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.
