Music

Scott Joplin

  • “King of Ragtime”
  • single most important person in ragtime
  • ragtime: irregular rhythm, synocopation
    • developed in late 1800s
    • precursor of jazz
  • pianist and composer
  • started the rage for piano ‘rags’ with the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’
  • wrote down roots music to help it gain acceptance
  • his music’s liveliness came from the vitality he encountered as an itinerant pianist

New Orleans Jazz

Women playing jazz

  • 1890s: new style based on African & European tradtions, ragtime, and improvisation
  • brass bands dominate the music scene
  • simpler harmonies than ragtime
  • Buddy Bolden is the first to play new style
  • Dixieland: white bands playing in the New Orleans style

Jelly Roll Morton

  • one of the founders of jazz
  • fused Carribean dance and song, black spirituals, blues, ragtime,
  • white operetta, and popular songs
  • recordings in Chicago during the 1920s
    • ‘Sidewalk Blues’
    • ‘Black Bottom Stamp’
  • band: Red Hot Peppers

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

  • trumpet player of legendary tone, stamina, and ferocity
  • transformed jazz from an ensemble art to solo expression
  • toured Africa, Australia, Europe, the Far East-nicknamed ‘the ambassador of jazz’

Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931)

  • first great white jazz musician
  • influenced by Armstrong, who he met in Chicago
  • self-taught coronetist-not as technically proficient as some
  • compositions based on Debussy and Ravel
  • unequaled ability to phrase/shape tunes

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

  • unequalled impact on development of jazz and popular music
  • learned by imitation
  • professional debut at age 17
  • ‘jungle style’ based on African rhythms
  • led the Duke Ellington Orchestra
    • able to compose/arrange music specifically for individual styles of his musicians
    • collaborated with Billy Strayhorn
  • composed ‘Black, Brown, and Beige’ (1943)
    • history of black people in America
  • awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
  • composed more than 5,000 works

Billie Holiday


  • developed a jazz singing style with emotion, eloquence, & rhythm
  • inspired by Louis Armstrong
  • signature song: “Strange Fruit” which protested lynchings in the South

Charles Ives

  • 1st major figure in concert music who was educated entirely in the US
  • advocated freeing American music from European tradition
  • Symphony #1-composed in 1887
    • began in one key, ended in another
    • traditional teachers disapproved
  • best years were 1889-1913
  • extremely American consciousness
    • various bases including
      • Emerson & Thoreau
      • urban and rural landscapes
      • poetry
      • political events, such as the sinking of the Lusitania
      • folksongs
  • music relatively unknown until 1939
  • won the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1947)

Aaron Copland (born 1900)

  • Organ Symphony (1924) 1st large scale work
  • advanced style, dissonant harmonies
    fused American jazz and dance music w/ conventional orchestration
  • ‘Americana’ pieces
    • ballet score
      • ‘Billy the Kid’-inspired by the famous outlaw, used cowboy tunes
      • ‘Rodeo’-imitated cowboy gathering with hoedown music
      • ‘Appalachian Spring’-used Shaker hymns and traditional American melodies
  • blended American folk song, poetry, and dance to portray patriotism
    • ‘Lincoln Portrait’ (1942) was inspired by passages from Lincoln’s letters and speeches
    • ’12 Poems of Emily Dickinson’ (1950)
  • Visited the Soviet Union, introduced the rest of the world to American music


George Gershwin

  • wrote Broadway hits with his brother Ira
  • later, tried classical composition
    • ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (1924)
      • composed in only 3 weeks
      • famous opening with glissando on clarinet
    • ‘An American in Paris’ (1928)
    • ‘Porgy and Bess’
      • controversial opera (accused of racism)
      • contains some of the best songs he ever wrote


Dance

Masquerade Balls

  • opportunity for the rich to flaunt their wealth and creativity
  • reached new heights of excess in Newport
  • Vanderbilt’s 1883 ball marked his arrival into elite New York society
  • favorite characters: Louis XV, Louis XIV, Marie Antionette, Cleopatra
  • fashionable to wear tiaras in imitation of royalty

Cotillions

  • chaperons required for unmarried women (as in Europe)
  • elaborate country dances including dinner and ballroom dancing
    • favors given to favorite partners-a mark of social standing
      • normally, favors were flowers or ribbons
      • in Newport, favors typically cost $10,000 apiece
  • women had to be escorted to dinner by a male partner
    • if they did not have a partner to take them, they had to leave the cotillion

Ragtime

Irene Castle

  • “sounded like anarchy”
  • sets of dance craze: turkey trot, bunny hug, grizzly bear, etc.
    • athletic and bouncy, cheek-to-cheek with partner
  • dances though to be uncouth and vulgar
  • made more respectable by Vernon and Irene Castle
    • respectable American couple who took up dancing in Paris
    • Parisian society loved them, so New Yorkers accepted them as well
    • opened a dancing school and night club in the USA
    • introduced the tango, the one-step, and the Castle Walk

Charleston

  • ‘respectable’ society thought it would usher in social chaos
    • “Any lover of the beautiful will die rather than be associated with the Charleston! It is neurotic! It is rotton! It stinks! Phew, open the windows”

Foxtrot

  • choreographed by Harry Fox and simplified by Oscar Duryea
  • became most popular ballroom dance

Dance during WWI

  • women have more freedom
  • high kicks, crossing arms, swinging knees require higher hemlines
  • Latin rhythms such as the tango and rumba are popularized

Depression

  • people find relief in movies starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
  • big bands perform swing
    • inspires lindy hop
      • hopping steps, syncopated swings, under-arm turns
  • boogie-woogie-a jitterbug variation on the lindy hop
  • samba and other Latin American rhythms popularized
    • at the 1939-1940 Brazilian pavilion at the World’s Fair
    • in Carmen Miranda’s Hollywood musicals

Blues

  • improvised music derived from plantation songs
  • secular counterpart to spirituals
  • W.C. Handy first publishes blues songs
  • blues and ragtime both influence the emergence of jazz
    • in the 1920s blues becomes a sub-genre of jazz
      • Mamie Smith
      • Ma Rainey
      • Bessie Smith, “The Empress of the Blues”

Harlem Stride

  • school of piano playing during the 1920s
  • closely linked to ragtime (which is already fading away), but jazzier
  • James Johnson was the “Father of Stride Piano”

Swing

Swing Parade

  • pre-composed music of white dance bands mixes with improvisational big-band jazz
  • creates the “pop music of the 1930s”
  • swinging jazzy dance music

Be-Bop

  • jazz variant best suited to small ensembles
  • Latin rhythms, unpredictability, syncopation, often agressive
  • intentionally complex, to exclude “undesirable” players

Study question : What is the relationship between ragtime and jazz?