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Chapter 16: Introduction to the Region.
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Chapter 16: Introduction to the Region • European ancestors of shape note singers, such as those described at the beginning of this chapter, immigrated to North America for a variety of reasons: to escape religious persecution, to seek their fortunes, to find a new beginning outside the restrictive social opportunities they left behind. • This new continent was in some ways a blank slate for these immigrants, who had the opportunity to develop entirely new styles and genres. These new sounds developed as folk music and popular music that frequently drew upon the rich influences brought by African Americans. • Indigenous people had already lived in North America for many thousands of years, developing their own cultural traditions and music. However, the music of the indigenous Americans did not have the same influence on European Americans as did that of the African Americans. • The United States and Canada have felt the musical influence of immigrants from nearly every corner of the planet.
Chapter 16: Elements of European and African Musical Traditions in North America • The most identifiable characteristics of European-American music: the use of harmony, notation, diatonic modes, a twelve-tone tuning system, and so on are the same as in Europe. And also included are those features that best represent African and native influences. • Here are some distinctively North American characteristics found in many types of music: • Rhythmic vitality • “Blue” notes • Alternating improvisations in ensemble music
Chapter 16: Early European American Music • Congregations often sang these psalms through a process called lining out, in which the minister would sing a line that was then repeated by the congregation. • To simplify the learning of these new songs, called hymns, anthems, or spirituals, they would teach them using solfege, a system in which each pitch in the scale is associated with a particular syllable.
Chapter 16: Early European American Music • Through the nineteenth century, musicians usually reserved instruments for accompanying dances rather than songs, often in a faster, more rhythmically complex manner than instrumental dances in England or Ireland. English and Irish reels became hoedowns and breakdowns, vigorous group dances featuring elaborate instrumental figurations.
Chapter 16: Instruments of North America • The banjo became possibly the mostidentifiable North American instrument after slaves and white minstrels developed it. • Like the banjo, the guitar was popular with Spanish sailors and slave-traders and, probably through them, both slave owners and slaves in America. The Spanish introduced it independently in the Southwest, where its portability made it an iconic companion to the cowboy. • The pedal steel guitar is a variation of a regular guitar, in that, it is flat and played horizontally. It can be electronically amplified. • The mountain dulcimer is a plucked or strummed zither with frets over a distinctive curved hourglass-shaped resonator. • A new variation of the European zither called the autoharp was invented in Germany. On this instrument, pressing down different buttons will result in dampers being raised from certain combinations of strings, so that when the player strums all of the strings, a chord will sound.
Chapter 16: Country Music • In the 1920s, the guitarist and singer Maybelle Carter drew on techniques from Anglo-American and African-American musicians to create a unique and highly influential style of playing. • Recording companies then labeled this sound “hillbilly music,” but by the 1940s, it was known as “country music,” a category that, by then, included many genres: • String bands consisting of banjo, guitar, fiddle, and, later, bass (European double bass of the violin family) and playing traditional dance tunes and accompanied singers. • Singing cowboys, who were popular in recordings and Hollywood movies, often in small vocal ensembles like those of gospel groups.
Chapter 16: Country Music Chapter 58: Characteristics of Traditional Latin American Music • Western swing, a fusion of country and big band jazz originating in Texas. • Honky-tonk, another genre from Texas that featured the electric slide steel guitar. • Bill Monroe created one of the most enduring country music genres when he put together a string band that focused on quick tempos and instrumental virtuosity. This eventually became known as bluegrass.
Chapter 16: The Folk Music Revival Chapter 58: Characteristics of Traditional Latin American Music • As commercial country music established itself as a large industry in the 1930s, the folk music of the common people did not disappear. • Especially in rural areas, singers in the old styles could still be found, although new topics became more relevant: stories of unemployment, civil rights, and corruption replaced old English legends. • A tradition of social protest runs through American folk songs from nineteenth-century abolitionist songs to ballads protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Chapter 16: Music of Indigenous Americans • Many songs used by Native Americans came to them while having a “vision.” • But not all of their songs have this spiritual incarnation. Many also included lullabies, game songs, social songs, war chants and so on. • Americans across the continent saw themselves as one strand amid a web of relationships in the natural and spiritual worlds, and even the most mundane song was often an expression of those relationships or communication across worlds. Thus the spirit world was ingrained in their music.
Chapter 16: Elements of Indigenous American Traditional Music • Short monophonic songs • Use of vocables • Limited use of instruments • Rhythm often follows words • Functional music • Commonality
Chapter 16: Indigenous American Musical Instruments • Rattles: Idiophones are the most common instruments among Indigenous Americans, nearly always used to accompany dance. Rattles are made from gourds, sewn hides, or baskets with seeds or pebbles inside. • Drums: Drums are used throughout the continent to accompany singing, sometimes in the form of frame drums and other times with deeper resonators. • Flute: Although not common, the duct flute was found throughout the Plains areas and some other regions in the nineteenth century, where it was a personal (rather than ritual) instrument.
Chapter 16:Indigenous American Regions • Arctic North America • Long and dark winter months offer many opportunities for indoor social games and rituals in which music plays a key role, including game songs, songs for juggling, courting dances, and the important ritual known as the drum dance. • To many indigenous Americans, singing, rather than being an activity distinct from speech, is a heightened form of it. • Songs often take the form of prose, where repetition may be varied to accommodate a text or may be absent altogether. Rhythms often follow the flow of the prose, creating songs of great rhythmic complexity and subtlety.
Chapter 16:Indigenous American Regions • Northwest Coast • As with Arctic groups, the winter is a time of important social interactions. • Among these rituals is the potlatch, an extended time of feasting, dance, and music given by an individual to gain prestige or to celebrate important life events. • The ceremonial songs, unusual for indigenous Americans, are sometimes nondiatonic and often have a jagged, descending contour.
Chapter 16:Indigenous American Regions • California and the Great Basin • A distinctive characteristic of the indigenous People of the California coast is a melodic contour known to musicologists as the Rise. • Southwest • the traditional songs of the Navajo (pronounced Navaho) have jagged, disjunct contours and high, wide ranges. • Pueblo • The songs accompanying special rituals are among the most complex of the indigenous traditions of North America. They have wide-ranging melodies that might mix different scales and rhythm.
Chapter 16:Indigenous American Regions • Plains and Subarctic • Traditional music was often a spiritual gift, a connection to one’s soul, and therefore a very personal expression. • Phrases are often initiated with a cry-like rapid ascent, followed by a gradually sloping descent in pitch sung with a tense, nasal vocal timbre. • Eastern • One of the most distinctive characteristics of the people of the Eastern hills and woodlands is responsorial and antiphonal (two groups alternating) forms.
Chapter 16: Pan-Indian Music • In 1890, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, who had a “vision” of dance and singing, taught many other Indigenous American groups, what he had heard and seen. • This was an attempt to bring all of the indigenous groups together and help them bring back their ancestors. White people nicknamed this dance the Ghost Dance. • Despite the elimination of the Ghost Dance from the Wounded Knee massacre, intertribal powwows took place. • This helped to create a Pan-Indian identity, along with the Native American Church. • The music of this Church has been associated with the taking of peyote but also resembles the songs of the Great Basin and Plains regions.
Chapter 16: Contemporary Indigenous American Music • Because the Native American flute was found among many indigenous groups of the Plains, the Great Basin, and the southeast, it became a popular instrument in intertribal powwows and experienced a revival in the 1960s. • Every fall in the United States, Native American Music Awards (nicknamed the Nammies) are given in categories of Native American jazz, country, church music, New Age, pop, and rock.
Chapter 16: African- American Music • In the mid-19th century, music scholars discovered new forms of rhythmic music performed by slaves. Some of these musical forms included: • Ring shout • Spiritual • The forms of the songs lent themselves to repetition by the dancers, as well as a group of back-up singers known as “basers,” who would respond to and heterophonically accompany the lead singer. • The melody was distinctive as well using pitches that would become known as blue notes.
Chapter 16: African- American Music • Each of these characteristics—distinctive rhythms, responsorial forms, microtonal pitch inflections—are clearly related to African music. • The most common instruments available to African Americans, apart from the voice, were the violin, guitar, and banjo, and these instruments often combined to form a string band. • White performers were imitating this characteristic rhythmic style as early as the 1840s. • Minstrel shows, popular theater that combined music and skits imitating blacks often in degrading stereotypes, first became widespread in this period. They nevertheless became one of the principal platforms for the popularization of new songs and dances by such composers as Stephen Foster (1826–1864).
Chapter 16: Wind Bands and Ragtime • Although European in origin, an orchestra made up primarily of aerophones, known as a wind band or brass band. They had become a widely popular fixture in hundreds of American communities in the period following the Civil War. • In addition to military marches, composers such as John Philip Sousa adapted popular songs, art music, and ballroom dances to the distinctive instrumentation. • At the same time, African-Americans like Scott Joplin were developing a new style of music with heavily syncopated rhythms. Some of these rhythms were so “ragged” that the term was used to describe the new instrumental form: ragtime.
Chapter 16: Early Jazz • What was termed a “musical riot” by some music critics in 1917, what with the clarinet, trombone, cornet, piano and drums bursting forth in loud conversation, was really the beginnings of a new style of music called jazz. • The syncopations remained but now in a seemingly unruly improvised polyphony. The well-mannered tunes of popular ragtime melodies were replaced with complex runs of notes idiomatic to “lead” instruments such as the cornet. • The notes growled, they bent, they slid, they enthusiastically collided. • The birthplace for this new music was New Orleans.
Chapter 16: Early Jazz • To create an improvised part that fit with all the others in this polyphonic context, follows the harmonic progression, and still allows room for the player’s expression and artistry requires careful rehearsal and a knowledge of the theory of harmony. • This was the New Orleans style, later known as Dixieland. • The melody instruments or “front line”—often a trumpet or cornet, clarinet or saxophone, and trombone—would weave this polyphony around the so-called rhythm section: the harmonic oom-pah of ragtime piano, double bass or tuba, drums, and perhaps banjo.
Chapter 16: Blues • Along the Mississippi River docks at the turn of the twentieth century, stevedores still sang out wordless melodies known as hollers, that preserved African yodels as well as blue note inflections also found in the church spirituals and work songs. • Existing ballads and other songs used these inflections, and by the beginning of the twentieth century this style coalesced as the blues. • The 12-bar blues is an AAB structure.
Chapter 16: Gospel Music • In the period following the Civil War, many churches adopted new songs with messages of consolation and optimism, focusing on the gospel books (that is, those books about the lifetime of Jesus) of the Christian Bible. • This new gospel music also distanced itself from the austere harmonies of the shape note singing masters. Mid-nineteenth-century musical reformers led by the composer Lowell Mason sought to replace shape note and other folk practices with full and sweet European harmonies. • Gospel songs allowed the leader in responsorial forms to create much more elaborate and expressive solos. These new sounds were popular outside the church as well as within.
Chapter 16: Big Band to Bebop • One of the major hurdles for jazz composers was to be able to incorporate improvisation into a group larger than Dixieland bands. • Such big bands might have multiple wind instruments of a single type, so each one would have to have a written-out part in order to harmonize with the others. • By the 1930s, big bands represented the standard jazz ensemble. They were popular both in concert and as accompanists to social dances, especially the new style known as swing. • After World War II, new smaller ensembles emerged, preferring intimate night clubs to large dance halls, and intricate solos to elaborate orchestrations, creating a new style known as bebop.
Chapter 16: Big Band to Bebop • While retaining the form of a lead followed by alternating solos, the bebop style emphasized great speed and virtuosity. • With this change jazz became more of an art music than a popular music, which came to appeal to a relatively select group of connoisseurs rather than a mass audience.
Chapter 16: Rock and Roll • Since at least the 1940s, blues notes, prominent bass patterns, and blues harmonic progressions had been used not just in the traditional slow soulful songs that gave blues their name but also in danceable, up-tempo tunes sometimes called jump blues or rhythm and blues. • Elvis Presley was the first to become internationally famous as a singer of what was being called a new genre: rock and roll. • Although early rock and roll was mostly a new name for white musicians performing what had been an African-American style, by the 1960s, the genre had developed the distinctive characteristics that would define it up to the present day: • The prominent use of electric guitar • Small ensembles • Emphasis on singing
Chapter 16: Rock and Roll • Strong beats within a four-beat cycle • Creative use of technology • Emotional, powerful styles • Simiplified harmonic progressions • A wide range of genres were created to appeal to an ever growing audience with different tastes. • Some of these genres include: • progressive rock • hard rock and heavy metal • punk rock and new wave • thrash metal and grunge
Chapter 16: From Soul to Rap • In the 1960s, the term soul music came to replace rhythm and blues as the genre evolved. • In the 1970s, James Brown’s emphasis on texture and rhythm would sometimes halt the fl ow of harmonic progression completely, creating the new style known as funk. • In urban black neighborhoods in cities, the creative focus was not on a live band but rather an MC or DJ, who would creatively juxtapose songs using multiple LP turntables. • As DJs presided over these block parties, some would also speak, or “rap,” rhythmic rhymes to the dancers. • The term hip-hop has since been used as a general term for African-American styles with these elements.
Chapter 16: Electronica • Many musicians in the 1970s created their own breaks for dance clubs, aided by the availability of inexpensive recording technology and electronic synthesizers. • Dance music of the late 1970s discarded rock’s insistent emphasis of beats two and four and instead planted a powerful bass drum on every beat (sometimes called “four on the floor”). This music became known as disco. • Since the wide availability of personal computers in the 1980s, electronica composers have been able to create their works entirely independently of bands, singers, and expensive recording studios.
Chapter 16: The Shrinking Musical Planet • The “world music” label of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to “worldbeat” and “global pop” and a new set of musical questions. The age of the Internet has opened up an unprecedented opportunity to exchange information, including music, throughout the planet. • new global access to information can also lead us to consider more carefully how to respect music and its makers as we are conscious of its cultural and social context.
