Reading: Music in America: Jazz and Beyond Flashcards
Cultivated Music
In America, genres and styles of music that were brought from Europe and subsequently nurtured here through formal training and education.
Vernacular Music
Music that was developed in America outside the European concert music tradition.
Fuging Tunes
A simple anthem based on a hymn, with a little counterpoint.
Who is the first American composer?
William Billings
Minstrel Show
A type of variety show popular in nineteenth-century America, performed in blackface.
Call and Response
In African and early African American music, a style in which a phrase by a leading singer or soloist is answered by a larger group or chorus, and the process is repeated again and again.
Spiritual
Religious folk song, usually among African Americans (called “Negro spiritual” in the 19th century).
Jazz
A major African American performance style that has influenced all twentieth-century popular music.
Break
In jazz, a brief solo improvisation between song phrases.
Beat Syncopation
In jazz, the fractional shifting of accents away from the beats.
Backbeat
Displacing the beat so the accent is on a different beat than usual.
Ragtime
A style of American popular music around 1900, usually for piano, which led to jazz.
Blues
A type of African American vernacular music, used in jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and other styles of popular music.
Blues, like most folk songs, are ___ songs.
Strophic.
Where does the phrase twelve-bar blues come from?
A blues melody consists of three four bar phrases.
What is the form of the blues?
aab.
If You Ever Been Down by Sippie Wallace
- Accompanied by Louis Armstrong and herself on piano.
- Instruments play short breaks in between her lines.
Gospel Music
Genre of African American choral church music, associated with the blues.
New Orleans Jazz
- Informal, low-budget, casual art.
- Small bands (6-8 players).
- Collective improvisation.
Big Bands
The big jazz bands (10 to 20 players) of the 1930s and 1940s.
Swing
A type of big-band jazz of the late 1930s and 1940.
How did swing compensate for the lost spontaneity of New Orleans Jazz?
Variety of tone colour and instrumental effects.
What did jazz arrangers do?
Arranged current songs for bands. Demonstrated technical ingenuity and verve.
Conga Brava by Duke Ellington
- Latin American music appropriated by jazz.
- Jazz melody cut off by still and mournful conga melody with Latin beat.
Typical forms of Tin Pan Alley songs:
aaba or abab.
Bebop
A jazz style of the 1940’s.
Bebop was a reaction to…
Big band and the distortion of style.
Out of Nowhere by Charlie Parker
- Improvised.
- Irregular, discontinuous sounding rests.
- Solos strike a balance between fantastic elaboration and return to a more modest starting point.
Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
- Fusion jazz (mix between rock and jazz).
- Rhythmic patterns against quiet jazz drum background.
- More elaborate patterns.
- Slower tempo.
Operetta
A nineteenth-century type of light (often comic) opera, employing spoken dialogue in between musical numbers.
Musical Comedies (Musicals)
American development of operetta, involving American subjects and music influenced by jazz or rock.
West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein
- Based on Romeo and Juliet.
- Story, score, and dances.
- Cha-cha, Meeting Scene, and Cool.
- Thematic transformation of cha-cha melody.
- Fugue dance in Cool.
