considered the opposite of jazz. Firstly, in the field of stylistics and language as its primary carrier, rock music meant a return to improvisational syncretism – a dramatic combination of poetry and music. Secondly, rock music is directly immersed, unlike elite jazz with its style of full linguistic freedom and collage, in the realm of relevant musical and poetic vocabulary, coming not from the rhetorical type of creativity (translating “artificial” into “new artificial”), but from the realities of the set of generally accessible linguistic means, which exists at a given historical moment (and in a certain “geography”). In the conclusions of the article, it is noted that rock music, even in its experimental radical and phenomenological manifestations, associated mainly with the sound realm (electronics, dynamics), remains, as a whole, the phenomenon of pop culture. This does not mean the absorption of rock art by the realm of mass consumerism. The best rock music pieces, which have already become classic, combine in reasonable proportions the “elite” (innovative) and “mass” (traditional), give a special rational embodiment of the idea of combining improvisation and composition – the “cornerstone” in the musical art of the entire “third” layer. The aesthetics and communication of rock music in its latest paradigms are differentiated according to the criteria of various stylistic inclinations – genre, national, regional, personal. Therefore, the study of modern rock music is the task of a number of separate studies devoted to specific issues of the problem, in particular, its main difference from jazz, namely, in the vocal and instrumental nature.
28
Macías, Anthony. "California’s Composer Laureate." Boom 3, no. 2 (2013): 34–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/boom.2013.3.2.34.
Full textAbstract:
This essay uses the 1960s, Gerald Wilson’s most prolific period, as a window into his life and work as a big band jazz trumpeter, soloist, arranger, conductor, and composer. This selective snapshot of Wilson’s career inserts him more fully into jazz—and California—history, while analyzing the influence of Latin music and Mexican culture on his creations. Tracing the black-brown connections in his Alta California art demonstrates an often-overlooked aspect of Wilson’s musical legacy: the fact that he wrote, arranged, recorded, and performed Latin-tinged tunes, especially several brassy homages to Mexican bullfighters, as well as Latin jazz originals. Wilson’s singular soul jazz reveals the drive and dedication of a disciplined artist—both student and teacher—who continually honed his craft and expanded his talents as part of his educational and musical philosophy. Wilson’s California story is that of an African American migrant who moves out west, where he meets a Chicana Angelena and starts a family—in the tradition of Cali-mestizaje—then stays for the higher quality of life, for the freedom to raise his children and live as an artist, further developing and fully expressing his style. However, because he never moved to New York, Wilson remains under-researched and underappreciated by academic jazz experts. Using cultural history and cultural studies research methods, this essay makes the case that Gerald Wilson should be more widely recognized and honored for his genius, greatness, and outstanding achievements in the field of modern jazz, from San Francisco to Monterey, Hollywood, and Hermosa Beach.
29
DuPree, Mary Herron. "Mirror to an Age: Musical America, 1918–30." Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 23 (1990): 137–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14723808.1990.10540939.
Full textAbstract:
The time between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the stock market crash in 1929 has traditionally been considered an interregnum in American Music: before it, American music and musical culture largely reflected that of Europe, and after it, America found its voice in the distinctive compositions of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and others. An examination of periodical writings on music from that time, however, reveals that this period marked not a state of anticipation but the real beginning of modern American music, of composition of international significance, and of distinctive styles of American composition. It was a period when traditionalism, modernism and jazz-influenced composition were each passionately defended and condemned not only in the music journals but in the pages of most of the general intellectual magazines.
30
Voskoboinikov, Yakov. "George Gershwin’s jazz transcriptions in piano performance of academic tradition." Aspects of Historical Musicology 19, no. 19 (February 7, 2020): 429–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-19.25.
Full textAbstract:
Background. Today, jazz transcriptions of works by George Gershwin can be heard around the world. Works such as “The Man I Love”, “I Got Rhythm”, “Summertime”, “Liza”, “Fascinating Rhythm”, “Somebody Loves Me”, “Swanee”, included in the collection “Gershwin songs”, and also “Seven virtuoso etudes on the themes of G. Gershwin” by E. Wilde are performed by modern academic musicians. Thus, widely known performance versions of piano transcriptions “Gershwin songs” by M.-A. Hamelin, the song “The Man I Love” performed by A. Tharaud, P. Barton, and others famous performers. The evidence of growing interest of classical performers in the music of the American composer is the successful holding of the IV G. Gershvin International Music Competition in New York (on November 7–10, 2019). Director and main organizer of the competition, Michael Bulychev-Okser, is the American pianist, the main winner of many international competitions in the United States, Italy, Andorra, Spain and Mexico. How does a musician of academic direction, whose inner professional intentions and way of thinking are brought up on the classical repertoire, perceive Gershwin’s jazz compositions? What is the specificity of modern reading of his music? In which cultural traditions should we look for the key to understanding Gershwin’s musical language, its rhythmic and intonational specifics? Finally, can a jazz pianist consider himself completely free from the culture of the academic tradition by playing Gershwin? The search for answers to all these questions has identified the problematic perspective of this article. The purpose of the article is to reveal the characteristic features of the performance of G. Gershwin’s transcriptions by modern academic pianists using specific examples and to determine the interpretational tasks of the performer. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive genre andstyle approach to the study of musical material, and also includes a comparative method used for concidering different performance versions of the same work. The main results of the study. Jazz and the culture of academic music work closely together in the style of G. Gershwin. Indicative in this sense was the idea of a concert eloquently called “Reunion of Classics and Jazz” (1924), for which the “Rhapsody in Blue” was created and where it was first performed by the author with the orchestra of Paul Whiteman. G. Gershwin, more than any other composer of his time, communicated with African-American musicians: he knew Will Voderi, Lucky Roberts, Duke Ellington; heard New York pianists play downtown and often visited the “Cotton Club” and other places in Harlem to hear the bands of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and other jazz musicians. But not only jazz was the area of interest and creative acquaintances of Gershwin. Along with jazz culture, there were many other musical styles. In the works of G. Gershwin, Ch. Ives, A. Copland in the early 1920s – mid 1940s there is an original combination of deep folk intonation with the composer’s technique of the XX century, up to the use of dodecaphonic-serial technique (Copland). The fusion of jazz and academic branches in Gershwin’s music, above all, takes place at the level of form. “I took the blues and put it in a larger and more serious form”, said the composer (as quoted by Schneider, 1999: 67). As a pianist, Gershwin did not receive a systematic professional education as a child, although he later had enough teachers. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a real pianist-virtuoso and a brilliant improviser. One should listen to archival recordings of Gershwin’s performance to get an idea of his performance style. Samples of his piano performances have been partially preserved: some acoustic and electric recordings, radio recordings, two sound films and a large number of piano videos (Gibbons, 2002). The studio recording of “Rhapsody in Blue” demonstrates Gershwin’s completely “academic” pianism – with clear, well-founded articulation, bright sonic fullness, thoughtful agogics of expressive declamation, which is only emphasized by the well-organized metric pulsation and dynamics by active rhythmic movement – and his true virtuoso skill. Should a modern pianist, performing Gershwin’s works, follow the example of a balanced and rather “academic” performance, as in his studio recording “Rhapsody in Blue”, or follow Gershvin’s interpretation, which can be observed in the transcription “I Got Rhythm”, where he clearly prefers the jazz element? It makes sense to compare different examples of Gershwin’s popular piano transcription of “The Man I Love”. The performance version of the English pianist Paul Barton is an attempt to imitate the specifics of the freedom of sound of instrumental jazz styles, however, as one can hear, the musical intonation is not always convincing, the breath is a bit torn, the agogics of chord melodic constructions performance the agogics of chord melodic constructions (upper layers of texture) is greatly exaggerated and the performing is practically “released” from calculation and feeling of time. As an undoubted plus of this version it is necessary to note huge attention to harmony as such, to vertical and balance within a chord – Barton’s harmony “breathes” and moves. This approach can be justified, because the harmony of Gershwin’s songs is always diverse, bright and inventive. The record of Gershwin’s 1959 “Songbook” by Ella Fitzgerald is available today. The composition “The Man I Love” in her performance can be one of the possible orienting points in the intonation of the main melodic voice, the calculation of its unfolding in time, the display of interval “tensions” and melodic intentions in Gershwin’s music. E. Fitzgerald’s vocal-jazz style presupposes a different temporal organization of the melody, different from the one suggested by P. Barton – the movement of its vocal recitation-intonation and improvisational vocals is accelerated, then somewhat slowed down, thus creating “compensated time” of a musical work, and it is with soft, relaxed, naturally light breathing. The modern media space presents the album of French pianist Alexandre Tharaud “Swing in Paris”, which includes two compositions by Gershwin: “The Man I Love” and “Do it Again!”. Three different interpretations of “The Man I Love” are popular on the You Tube website, where each video is original in its own way. These performings are variants, but the concept of details – melodic constructions, organization of rhythmic accents, as well as a sense of Gershwin’s style, is preserved. The sophistication of the Parisian salon is what distinguishes the game of Tharaud. The musician has a sense of proportion and uses the full range of expressive means of academic pianism. At the same time, the development of the melodic line takes place organically and effortlessly, alluding to vocal genre examples, to free breathing and “blues” articulation of jazz vocalists; rhythmic accentuation is unobtrusive but clearly felt. Summing up, we note that the “Tharaud approach” is certainly the closest to the reference. Conclusions. Proceeding from the synthetic nature of G. Gershwin’s music, comprehension of its stylistic and cultural origins, analysis of listened musical samples, let us single out the interpretation constants that must be taken into account by the performer of his compositions. Among them – the inheritance of agogics, articulation, “light” breathing, inherent in the vocal jazz manner, in the intonation of the melody; “Breathing” harmony with a colorful timbre filling of chords and subvoices united into a movable vertical-horizontal complex; understanding of rhythm as an independent expressive sphere that has ethnic roots in the music of the African American tradition.
31
DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell. "APPALACHIAN BLACK FIDDLING: HISTORY AND CREATIVITY." African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 11, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 77–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.21504/amj.v11i2.2315.
Full textAbstract:
Discussions on Appalachian music in the United States most often evoke images of instruments such as the fiddle and banjo, and a musical heritage identified primarily with Europe and European Americans, as originators or creators, when in reality, many Europeans were influenced or taught by African-American fiddlers. Not only is Appalachian fiddling a confluence of features that are both African- and European-derived, but black fiddlers have created a distinct performance style using musical aesthetics identified with African and African-American culture. In addition to a history of black fiddling and African Americans in Appalachia, this article includes a discussion of the musicking of select Appalachian black fiddlers.
32
CAPLAN, LUCY. "“Strange What Cosmopolites Music Makes of Us”: Classical Music, the Black Press, and Nora Douglas Holt's Black Feminist Audiotopia." Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 3 (August 2020): 308–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196320000218.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis article examines the music criticism of Nora Douglas Holt, an African American woman who wrote a classical music column for the Chicago Defender (1917–1923) and published a monthly magazine, Music and Poetry (1921–1922). I make two claims regarding the force and impact of Holt's ideas. First, by writing about classical music in the black press, Holt advanced a model of embodied listening that rejected racist attempts to keep African Americans out of the concert hall and embraced a communal approach to knowledge production. Second, Holt was a black feminist intellectual who refuted dominant notions of classical music's putative race- and gender-transcending universalism; instead, she acknowledged the generative possibilities of racial difference in general and blackness in particular. I analyze Holt's intellectual commitments by situating her ideas within the context of early twentieth-century black feminist thought; analyzing the principal themes of her writing in the Chicago Defender and Music and Poetry; and assessing her engagement with a single musical work, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, op. 36. Ultimately, Holt's criticism offers new insight into how race, gender, and musical activity intersected in the Jim Crow era and invites a more nuanced and capacious understanding of black women's manifold contributions to US musical culture.
33
Morrison, Steven J. "A Comparison of Preference Responses of White and African-American Students to Musical versus Musical/Visual Stimuli." Journal of Research in Music Education 46, no. 2 (July 1998): 208–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3345624.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study was to examine the role of same- and other-group identification in musical preference decision-making. Subjects were African-American (n = 189) and white (n = 280) music students in Grades 6, 7, and 8. Each subject responded along a 9-point Likert scale to 10 instrumental music excerpts, five performed by African-American jazz artists and five performed by white jazz artists. Examples were presented according to one of three conditions: (1) music only, (2) music accompanied by a photograph of the performers, or (3) music accompanied by a photograph of different performers representing a different ethnicity. Results indicated that white subjects preferred examples by white performers regardless of presentation condition. African-American subjects preferred examples by white performers when presented with music alone, but preferred examples believed to be by African-American performers under the musical/visual conditions.
34
DJEDJE, JACQUELINE COGDELL. "The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle." Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196315000528.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.
35
Cabrera, Daniel Antonio Milan. "PENGARUH MUSIK AMERIKA LATIN TERHADAP INDONESIA." Sorai: Jurnal Pengkajian dan Penciptaan Musik 13, no. 1 (November 20, 2020): 36–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.33153/sorai.v13i1.3093.
Full textAbstract:
Since the beginning of the last century, Latin American music has been succes in the U.S. music industry because its intrinsic musical characteristics and its involvement within the film industry. Through the U.S. and Europe, it has been influencing popular music around the world; including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and India, countries that also contributed to the diffusion of Latin styles in Indonesia. The corpus of original works of Indonesian-Latin music is quite huge and has great quality; particularly audio recordings done in the 1950s and 1960s that mixed Latin, Western, and regional musical elements to create new musical forms know as lagu daerah (regional songs) and pop daerah (regional pop). This article aims to provide some understandings of this complex diffusion process utilising mainly a bibliographical research method (books, journals, digital news, etc.), interviews, and listening-based information from old audio recordings. My hipothesis is that Latin American music has been well accepted in Indonesia, espetially in Java and Sumatra, due to historical crossroads that spread musical and cultural similarities in both regions. In order of its importance in Indonesian-Latin music, these are: the conection of Asia and America during the Spanish, Portugal, and Holand colonial era; the Islamic influence in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and the Iberic peninsula; the influence of Dutch music in Indonesia and German music in Latin America; the role of African music in Latin America and the probable two side influences between Africa and Indonesia; and the inmigration to Amerika from Nusantara-Oceania sailors in prehistoric times.
36
Tracy, Steven C. "Sonny in the Dark: Jazzing the Blues Spirit and the Gospel Truth in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”." James Baldwin Review 1, no. 1 (September 29, 2015): 164–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/jbr.1.10.
Full textAbstract:
The webs of musical connection are essential to the harmony and cohesion of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” As a result, we must explore the spectrum of musical references Baldwin makes to unveil their delicate conjunctions. It is vital to probe the traditions of African-American music—Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, and Pop—to get a more comprehensive sense of how Baldwin makes use of music from the sacred and secular continuum in the African-American community. Looking more closely at the variety of African-American musical genres to which Baldwin refers in the story, we can discern even more the nuances of unity that Baldwin creates in his story through musical allusions, and shed greater light on Baldwin’s exploration of the complexities of African-American life and music, all of which have as their core elements of human isolation, loneliness, and despair ameliorated by artistic expression, hope, and the search for familial ties. Through musical intertextuality, Baldwin demonstrates not only how closely related seemingly disparate (in the Western tradition) musical genres are, but also shows that the elements of the community that these genres flow from and represent are much more in synchronization than they sometimes seem or are allowed to be. To realize kinship across familial (Creole), socio-economic (the brother), and most importantly for this paper appreciation and meanings of musical genres advances to Sonny the communal cup of trembling that is both a mode and an instance of envisioning and treating music in its unifying terms, seeing how they coalesce through a holistic vision.
37
Choi, Eunjung, and Laura J. Keith. "Cultural Diversity." Music Educators Journal 103, no. 2 (December 2016): 35–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0027432116670459.
Full textAbstract:
Contemporary African-American classical composers Cedric Adderley, John Lane, and Trevor Weston intertwine strands of culture and individual experience to produce musical works whose distinct designs offer cultural resources that music educators can use to integrate diversity into instructional settings. Of special interest is their ability to combine traditional European styles and other musical styles, including jazz, gospel, and blues, in their music. The authors include recommendations for incorporating elements of these contemporary African-American–composed works into the curriculum.
38
Kočan, Kristina. "Problems in Translating Musical Elements in African American Poetry after 1950." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 6, no. 1-2 (June 15, 2009): 45–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.6.1-2.45-60.
Full textAbstract:
In most cases, African American poetry eschews traditional literary norms. Contemporary African American poets tend to ignore grammatical rules, use unusual typography on many occasions, include much of their cultural heritage in their poetry, and interweave musical elements into literary genres. The influence of such musical genres as jazz, blues, soul, and gospel, together with the dilemmas that occur for the translator, will be shown to great extent, since music, like black speech, is a major part of African American culture and literature. The translator will have to maintain the specific African American rhythm, blues adaptations and the improvisational language under the jazz impact. The paper presents the problems in translating post-1950 African American poetry into Slovene, and asks to what extent can one successfully transfer the musical elements within this poetry for the target culture? Inevitably, it will identify a share of elements that are lost in translation.
39
Volk, Terese M. "Folk Musics and Increasing Diversity in American Music Education: 1900-1916." Journal of Research in Music Education 42, no. 4 (December 1994): 285–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3345737.
Full textAbstract:
From 1900 to 1916, the demographic makeup of the United States changed radically due to the heavy influx of people from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the schools, in particular, felt the impact of this immigration. Many music educators, like their colleagues in general education, found themselves facing an increasingly multicultural classroom for the first time. As a result of their efforts to help Americanize their immigrant students, music educators gradually came to know and accept folk songs and dances from many European countries and to make use of musics from these countries in music appreciation classes. Also during this period, some of the musics of Native Americans and African Americans were introduced into the music curriculum. Including these folk musics in the American school music curriculum resulted in an increased musical diversity that perhaps marked the beginnings of multicultural music education in the public schools.
40
Silverman, Marissa. "I drum, I sing, I dance: An ethnographic study of a West African drum and dance ensemble." Research Studies in Music Education 40, no. 1 (October 28, 2017): 5–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1321103x17734972.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this ethnographic study was to investigate the Montclair State University’s West African drum and dance ensemble. Analyses of the data revealed three themes related to individual participants and the “lived reality” of the group as a whole, and to the social-cultural teaching–learning processes involved: spirituality, community-as-oneness, and communal joy. My motivation for undertaking this inquiry arose from the fact that, beginning in the 1960s, music education scholars in the United States have been concerned about the widespread marginalization of non-Western musics in American music teacher education programs. This situation is still a major concern because American undergraduate and graduate music teacher preparation remains overwhelmingly dominated by Western classical styles. This situation runs contrary to the massive social, cultural, situational, and musical diversity of American students’ lives. As one small effort to advance musical diversity in my own university music school context, I developed the proposal for and initiated the Montclair State University’s West African drum and dance ensemble.
41
Horn, David. "Eileen Southern." Popular Music 22, no. 3 (October 2003): 378–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026114300300326x.
Full textAbstract:
Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).
42
Steichen, James. "Balanchine’s “Bach Ballet” and the Dances of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes." Journal of Musicology 35, no. 2 (2018): 267–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2018.35.2.267.
Full textAbstract:
This article uncovers an unrealized “Bach Ballet” by choreographer George Balanchine previously unexamined by scholars of music or dance. Inspired by tap dancer Paul Draper and conceived of by Balanchine’s patron Lincoln Kirstein, this work is probably an early inspiration for the choreographer’s now iconic ballet Concerto Barocco (1941, set to J. S. Bach’s D-minor concerto for two violins, BWV 1043). This “Bach Ballet” provides an occasion to reevaluate the aesthetic and institutional stakes of Balanchine’s better-known endeavor from the same period: his well-regarded dances for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musical comedy On Your Toes, in which the worlds of classical music and ballet collide with popular music and dance. New insights into the dramaturgical function and reception of the dances in On Your Toes offer a way to revisit the show’s status as an early exemplar of “integrated” musical comedy and to understand the musical’s engagement with the phenomenon of Russian ballet in New Deal America. This essay analyzes the musical’s three dances—the Princess Zenobia ballet, the “On Your Toes” number, and the concluding Slaughter on Tenth Avenue—as an allegory of Balanchine’s Americanization as a choreographer. This complex of projects provides a fresh perspective on how Balanchine’s personal contact with a range of dancers (white and African-American, tap and ballet performers) affected his development as a choreographer and in the process helped realize, if inadvertently, the erstwhile goal of Balanchine and Kirstein’s ballet enterprise: to reinvent the art form in a native idiom.
43
Chybowski, Julia J. "Becoming the “Black Swan” in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America:." Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 1 (2014): 125–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.1.125.
Full textAbstract:
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was first in a lineage of African American women vocalists to earn national and international acclaim. Born into slavery in Mississippi, she grew up in Philadelphia and launched her first North American concert tour from upstate New York in 1851. Hailed as the “Black Swan” by newspapermen involved in her debut, the soubriquet prefigured a complicated reception of her musical performances. As an African American musician with slavery in her past, she sang what many Americans understood to be “white” music (opera arias, sentimental parlor song, ballads of British Isles, and hymns) from the stages graced by touring European prima donnas on other nights, with ability to sing in a low vocal range that some heard as more typical of men than women. As reviewers and audiences combined fragments of her biography with first-hand experiences of her concerts, they struggled to make the “Black Swan” sobriquet meaningful and the transgressions she represented understandable. Greenfield's musical performances, along with audience expectations and the processes of patronage, management, and newspaper discourse complicated perceived cultural boundaries of race, gender, and class. The implications of E. T. Greenfield's story for antebellum cultural politics and for later generations of singers are profound.
44
Mack, Kimberly. "She's A Country Girl All Right." Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 144–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2020.32.2.144.
Full textAbstract:
Classically trained vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and 2017 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Rhiannon Giddens has in recent years enjoyed increased visibility in the contemporary country music world. In 2016, she was a featured singer on Eric Church's top-ten country hit, “Kill a Word,” and she won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass that same year. Giddens also had a recurring role as social worker Hanna Lee “Hallie” Jordan on the long-running musical drama Nashville in 2017 and 2018. While Giddens now enjoys a certain degree of acceptance in the country music world, she has not always felt included in the various largely white, contemporary American roots scenes. As such, she continues to speak out to audiences and the press about the erasure of African Americans from histories of string music, bluegrass, country, and other styles and forms of American roots music. Using Giddens's 2017 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) keynote, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops' music video for the song “Country Girl” from 2012's Leaving Eden, I demonstrate that Giddens effectively reclaims American old-time string music and country culture as black, subverting historically inaccurate racialized notions of country music authenticity.
45
Serdiuk, Ya O. "Amanda Maier: a violinist, a pianist, a composer – the representative of Leipzig Romanticism." Aspects of Historical Musicology 17, no. 17 (September 15, 2019): 232–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-17.15.
Full textAbstract:
Background. The performance practice of recent decades demonstrates an obvious tendency to expand and update the repertoire due to the use of the works of those composers whose pieces had “lost” over time against to the pieces of their more famous contemporaries. At the same time, in sociology, psychology, culturology, gender issues are largely relevant. Musicology does not stand aside, applying the achievements of gender psychology in the study of composer creativity and musical performing (Tsurkanenko, I., 2011; Gigolaeva-Yurchenko, V., 2012, 2015; Fan, Liu, 2017). In general, the issue of gender equality is quite acute in contemporary public discourse. The indicated tendencies determine the interest of many musicians and listeners in the work of women-composers (for example, recently, the creativity by Clara Schumann attracts the attention of performers all over the world, in particular, in Ukraine the International Music Festival “Kharkiv Assemblies” – 2018 was dedicated to her works). The theme of the proposed work is also a response to the noted trends in performing practice and musicology discourse. For the first time in domestic musicology an attempt is made to give a brief overview of the life and career of another talented woman, whose name is little known in the post-Soviet space. This is a Swedish violinist, composer and pianist Amanda Röntgen-Maier (1853–1894), a graduate of the Stockholm Royal College of Music and the Leipzig Conservatory, a contemporary of Clara Schumann, J. Brahms, E. Grieg, with whom she and her husband – composer, pianist, conductor Julius Röntgen – were associated for enough long time by creative and friendly relationships. In the post-Soviet space, not a single work has been published that would be dedicated to the works of A. Maier. In European and American musicology, the composer’s personality and creative heritage is also not widely studied. Her name is only occasionally mentioned in works examining the musical culture and, in particular, the performing arts of Sweden at that time (Jönsson, Å., 1995, 151–156; Karlsson, Å., 1994, 38–43; Lundholm, L., 1992, 14–15; Löndahl, T., 1994; Öhrström, E., 1987, 1995). The aim of the proposed study is to characterize Amanda Meier’s creative heritage in the context of European romanticism. Research results. Based on the available sources, we summarized the basic information about the life and career of A. Maier. Carolina Amanda Erica Maier (married Röntgen-Maier ) was born on February 20, 1853 in Landskrona. She received the first music lessons from his father, Karl Edward Mayer, a native of Germany (from Württemberg), who worked as a confectioner in Landskrona, but also studied music, in particular, in 1852 he received a diploma of “music director” in Stockholm and had regular contracts. In 1869, Amanda entered to the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (Royal College of Music) in Stockholm. There she learns to play several instruments at once: the violin, cello, piano, organ, and also studies history, music theory and musical aesthetics. A. Maier graduated from Royal College successfully and became the first woman who received the title of “Musik Direktor”. The final concert, which took place in April 1873, included the performance of the program on the violin and on the organ and also A. Maier’s own work – the Romance for Violin. In the spring of 1874, Amanda received the grant from the Royal College for further studies at the Leipzig Conservatory. Here, Engelbert Röntgen, the accompanist of the glorious orchestra Gewandhaus, becomes her teacher on the violin, and she studies harmony and composition under the guidance of Karl Heinrich Karsten Reinecke and Ernst Friedrich Richter. Education in Leipzig lasts from 1874 to 1876. In the summer and autumn of 1875, A. Maier returns to Landskron, where she writes the first major work – the Concerto for violin and orchestra in one-movement, D minor, which was performed twice: in December 1875 in Halle and in February 1876 with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the direction of K. Reinecke. The further career of A. Maier, both performing and composing, developed very successfully. She made several major concert trips between 1876 and 1880: to Sweden and Norway, to Finland and St. Petersburg; she also played to the Swedish king Oscar II (1876); concerts were held with constant success. While studying in Leipzig, A. Maier met her future husband (the son of her violin teacher) Julius Röntgen, composer and conductor. They married 1880 in Landskrona. Their personal relationships included active creative communication, both playing music together, and exchanging musical ideas, getting to know each other’s works. Part of his chamber opuses, for example, the cycle of Swedish folk dances, A. Maier created in collaboration with her husband. An analogy with life of Robert and Clara Schumann may take place here, although the Röntgen spouses did not have to endure such dramatic collisions that fell to the lot of the first. After the wedding, Röntgen family moved to Amsterdam, where Julius Röntgen soon occupies senior positions in several music organizations. On the contrary, the concert and composing activities of A. Maier go to the decline. This was due both, to the birth of two sons, and to a significant deterioration in her health. Nevertheless, she maintains her violin skills at the proper level and actively participates in performances in music salons, which the family arranges at home. The guests of these meetings were, in particular, J. Brahms, K. Schumann, E. Grieg with his wife and A. Rubinstein. The last years of A. Maier’s life were connected with Nice, Davos and Norway. In the fall of 1888 she was in Nice with the goal of treating the lungs, communicating there with her friends Heinrich and Elizabeth Herzogenberg. With the latter, they played Brahms violin sonatas, and the next (1889) year A. Maier played the same pieces with Clara Schumann. Amanda Maier spent the autumn of 1889 under the supervision of doctors in Davos, and the winter – in Nice. In 1890, she returned to Amsterdam. His last major work dates back to 1891 – the Piano Quartet in D minor. During the last three years of her life, she visited Denmark, Sweden and Norway, where she performed, among other, her husband’s works, for example, the suite “From Jotunheim”. In the summer of 1889, A. Maier took part in concerts at the Nirgaard Castle in Denmark. In 1894, she returned to Amsterdam again. Her health seems stable, a few hours before her death she was conducting classes with her sons. A. Maier died July 15, 1894. The works of A. Maier, published during the life of the composer, include the following: Sonata in H minor (1878); 6 Pieces for violin and piano (1879); “Dialogues” – 10 small pieces for piano, some of which were created by Julius Röntgen (1883); Swedish songs and dances for violin and piano; Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello E minor (1891). Still unprinted are the following works: Romance for violin and piano; Trio for violin, cello and piano (1874); Concert for violin and orchestra (1875); Quartet for piano, violin, viola and clarinet E minor; “Nordiska Tonbilder” for violin and piano (1876); Intermezzo for piano; Two string quartets; March for piano, violin, viola and cello; Romances on the texts of David Wiersen; Trio for piano and two violins; 25 Preludes for piano. The composer style of A. Mayer incorporates the characteristic features of the Romantic era, in particular, the Leipzig school. Lyric elements prevail in her works, although the composer is not alien to dramatic, heroic, epic images (the Piano Quartet E minor, some pieces from the Six Songs for Violin and Piano series). In the embodiment of such a circle of images, parallels with the musical style of the works of J. Brahms are quite clearly traced. In constructing thematic structures, A. Maier relies on the melody of the Schubert-Mendelssohn type. The compositional solutions are defined mainly by the classical principles of forming, which resembles the works of F. Mendelssohn, the late chamber compositions of R. Schumann, where the lyrical expression gets a clear, complete form. The harmonic language of the works of A. Maier gravitates toward classical functionality rather than the uncertainty, instability and colorfulness inherent in the harmony of F. Liszt, R. Wagner and their followers. The main instrument, for which most of the opuses by A. Maier was created, the violin, is interpreted in various ways: it appears both, in the lyrical and the virtuoso roles. The piano texture of chamber compositions by A. Maier is quite developed and rich; the composer clearly gravitates towards the equality of all parties in an ensemble. At the same time, piano techniques are reminiscent of texture formulas by F. Mendelssohn and J. Brahms. Finally, in A. Mayer’s works manifest themself such characteristic of European romanticism, as attraction to folklore, a reliance on folk song sources. Conclusions. Periods in the history of music seemed already well studied, hide many more composer names and works, which are worthy of the attention of performers, musicologists and listeners. A. Mayer’s creativity, despite the lack of pronounced innovation, has an independent artistic value and, at the same time, is one of such musical phenomena that help to compile a more complete picture of the development of musical art in the XIX century and gain a deeper understanding of the musical culture of this period. The prospect of further development of the topic of this essay should be a more detailed study of the creative heritage of A. Maier in the context of European musical Romanticism.
46
Vasiliu, Alex. "The Balkan tradition in contemporary jazz. Anatoly Vapirov." Artes. Journal of Musicology 20, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 256–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ajm-2019-0015.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract The folkloric character of the beginnings of jazz has been established by all researchers of American classical music. The African-Americans brought as slaves onto the territory of North America, the European émigrés tied to their own folkloric repertoire, the songs in the musical revues on Broadway turned national successes – can be considered the first three waves to have fundamentally influenced the history of jazz music. Preserving the classical and modern manner of improvisation and arrangement has not been a solution for authentic jazz musicians, permanently preoccupied with renewing their mode of expression. As it happened in the academic genres, the effect of experiments was mostly to draw the public away, as its capacity of understanding and empathizing with the new musical “products” (especially those in the “free” stylistic area) were discouraging. The areas which also had something original to say in the field of jazz remained the traditional, archaic cultures in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Orient. Compared to folkloric works from very distant areas, the musical culture of the Balkans bears the advantage of diversity, the ease of reception of melodies, rhythms and instrumental sonority. One of the most important architects of ethno-jazz is Anatoly Vapirov. A classically-trained musician, an author of concerts, stage music and soundtracks, a consummate connoisseur of the classical mode of improvisation as a saxophone and clarinet player, Anatoly Vapirov has dedicated decades of his life to researching the archaic musical culture of the Balkans, which he translated into the dual academic-jazz language, in the hypostases of predetermined scored works and of improvised works – either as a soloist, in combos or big bands. This study focuses on highlighting the language techniques, emphasizing the aesthetic-artistic qualities of the music signed Anatoly Vapirov.
47
MAXILE, HORACE J. "Implication, Quotation, and Coltrane in Selected Works By David N. Baker." Journal of the Society for American Music 7, no. 2 (May 2013): 147–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196313000059.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis article explores composer David N. Baker's use of elements of jazz and vernacular music to articulate formal structures and suggest extramusical commentaries in his concert works, with particular focus on the Sonata for Cello and Piano and the Sonata I for Piano. Themes of homage to and respect for jazz saxophonist John Coltrane resonate through these works. Various features bring the jazz legend to mind, but Baker's compelling play with implication and quotation provides fertile ground for studying musical signification and the use of vernacular emblems within Western compositional structures and the concert music of African American composers. Conventional analytical methods are combined with readings of referential symbols to work toward interpretations that address both structural and expressive domains. This approach allows discussions of compositional techniques to intersect with cultural and philosophical considerations. By addressing issues of musical structure and expressivity, this article seeks to move beyond commonplace surface-level descriptions of black vernacular emblems in the concert music of African American composers.
48
Palacios, Fernando. "ARRULLOS, CHIGUALOS AND ALABAOS: TRADITIONAL AFRO-ESMERALDENIAN MUSIC IN ECUADOR." African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 11, no. 2 (November 22, 2020): 119–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.21504/amj.v11i2.2317.
Full textAbstract:
In this article I examine traditional Afro-Esmeraldenian music as manifested in religious and spiritual contexts. I discuss the repertoire’s formal musical aspects and its associated factors. I argue that the traditional music of the Afro-Esmeraldenian community is evidence of a performance culture that has taken on the characteristics of first nation Americans and Spanish colonisers, while retaining a distinct African identity mostly in the musical instruments such as the marimba, rattles and drums, in the polyrhythms and in the distinctive responsorial singing. )e religious sphere is a fundamental and representative space for understanding the cosmovision and symbolism of the Afro-Esmeraldenians, a population located on Ecuador’s northern Pacific coast, originally settled during forced migration of Africans to America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, traditional musical practices have survived through generations and reflects the importance of the spiritual world for this cultural group. In addition, it is likely that the religious sphere has contributed significantly to the validity and durability of the Afro-Esmeraldenian musical repertoire and the instruments making up the traditional ensemble.
49
Carter-Ényì, Aaron, and Quintina Carter-Ényì. "“Bold and Ragged”: A Cross-Cultural Case for the Aesthetics of Melodic Angularity." Music & Science 3 (January 1, 2020): 205920432094906. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2059204320949065.
Full textAbstract:
Smaller corpora and individual pieces are compared to a large corpus of 2,447 hymns using two measures of melodic angularity: mean interval size and pivot frequency. European art music and West African melodies may exhibit extreme angularity. We argue in the latter that angularity is motivated by linguistic features of tone-level languages. We also found the mean interval sizes of African-American Spirituals and Southern Harmony exceed contemporary hymnody of the 19th century, with levels similar to Nigerian traditional music (Yorùbá oríkì and story songs from eastern Nigeria). This is consistent with the account of W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that African melody was a primary source for the development of American music. The development of the American spiritual coincides with increasing interval size in 19th-century American hymnody at large, surpassing the same measure applied to earlier European hymns. Based on these findings, we recommend techniques of melodic construction taught by music theorists, especially preference rules for step-wise motion and gap-fill after leaps, be tempered with counterexamples that reflect broader musical aesthetics. This may be achieved by introducing popular music, African and African Diaspora music, and other non-Western music that may or may not be consistent with voice leading principles. There are also many examples from the European canon that are highly angular, like Händel’s “Hallelujah” and Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Although the tendency of textbooks is to reinforce melodic and part-writing prescriptions with conducive examples from the literature, new perspectives will better equip performers and educators for current music practice.
50
Temperley, David. "Second-Position Syncopation in European and American Vocal Music." Empirical Musicology Review 14, no. 1-2 (November 26, 2019): 66. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v14i1-2.6986.
Full textAbstract:
I define a second-position syncopation as one involving a long note or accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit. I present a corpus analysis of second-position syncopation in 19th-century European and American vocal music. I argue that the analysis of syncopation requires consideration of other musical features besides note-onset patterns, including pitch contour, duration, and text-setting. The corpus analysis reveals that second-position syncopation was common in English, Scottish, Euro-American, and African-American vocal music, but rare in French, German, and Italian vocal music. This suggests that the prevalence of such syncopations in ragtime and later popular music was at least partly due to British influence.