AMERICAN MUSIC

Music Time Periods

Music Time Periods

This paper will discuss two musical eras (popular music and jazz music) and it will summarize the characteristics of two pieces of work.

Jazz Music (1900-1950)

Jazz is approximately one in 1900 in the southern United States created, initially mainly by African Americans brought forth music that has evolved in many ways, often in the crossover with other musical traditions and genres. Meanwhile, musical forms of jazz are counted, which are often only loosely connected yet with little or Afro-American tradition (Joachim, 1981).

The Jazz is built on a mostly European sound system, and uses European melody and harmony, musical forms (such as song form), as well as European instruments (wind instruments, piano, guitar, bass, large and small drum, cymbals). A native of Europe but in the jazz music culture is used in its own way. Central is a special feeling for movement-related rhythm (Swing, Groove), intense, spontaneous interaction (including call and response) and one based on the vocal expression of tone. These elements, especially the rhythm, can be music to the perception of African music cultures back (Alyn, 2007).

Jazz developed in the latter part of the 19th century from black work songs, field shouts, sorrow songs, hymns, and spirituals whose harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic elements were predominantly African. Because of its spontaneous, emotional, and improvisational character, and because it is basically of black origin and association, jazz has to some extent not been accorded the degree of recognition it deserves. European audiences have often been more receptive to jazz, and thus many American jazz musicians have become expatriates. Jazz grew up at the turn of the twentieth century, when the myth of Africa prevailed. That myth was of a “primitive other” who lived out all that was repressed in white society. Jazz history begins with the consequences of this prejudice, the discrimination that resulted from the imposition of Jim Crow laws in New Orleans, and the subsequent cultural clash between black Creoles and other blacks (Schuller, 1991).

The jazz acts (similar to some African and Indian forms of music) mostly simple in comparison with the "architecture of the large form" in American concert music with the increasingly complex large-scale organization of their compositions. The importance of improvisation in jazz and the Groove is in accordance with the musical arrangement very embedded in the course of time, generally with an open end. Jazz is therefore largely serial (daisy chain) organized and therefore tends to be modular, smaller design units.

Characteristics

Syncopation

If there is any single characteristic of jazz that sets it apart from other musical forms, it is a tendency to break from the regular and expected flow of music into something new and unexpected. Ragtime and early jazz was marked by syncopation, a style that might put a beat where a rest in the music might have been expected (and vice versa), or stressing a beat where you might otherwise think that beat would go unstressed (Joachim, 1981).

Improvisation

In keeping with that idea of unexpected changes in the ...