American music and musicians

Second generation Jamaican Busta Rhymes was later an important gangsta rapper during the 1990s; his style is similar to that found in Jamaican dub and dancehall.

Large-scale Japanese immigration to the United States began early in the 20th century, and traditional music came with them. California and Hawaii were two of the biggest destinations for these immigrants. The first North American taiko group was Seiichi Tanaka's San Francisco Taiko Dojo in San Francisco, which was founded in 1968.

The Polish community is strongest in the area around Detroit. The city's Polish-American community spawned a wave of musicians that are usually considered polka players, though their actual output is quite varied. New York City, Chicago and Minneapolis also have Polish-American musical traditions. Chicago's Orkiestra Makowska, led by George Dzialowy, defined that city's unique sound for many years.

Slovenian-American polka musician Frankie Yankovich is by far the most famous musician of that genre. He began his career in the 1930s, beginning with some regional hits in the Detroit and Cleveland areas, followed by mainstream success in the later 1940s.

Ukrainian-Americans in the Cleveland and Detroit area have kept a folk scene alive, also producing a minor crossover star in the 1920s and 30s, Pawlo Humeniuk, the King of the Ukrainian Fiddlers.

              2 CLASSICAL MUSIC

The European classical music tradition was brought to the United States with some of the first colonists. European classical music is rooted in the traditions of European art, ecclesiastical and concert music. The central norms of this tradition developed between 1550 and 1825, centering on what is known as the common practice period. Many American classical composers attempted to work entirely within European models until late in the 19th century [1, p. 56]. When Antonio Dvorak, a prominent Czech composer, visited the United States from 1892 to 1895, he iterated the idea that American classical music needed its own models instead of imitating European composers; he helped to inspire subsequent composers to make a distinctly American style of classical music. By the beginning of the 20th century, many American composers were incorporating disparate elements into their work, ranging from jazz and blues to Native American music.

              2.1 Colonial or “early American” music

Colonial music was not so much music written in America before the Revolution as it was music that was brought here and helped define the people who were to make a new country. Understanding the music that early Americans chose to sing and play gives us a better understanding of the colonists themselves. Their music included ballads, dance tunes, folk songs and parodies, comic opera arias, drum signals, psalms, minuets and sonatas. Such music came mostly from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, and Africa, and it was played on whatever instruments were handy.

In early America a wonderful variety of types and styles of music emerged, expressing the full spectrum of colonial life. It is clear that while our ancestors were musically dependent upon Great Britain and Europe, for the most part, uniquely American developments were already felt before 1776 [4, p. 69-71].

Most instruments that we have today were around by the Revolution, when pianos were just coming into popularity; but certainly some instruments were more prevalent than others. Violins were by far the most popular instruments.  Men of all different classes, from Thomas Jefferson to indentured servants and slaves, played violins or fiddles. Prices varied from cheap to quite expensive and there's little doubt that violins were imported in great numbers. Second in popularity to violins were flutes of many different kinds, also played for the most part by men. There were fifes, recorders (in early America these were called common or English flutes), and transverse, but it is doubtful that there were any pennywhistles, despite their numbers in the mouths of little tourists at Williamsburg. Drums and trumpets, trombones and french horns, 'cellos, violas da gamba, clarinets, oboes and  bassoons, glass 'armonicas, hammered dulcimers, organs—all these appeared, in varying numbers, within in the colonies [9, p. 18-22].

A very tight self-regulation of activity in the name of "maintaining reputation" limited musical options for women [11, p. 25]. Many wealthy women played harpsichords on which they practiced and performed for family and friends. The other instrument of choice for women was what we call today an English guitar, a now extinct 10-string version of a Renaissance cittern with a flat back and a tear-drop shape, tuned to an open C chord, seen in the picture above. The grandmother of our modern guitar was around also, but not as popular; it is called today a Baroque guitar, and it was a small version of a classical guitar with gut strings, frets of gut tied around the neck, and strung as a modern 12-string without the bass E strings, so it was also a 10 stringed instrument. It wasn't until around 1820 that the standard guitar had 6 strings. Women also played harps, but not before the end of the 18th century.

              2.1.2 Types of colonial music

There were a lot of types of colonial music. They included theater music, dance music, church and military music.

Musical theater in the colonies was very popular. Most performed were ballad operas — compilations of familiar folk tunes with new words strung together by spoken dialogue to tell a comic story. The most famous of these was The Beggar's Opera, compiled in 1728 in London as a reaction to the elite Italian opera that was so popular among the wealthy in that city. The Beggar's Opera was performed in the colonies as early as 1750. Just as many people today will buy the sheet music and/or CD to a favorite movie or musical, so the colonists would bring home the music and words to songs in The Beggar's Opera(or to any of the many other ballad operas), and play and sing them at home [16, p. 98-104].

Music was also critical to the favorite pastime of the colonists — dancing. There was a huge repertory of dance tunes, mostly English and Celtic reels, hornpipes, jigs, and minuets. Dancing was usually accompanied by a single violin, but for special occasions there may have been 4 or 5 musicians. Whatever instruments and players could be gathered was fine for the dancers. We have a reference to a dance being accompanied by a solo French horn, for lack of a more suitable instrument.

The most varied sort of music in colonial America was related to the several religious denominations active here. The devout Congregationalist churches of New England encouraged the singing of psalms, anthems, and fuging tunes. After 1720 paid singing masters taught church members to read from music, and a large body of unique compositions emerged, most notably by William Billings of Boston. However, in the colonial South, the official tax-supported Church of England evoked considerably less enthusiasm on the part of parishioners. More organs graced private homes in the South than found use in churches.

Most musically sophisticated were the Moravian settlers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. These largely Germanic people copied, performed, and even composed new chamber pieces that were far superior to the general level of musical accomplishment in the colonies. Baptists, Methodists, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and other Protestant denominations all rose in importance through the 1700s, but Catholics were persecuted (especially in Maryland) and flourished only after the Revolution brought true religious freedom. Native Americans and African Americans were in many cases Christianized, and the rise of the Negro Spiritual as a popular choral style after the Civil War is attributed to musical interactions dating back well into colonial times [5, p. 118-130].

Two general sorts of military music are associated with early America, mostly during the late colonial period and Revolutionary period. A "Band of Music" consisted of professional musicians hired by officers to play contrapuntal music at parades, during meals, and for dancing. This ensemble often consisted of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons. The other type of music was often referred to as "field music." This consisted of the fifers and drummers who played during the march, during battles, and for the various camp duty calls which regulated soldiers' lives.

              2.2 20th-century classical music

The New York classical music scene included Charles Griffes, originally from Elmira, New York, who began publishing his most innovative material in 1914. His early collaborations were attempts to use non-Western musical themes. The best-known New York composer was George Gershwin. Gershwin was a songwriter with Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway theatres, and his works were strongly influenced by jazz, or rather the precursors to jazz that were extant during his time. Gershwin's work made American classical music more focused, and attracted an unheard of amount of international attention. Following Gershwin, the first major composer was Aaron Copland from Brooklyn, who used elements of American folk music, though it remained European in technique and form. Later, he turned to the ballet and then serial music. Charles Ives was one of the earliest American classical composers of enduring international significance, producing music in a uniquely American style, though his music was mostly unknown until after his death in 1954 [15, p. 42-45].

Many of the later 20th-century composers, such as John Cage, John Corigliano and Steve Reich, used modernist and minimalist techniques. Reich discovered a technique known as phasing, in which two musical activities begin simultaneously and are repeated, gradually drifting out of sync, creating a natural sense of development. Reich was also very interested in non-Western music, incorporating African rhythmic techniques in his compositions. Recent composers and performers are strongly influenced by the minimalist works of Philip Glass, a Baltimore native based out of New York, Meredith Monk and others.

In the 1980s, after a period during which self-defined American "classical" composers like John Cage adopted a tonal structure, Philip Glass revived tonality and traditional genres, such as opera in works like Einstein on the Beach. Glass helped create a mass market for "classical" music after audiences outside of the avant-garde had simply generally refused Modernist, atonal music [7, p. 26-31].

A pessimist model, shared by Aldous Huxley and Theodor Adorno, of the classical tradition in Europe was that it peaked with Beethoven. Aldous Huxley believed that subsequent classical music was vulgarized with the re-entry of the unsublimated erotic and Adorno believed that commodification entered with Wagner. "American classical music" flourished much after Beethoven.

The 20th Century also saw important works published by such significant immigrant composers as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg who came to America for a variety of reasons, including political persecution, aesthetic freedom and economic opportunity.

              3 POPULAR MUSIC

Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres having wide appeal, and stands in contrast to art music, and traditional music which was disseminated orally.

The United States has produced many popular musicians and composers in the modern world. Beginning with the birth of recorded music, American performers have continued to lead the field of popular music, which out of all the contributions made by Americans to world culture has been taken to heart by the entire world. The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant influence on global culture, including ragtime, blues, jazz, rock, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul and hip hop.

              3.1 Jazz and swing. Country music

Jazz music was the anthem for the first well-defined American youth culture. Rebelling against the horrors of mechanized warfare and the straitlaced morality of the 19th century, millions of college-age Americans adopted jazz as a way to mark their difference from their parents’ generation.

Admittedly, the ability of youth to indulge in the sorts of up-to-date pastimes portrayed in Hollywood films and novels was strongly affected by their position in society — after all, not everyone could afford luxury automobiles, champagne and top-fight dance orchestras. However, jazz’s attraction as a symbol of sensuality, freedom, and fun does appear to have transcended the boundaries of region, ethnicity, and class, creating a precedent for phenomena such as the swing era, rhythm & blues, and rock ’n’ roll.

Jazz, one of America’s original art forms, emerged in New Orleans, Louisiana, around 1900. New Orleans’s position as a gateway between the United States and the Caribbean, its socially stratified population, and its strong residues of colonial French culture, encouraged the formation of a hybrid musical culture unlike that in any other American city. Jazz emerged from the confluence of New Orleans’s diverse musical traditions, including ragtime, marching bands, the rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, French and Italian opera, Caribbean and Mexican music, Tin Pan Alley songs, and African-American song traditions, both sacred (the spirituals) and secular (the blues) [20, p.152-158].

The New Orleans-born cornetist and singer Louis Armstrong is commonly credited with establishing certain core features of jazz — particularly its rhythmic drive or swing and its emphasis on solo instrumental virtuosity. Armstrong also profoundly influenced the development of mainstream popular singing during the 1920s and 1930s. Armstrong emerged as an influential musician on the local scene in the years following World War I, and subsequently migrated to Chicago to join the band of his mentor King (Joe) Oliver, playing on what are regarded by many critics as the first real jazz records.

In 1924 Armstrong joined Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City, pushing the band in the direction of a hotter, more improvisatory style that helped to create the synthesis of jazz and ballroom dance music that would later be called swing. By the 1930s Armstrong was the best–known black musician in the world, as a result of his recordings and film and radio appearances. Armstrong’s approach was shaped by the aesthetics of early New Orleans jazz, in which the cornet or trumpet player usually held the responsibility of stating the melody of the song being played. Throughout his career Armstrong often spoke of the importance of maintaining a balance between improvisation and straightforward treatment of the melody [1, p. 162-164].

Although jazz was initially regarded by the music industry as a passing fad, its impact on the popular music mainstream represented an important cultural shift. A new subculture emerged from the white upper and middle classes, symbolized by the “jazz babies” or “flappers” (emancipated young women with short skirts and bobbed hair) and “sheiks” (young men whose cool yet sensual comportment was modeled on the film star Rudolph Valentino). This movement involved a blend of elements from “high culture” — the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the paintings of Pablo Picasso, the plays of Eugene O’Neill — and from popular culture, particularly styles of music, dance, and speech modeled on black American prototypes. The idea of the jazz age was promoted by the mass media, especially by Hollywood.

Following on the heels of ragtime, the jazz craze represented the intensification of African-American influence on the musical tastes and buying habits of white Americans. While it did increase opportunities for some black musicians, the world of dance orchestras remained strictly segregated. African-American musicians appeared with increasing frequency in fancy downtown cabarets and hotel ballrooms (although they could enter these places only as employees, not customers). During the late 1920s white jazz fans began to frequent nightclubs in African-American neighborhoods. In New York’s Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, these “black and tan” cabarets offered their predominantly white clientele an array of jazz music. Performing at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, the great jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington developed a style that he called “jungle music,” featuring dense textures and dark, growling timbres.

The most successful dance band of the 1920s was the Ambassador Orchestra, led by Paul Whiteman. Whiteman’s role in the history of jazz is ambiguous. On the one hand, he promoted a watered-down, “safe” version of jazz to the public. On the other hand, Whiteman did make some important contributions, widening the market for jazz-based dance music (and paving the way for the Swing Era), hiring brilliant young jazz players and arrangers, and establishing a level of professionalism that was widely imitated by dance bands on both sides of the color line. He also defended jazz against its moral critics and carried on aspects of the brilliant African-American musician Jim Europe’s vision of a symphonic version of jazz.

The Ambassador Orchestra, which comprised only 10 players in 1920, had expanded to 19 by the end of the decade (five brass instruments, five reed instruments, four violins, and a five-piece rhythm section). In 1927 Whiteman began to hire some of the leading white jazz musicians of the time, including the brilliant cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and the Dorsey brothers (Jimmy and Tommy), who would later achieve success as bandleaders in the Swing Era. At concerts and dances he used a small “band-within-a-band,” made up of the best jazz musicians in his orchestra, to play “hot” music.

Beginning in 1935, a new style of jazz-inspired music called “swing,” initially developed in the late 1920s by black dance bands in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City, transformed American popular music. The word “swing” (like “jazz,” “blues,” and “rock ’n’ roll”) derives from African-American English. First used as a verb for the fluid, “rocking” rhythmic momentum created by well-played music, the term was used by extension to refer to an emotional state characterized by a sense of freedom, vitality, and enjoyment. References to “swing” and “swinging” are common in the titles and lyrics of jazz records made during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Swing music provides us with a window onto the cultural values and social changes of the New Deal era. The basic ethos of swing music was one of unfettered enjoyment, “swinging,” “having a ball.” The audience for swing spanned the social boundaries that separated ethnic groups, natives and immigrants, southerners and northerners, city dwellers and country folk, the working   class,   the   expanding   middleclass, and progressive members of clarinetist educated elite [13, p. 132-138].                               

In a seeming echo of the hype surrounding Paul Whiteman’s public image, the press crowned Benny Goodman the “King of Swing.” However, there are several big differences between the so-called kings of jazz and swing. While Whiteman remained a classical musician all his life, Goodman was in fact a fine (if often under-rated) improviser who studied jazz closely. While Whiteman’s band played syncopated ballroom dance music in a style that borrowed its name from jazz, Goodman’s really was a jazz band, performing music closely modeled on the innovations of African-American musicians, composers, and arrangers. And while Paul Whiteman’s dance orchestras of the 1920s never included musicians of color, Goodman was the first prominent white bandleader to hire black players, beginning with the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1936 and followed by the brilliant young electric guitarist Charlie Christian, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and trumpeter Cootie Williams.

Although big bands relied heavily on arrangements of popular Tin Pan Alley songs, the blues—with its 12-bar structure, three-chord pattern, blue notes, and call-and-response patterns—also remained a mainstay of swing music. Of all the big bands, the one most closely associated with the blues tradition was led by the jazz pianist William “Count” Basie (1904–84). Basie, born in New Jersey, gained much of his early experience as a player and bandleader in Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1920s and early 1930s black dance bands in Kansas City had developed their own distinctive approach to playing hot dance music. Kansas City-style was more closely linked to the country blues tradition than the style of the New York bands. One important influence on the rhythmic conception of the K.C. bands was the boogie-woogie blues piano tradition, in which the pianist typically plays a repeated pattern with his left hand, down in the low range of the piano, while improvising polyrhythmic patterns in his right hand.

Another prominent swing era band was the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974), and widely regarded as one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century. Ellington was an experimenter. He devised unusual musical forms, combined instruments in unusual ways, and created complex, distinctive tone colors.