 |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||
The influence of the music of African-Americans has most set the United States apart from that of Western Europe. While African Americans were looked down on by the majority of European-Americans and their culture was denigrated as low class, if not semi-barbaric as late as the 1930s, the music was wildly popular with the general public. The African banjo (a stringed instrument) became common in many styles of US music in the 19th century. Stephen Foster, by far the most popular American composer of that century, incorporated many African American rhythmic notions into his songs. The minstrel show was very popular, and was the first example of American music widely exported abroad. Perhaps the most important characteristic of African music, which survives to the present, is call and response, in which the singer(s) present a lyrical phrase and the audience issues some sort of reply. This characteristic has been present in African American music from spirituals to hip hop, and can be found in white-dominated country, rock and other genres.
Interestingly, some West-African melodies, such as "Lucy Long" and "Old Dan Tucker", were retained by white country musicians decades after they fell out of the repertory of the descendants of the Africans who brought the tunes over.
Prior to the late 19th century, U.S. music was dominated by occasional songs of great popularity. Exampes include "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Dixie," "Jump Jim Crow," "Oh Susana," "Oh My Darling, Clementine," "The Old Folks at Home," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Just Before the Battle, Mother," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." African-American spirituals were also popular, and were even played for Queen Victoria in 1871; she is said to have been moved to tears by the performance.
The upper-class during the colonial era promoted ensembles who played serenades, feldparthien and divertimenti, such as those composed by Mozart and Haydn. Natural horns and bassoons provided harmonic support for the melodic line, played by clarinets and oboes. Thomas Jefferson suggested this instrumentation for the U.S. Marine Band, and asked fourteen Italian-American musicians to form the nucleus of that influential group, and thus these ensembles were the origin of the American brass band tradition, which flourished in the 19th century, having moved from upper-class entertainment to that of the common folk.
Opera was also popular; the first opera to be performed in the US was Giovanni Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona in 1790. In 1883, sixty-five Italian-American musicians formed the orchestra at the newly-opened Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, which would become an important venue for opera in the country.
Western European opera and classical music provided the underpinnings for modern American music. Many claim that the first form of distinctly American music was jazz, which arose as a fusion of African and European forms. African music provided the incessant rhythms and emotional qualities, while Europe contributed a focus on melody and harmony. The result was well-suited for both popular consumption (through simplified genres like ragtime and swing) as well as artistic works of great passion (eventually including avant-garde styles like bebop).
Main article: Native American music
Native Americans had no indigenous traditions of classical music, nor a secular song tradition. Their music was mostly spiritual in nature, performed usually in groups in a ritual setting important to their religion; for some groups, music was the primary means of worship, and song was regarded as a direct link to the divine. Though many Native Americans claim their songs are unchanged since ancient times, there is no proof of thus (due to a lack of written records). Many songs were improvised.
For a long time, and continuing into the present, many American beginner's guides to learning the piano contain a song purported to be Native American in origin. In reality, these songs have little or no relationship to actual Native American styles, and are merely a vehicle to introduce left-handed repeated harmonic fifths or the minor mode in the melody.
It was not until the 1890s that Native American music began to enter the American establishment. At the time, the first pan-tribal cultural elements, such as powwows, were being established, and composers like Edward MacDowell and Henry F. B. Gilbert used Native themes in their compositions. It was not until the much later work of Appalachian folk music
The Appalachian Mountains have long been a center for cultural innovation, in spite of only sparse settlement by Native Americans and Europeans alike. Due to complex geologic reasons, the mountains and subranges were difficult to cross and included ridges of uninhabitable quartz mixed with valleys of soil unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, immigration of Europeans and their African slaves tended to be southern in direction, along the Piedmont area, and the Appalachian region was populated by poor Europeans, many of Irish or Scottish descent. This settlement occurred primarily from 1775 to 1850.
Celtic folk tunes and ballads continued evolving from their distant roots along the Appalachians, eventually forming the major basis for jug bands, country blues, hillbilly music and a hodge-podge of other genres which eventually became country music. These folk tunes adopted characteristics from multiple sources, including British broadside ballads (which switched their themes from love to a distinctly American preoccupation with masculine work like mining or sensationalistic disasters and murder), African folk tunes (and their lyrical focus on semi-historical events) and minstrel shows and music halls. Popular ballads included "Barbara Allen" and "Black Is the True Color of My Love's Hair". The banjo was also introduced, having gone through numerous geographic movements since its invention by the Arabians and subsequent travel across Africa, the Atlantic and throughout the Americas.
Main article: Fiddle
A Scottish fiddler named Neil Gow is usually credited with developing (during the 1740s) the short bow sawstroke technique that defined Appalachian fiddling. This technique was altered during the next century, with European waltzes and polkas being most influential. Square dances, based on the cotillion, and cakewalks, an African American imitation of white dances and the Virginia Reel arose during the 19th century.
Main article: Lined-out hymnody
Lined-out hymnody, a religious music style perpetuated by the Old Regular Baptists, Primitive Baptists, et al., is often studied and classified as folk music. See Old Regular Baptist, Lined-Out Hymnody
The religious singing traditions of New England played an important role in the early evolution of American music. Beginning with the Pilgrim colonists, who brought the First New England School
In the 18th century, Americans composed a number of their own hymns, often based off the Old Testament. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, played a major role in revivalist hymnody after a trip to Georgia in 1735 at the invitation of James Oglethorpe. Compared with the older songs, Wesley and other new composers wrote with a simple structure. Rural farmers and workers expanded on these structures, creating complex songs which some musical conservatives railed against to no avail. It was in this context that a wave of itinerant singing masters, including William Billings, arose, creating hymns that remain standard across the country. This field was called the First New England School. Following Billings' pioneering footsteps were Supply Belcher, Andrew Law, Daniel Read, Jacob Kimball, Jeremiah Ingalls, John Wyeth, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan and Shape note
New England hymns quickly spread south, facilitated by the invention of the shape note notation. Andrew Law was the prime mover of shape note, which was a system of notation using different symbols for each of the four syllables used (in the fa-so-la-mi tradition). Later, three more symbols were added to correspond to the modern solfege.
In 1801, William Smith and William Little published The Easy Instructor, a textbook for choral teachers, using the shape-note system, which helped popularize the technique, at least in the South and Appalachia. The end of popularity in New England can be credited to Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings. Shape-note's popularity lived on in the south, and many of the hymns there composed remain well-known today. Some have been preserved due to the efforts of collections like William Walker's Southern Harmony (1835) and Ananias Davisson's Kentucky Harmony (1817).
Main article: Sacred Harp
Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King published The Sacred Harp in 1844, using the shape note tradition as a basis for Sacred Harp music.
The great urban centers of the mid-Atlantic included cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, and it was there that European classical traditions were best represented. Philip Phile, Johann Friedrich Peter and Alexander Reinagle were prominent composers of the era, though Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Philadelphia, remains the most well-known. One of his compositions, "Lowell Mason
Perhaps the most influential early composer was Lowell Mason. A native of Boston, Mason campaigned against the use of shape-note notation, and for the education in standard notation. He worked with local institutions to release collections of hymns and maintain his stature. Opposed to the shape-note tradition, Mason pushed American music towards a European model.
Main article: Music of Pennsylvania
Rural Pennsylvania in the colonial era was home to religious minorities like the Quakers, as well as important Moravian and Lutheran communities. While the Quakers had few musical traditions, Protestant churches frequently made extensive use of music in worship J. F. Peter emerged from the Moravian tradition, while Conrad Beissel (founder of the Ephrata Cloister) innovated his own system of harmonic theory. The Lutheran traditions of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buxtehude, Johann Pachelbel and Walther were propagated in Pennsylvania, and the city of Bethlehem remains a center of Lutheran musical traditions today.
Main article: African American music
Brought to the United States as early as 1619, African slaves were from a variety of tribes from West Africa. They spoke hundreds of languages; some came from rival tribes, or isolated communities with little connection to anyone else until the arrival of the slave traders. Slaves brought with them work songs, religious music and dance, and a wide variety of instruments, including kalimba, xylophone, flutes and rattles. Perhaps the most important characteristic, however, was the call-and-response vocal style, in which a singer and the audience trade lines back-and-forth. This practice lended itself well to the burgeoning New England hymn tradition, and the two fields began commingling early in the nation's history.
The most distinctive component of African music, however, is the focus on the rhythm. In this respect, African folk styles are far more complex than anything developed anywhere else in the world. African music is usually polyrhythmic, made by a wide variety of percussion instruments, both pitched and unpitched, using numerous kinds of natural materials. Polythythms were imported along with slaves to the New World, where it has found its way to genres ranging from African American gospel to pop-swing and rock and roll.
Main article: Spiritual music
In the 1830s, a Great Awakening of fervent Christianity began, leading to popular spiritual song traditions. During this period, the country was undergoing a religious revival that centered around outdoor worship gatherings (camp meetings), where hymns (camp songs) were sung. Though the African-Americans, still mostly enslaved, were not generally allowed to participate, they watched, and were inspired to use African vocal styles and rhythms with the English hymns. These songs were called Negro spirituals. While many were songs praising God or Jesus Christ, others contained coded messages to fellow slaves and rhetoric or symbolically demanding freedom. Spirituals like "Steal Away to Jesus" communicated an impending escape, while "Let My People Go" and "Go Down Moses" overtly concerned Biblical Hebrew slaves as a symbol for African slaves.
Musically, spirituals were a descendent of New England choral traditions mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Shape-note hymns from the First New England School spread south, and were popular there long after New England had moved on. The hymns were simplified to the extreme, until they were nothing more than a tune and some religious lyrics; interacting with African American slave songs, the result was the spiritual tradition.
The 1840s saw the banjo, long-denigrated as a "slave instrument" unsuitable for white folks, popularized by the minstrel show. In 1867, Slave Songs from the Southern United States was published, and the songs were popularized by students from Fisk University in Nashville. Other important collections included Slave Songs of the United States (1867) and Negro Singer's Own Book (1846).
Main article: Blues
Following the Civil War, a form of song developed with some distinctive characteristics that may be of ancient origin, perhaps related to the call-and-response format. These songs consisted of three 4-bar phrases. The first two were identical and described a problem, beginning on the implied tonic and subdominant harmonies respectively. The third phrase indicates a reaction to the problem described and begins on the implied dominant harmony. All three phrases cadence on a sustained tonic occupying the third and fourth bar.
Main article: Jazz
Jazz was a fusion of African rhythms with European melodies and harmonies, resulting in a highly-variable, diverse genre that came to include both popular styles like swing, popularized in the 1920s to the 1940s, as well as avant-garde art music like bebop and cool jazz, which catered to intellectuals, especially blacks associated with the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. Early jazz was associated primarily with New Orleans, and a local, Cajun influence can be seen in the genre's instrumentation and form, which developed in the 19th century.
Main article: Ragtime
In the 1890s, more sophisticated African-American styles of the cakewalk and then ragtime music started to become popular. Originally associated primarily with poor African Americans, ragtime was quickly denounced as degenerate by conservatives and the classically trained establishment. In spite of the denigration, however, the style continued to gain widespread popularity and became mainstream; it was adopted by Tin Pan Alley at the start of the 20th century.
Ragtime shared similarities with both blues and jazz, the two rival forms of African American music at the time. It was primarily piano-based, and could be performed by a single person (more like the blues) or by an entire orchestra (more like jazz). Scott Joplin was the most famous ragtime musician.
Main article: Minstrel
In the 1820s, genteel English-styled ballads were popular in urban areas. Many of the songwriters, however, were looking for something new, and were connected with the growing abolitionism movement, which sought to abolish slavery; these included most famously the Hutchinson Family Singers. The 1840s saw increased awareness of African American musical traditions, culminating in the publication of the first collection of African American songs, The Negro Singer's Own Book (1846). Some songwriters, including John Hill Hewitt and Stephen Foster, sought to incorporate what was then called Ethiopian music into their compositions. Songs with simple melodies and delicately-incorporated ornamentations like suspensions and appogiaturas were popular, including "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" and "My Darling Clementine". These songs, especially those by Foster, could be considered the beginning of Banjo
The banjo entered the American national consciousness in the middle of the 19th century. Though originally only four-stringed, a five-stringed banjo was standard by the 1840s. The instrument is widely used in many kinds of African American folk music, and is likely descended from one or more African instruments. It is now a major element of popular music, especially country and bluegrass.
Main article: Blackface
A component of minstrel shows, blackface performances included white (or, more rarely, African American) singers dressed in bizarre costumes, their faces marked black with burnt cork, singing in a caricature of African American Vernacular English. Composers included E. P. Christy, Daniel Decatur Emmett and Thomas Rice; the latter's "Jump Jim Crow" was an immensely popular song, so well-known and widely-played that foreign leaders mistook it for the American national anthem. Other songs typically performed in blackface included "Camptown Races", "Old Dan Tucker", "Dixie", "Old Folks at Home", "Old Black Joe", "Turkey in the Straw" and "Brass band
The early 1850s saw a growth in the development of brass band music. Brass bands were made up of brass and woodwinds, especially the E-flat cornet and soprano saxhorn. Many of these bands were associated with an Army regiment, while others were associated with the workers at a particular factory. Employers urging their employees to form bands were common in the United Kingdom at the time, and the practice spread through immigration to the US. These factory bands' concerts were probably rowdy affairs, with musicians and listeners dancing wildly with no spatial split between them. British bands were all amateurs, but America produced many professional ensembles as well.
John C. Linehan described the spirit of American brass bands, and specifically the Fisherville Cornet Band, formed immediately before the Civil War:
Besides the English tradition, German, Italian and Irish immigrants also had a major impact on the American brass band tradition. Forty-two professional German musicians, for example, formed the Seventh Regiment Band, one of the most famous brass bands during the 1850s and the only exclusively regimental band of the period; the bandleader, who went by the name Noll, used brass and reed instruments in duo proportion. German bandleader Friendrich Wilhelm Wieprecht was also influental, collecting full scores for his compilation of instrumentations of popular works, für die jetzige Stimmenbesetzung. Instruments included the bassoon, contrabassoon, bass tuba, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piccolo, oboe, French horn, saxhorn, drums and cymbal. Wieprecht was recognized at the time as a key figure in the reorganization of the Prussian military bands in meticulous, regimented detail and strict rules of conduct, rehearsal and musicianship. The Italian influence on American brass bands is perhaps best demonstrated by Francis Scala, a Naples-born immigrant who led the U.S. Marine Band. He was a clarinetist who always placed his instrument prominently in his band, and is largely responsible for popularizing the instrument in brass bands. Irish bandleader Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was also influential, having introduced a wide range of reed instruments as well as developing instrumentation that allowed a large wind ensemble to approximate the effects of a full orchestra.
With the coming of the Civil War, the popularity of brass bands continued to grow. Promises of a famous band being attached to a regiment were used to induce recruitment, and the brass band tradition flourished. Following the war, huge Military march
Military style march music enjoyed great popularity, and most towns had brass bands that performed them. The most popular of the US march composers were John Philip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, and Karl King.
Main article: Music of immigrant communities in the United States
Main article: Music of Louisiana
The city of New Orleans has long been a center for cultural innovation, and the pre-eminent city of the Gulf Coast. It is fitting, then, that the first major American classical composer was from New Orleans -- Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk achieved fame in Europe, the first American composer to do so, and is well-remembered for his fusion of themes from ethnic folk dances in Louisiana into his piano compositions.
With French-Canadians from Acadia, white settlers of Scotch-Irish, French and Spanish descent, Native Americans and an abundance of slaves from the West Indies, New Orleans and the surrounding areas was a cultural melting pot.
Main article: Eastern European music
Starting in the 1880s, Eastern European Jews immigrated to the US in large numbers. They brought with them klezmorim, or musicians who played "Klezmer music" at weddings and other community events. Soon, the United States became the international center for klezmer music, and it became a major influence on jazz and other genres.
Into the 20th century, immigration from Italy, Ireland, Armenia, China, Germany, Finland and elsewhere was widespread. Most of these immigrant communities kept their folk traditions alive. Some produced musicians of great stature, such as Ukrainian fiddler Pawlo Humeniuk in the 1920s and 30s. Much later, Armenian oud player Richard Hagopian also became popular at home and abroad. The Slovenian polka master, Frankie Yankovich, has had perhaps more crossover success than these other stars; his period of greatest popularity was in the 1940s.
Main article: Tex-Mex and Tejano
Texas was part of Mexico until the mid-1800s, after the Mexican War, and its Mexican-American inhabitants played a mixture of ranchera, bolero and polka music called conjunto. To some extent an American version of accordion-led Mexican Tin Pan Alley
In the later decades of the 19th century, the music industry became dominated by a group of publishers and song-writers in New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley's representatives spread throughout the country, buying local hits for their publishers and pushing their publisher's latest songs. Song demonstrators were fixtures at department stores and music stores across the country, and traveling song demonstrators made circuits of rural areas. The industry was driven by the profits from the sales of sheet music. A piano was considered a must in any middle-class or higher home. Major 19th century Tin Pan Alley hits included "Only a Bird in a Guilded Cage" and "After the Ball Is Over".
Bice'waan Song is a recording from the Library of Congress, collected by Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche and published in 1897. The singer is George Miller, who was probably born in about 1852. It was described as: "The true love-song, called by the Omaha Bethae waan, an old designation and not a descriptive name, is sung generally in the early morning, when the lover is keeping his tryst and watching for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship and are sometimes called Me-the-g'thun wa-an - courting songs. . . . They were sung without drum, bell or rattle, to accent the rhythm, in which these songs is subordinated to tonality and is felt only in the musical phrases. . . . Vibrations for the purpose of giving greater expression were not only affected by the tremolo of the voice, but they were enhanced by waving the hand, or a spray of artemesia before the lips, while the body often swayed gently to the rhythm of the song (Fletcher, 1894, p. 156)."
|
||||
| View Live Article | This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License | |
||
