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Chapters:
Chapter 1: North American Indian MusicThe chapter emphasizes the variety of musics produced by the many North American Indian cultures and the essential role music—intimately associated with dance, celebration, games, work, or prayer—plays in their lives. Songs may be accompanied by sound instruments, some of which are described. The repetition of musical phrases is compared with the repetition of geometric designs in basketry and weaving. The chapter concludes with references to contemporary developments among Native American musicians, including those reflecting Western classical and/or popular traditions.
British and African sources have profoundly affected American folk music. This chapter describes traditional British folk ballads and broadsides and American ballads based on them. African work songs and traditional African performance customs also are considered.
Chapter 3: The Colonial, Revolutionary, and Federal PeriodsMusic was an important part of the religious training of American Indians by zealous French and Spanish missionaries. Of more far-reaching and long-lasting influence on the early American experience, however, was the music of Protestant settlers, especially the Pilgrims and Puritans. The singing school movement produced the first American composers, who wrote much of their own teaching materials. The Mennonites and Moravians also profoundly affected the music of America.
Music to accompany work, entertainment, or dancing became important early in the eighteenth century, and music publishing became an important business. Concert music and musical theater performances drew enthusiastic audiences in several American cities.
Chapter 4: Populist Music of the Nineteenth CenturyAt the turn of the nineteenth century, a wave of evangelical revival movements furthered the popularity of the music of the First New England School composers, especially in rural America. Shape-notes proved a popular and long-lasting system of music notation. City folk responded to Lowell Mason’s efforts to “reform” music, and many of Mason’s hymns remain popular to this day. Stirring spirituals resounded at religious camp meetings, and songs and dances of various ethnic heritage enriched American vernacular music. Minstrelsy became a wildly popular form of entertainment.
Stephen Foster wrote minstrel songs as well as sentimental parlor ballads and patriotic songs. Many Civil War songs, by Foster and others, remain well known today, as do John Philip Sousa’s stirring marches.
Chapter 5: Early Concert MusicEarly in the nineteenth century, a few American composers developed interest in a nationalistic American music. Anthony Philip Heinrich wrote programmatic pieces referring to Indian themes or to the American wilderness. William Henry Fry and George Bristow sought performances of their own and other American orchestral works, but aroused little interest in symphonic music, especially that composed by Americans. Theodore Thomas, however, made the symphony orchestra a popular American institution.
Chapter 6: American Concert Music Comes of AgeLate in the nineteenth century, Americans produced musical compositions in all of the large forms. While nationalism thrived in Europe, however, most American composers tried to make their music sound European. The Second New England School composers, and especially Edward MacDowell, attracted admiration here and abroad.
Chapter 7: The Rise of Popular CultureEven as American composers of art music emulated venerable European traditions, vernacular music developed characteristic American traits. The Gay Nineties witnessed two phenomenal movements in American music: the rise of ragtime and the domination of the popular music industry by Tin Pan Alley.
Chapter 8: Country Western and Urban Folk MusicThe ballads and instrumental music of remote hill people began to enter the realm of popular music early in the twentieth century. Since then, country musicians have reflected a wide variety of influences, each with a distinctive flavor but generally sharing an unaffected, down-to-earth manner of delivery.
Urban folk musicians performed folk-like music in a polished, suave manner designed to appeal to popular music fans. Many of their songs protested against particular topics of current social interest.
The twelve-bar blues, which evolved from simple folk like solo songs, became increasingly sophisticated and urbanized, eventually influencing every kind of American music. Early New Orleans jazz musicians played improvisations on hymns and other given tunes, evolving a style of jazz that moved north to Chicago and then New York, meanwhile developing important regional characteristics. Sweet and symphonic jazz pleased a public skeptical of the hot rhythms and virtuosic techniques of more serious jazz musicians, while jazz pianists played boogie-woogie and stride.
By the 1930s, big bands were entertaining large dance audiences with music skillfully arranged to sound improvised. A decade later bebop, often called the first modern jazz, restored the early creativity, originality, and virtuosity of jazz while taking the music to new harmonic and rhythmic levels. Since then many jazz musicians have created jazz more suited for careful listening than to accompany dancers. About 1950, cool jazz reacted against the dissonance and complexity of bebop, but by the end of that decade hard bop musicians rebelled against the intellectual “white” sounds of cool jazz.
In recent decades, interaction between jazz and classical musicians has been close and productive. Third stream combined classical music and jazz without mixing them. Charles Mingus and other jazz musicians explored techniques of jazz composition, today among the most important fields of American concert music.
Free jazz declared independence from most established tenets of jazz and emphasized collective improvisation. Some jazz musicians have fused their sounds with rock, while others have integrated foreign sounds into their music.
Chapter 12: Latin Popular MusicFrom the time the Argentinian tango intoxicated Broadway audiences in 1911, Latin dances, especially from the Caribbean, Brazil, and Mexico, have enriched American popular, theater, and concert music. The bomba, rumba, mambo, and many other Latin dances enjoyed high popularity during the “dance decades” of the thirties and forties. Salsa and reggae number among the still-popular musics reflecting the complexities and enrichments this wide accumulation affords.
Various social and economic conditions fostered a sense of independence and rebellion among the youth of the 1950s. Rock and roll, which developed from a combination of rhythm and blues and country-western styles, appealed to young listeners, both black and white. Urban folk songs protested against discrimination, authoritarianism, and eventually the war in Vietnam. Despite the popularity of Motown music, some black performers rebelled at the success of white musicians’ cover recordings of black hits and sought to redeem the ideals of rhythm and blues.
Chapter 14: Popular Music since 1970The Rolling Stones and other British rockers having revitalized rock music, jazz and art music combined with rock to produce new styles. Funk, disco, punk, and new wave attracted fans. Rap, beginning in the mid-seventies, evolved to become a dominant style, vying with black gospel for sales and popularity.
Musical theater became increasingly popular in America before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Most American musical shows between the Civil War and World War I had a variety format with little if any plot, but imported European operettas paved they way for the first American operettas, written by sophisticated European composers.
The Broadway musical combined the integrated story of an operetta with the elements of entertainment found in variety shows. George M. Cohan introduced the musical comedy and kept it alive into the 1920s, when other composers replaced him. American musical theater has become ever more sophisticated, and the distinctions between opera, operetta, and musical are ever less clear.
From the earliest days of commercial films, live music introduced and accompanied movies. With the advent of sound films, the film score emerged as a new form of dramatic music, underpinning the movie’s emotional effects while serving innumerable practical functions as well.
In an opera, dialogue usually is sung in recitative. Two significant operas of the 1920s, both by white composers for black casts (Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts) were intended for a Broadway audience. More recently, as opera has assumed a vital role in American musical theater, operas have addressed various aspects of current and past American life.
Chapter 18: Experimental Music: RevolutionThree musical pioneers initiated the experimental movement in American music. Charles Ives challenged traditional concepts of the meaning of music. Henry Cowell expanded the resources of the piano and explored Eastern sounds and ideas. Edgard Varèse, considering music simply as organized sound, sought an infinite variety of new sounds for his compositions. John Cage invented the prepared piano as one means of achieving new sounds.
Chapter 19: Mainstream Concert Music: EvolutionIn the 1920s, Aaron Copland led the way to France to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. Copland and other important mainstream composers adapted traditional music forms and techniques to compose twentieth-century music, often of a nationalistic character, thereby finally establishing an audience for serious American music.
Chapter 20: The Avant-Garde after 1950Rhythm and timbre having replaced melody and harmony as the elements of primary interest for many American composers, experimentalists altered traditional instruments and invented new ones to produce unusual sounds as well as rhythms of unprecedented complexity. Electronic synthesizers and tape techniques assumed greater importance among composers seeking control of their music, while John Cage and others explored aleatory.
Chapter 21: American Concert Music Since 1950Recent years have experienced rapid and significant changes in the visual arts, literature, theater, and dance as well as in music, all of the arts developing close interrelationships. Foreign influences and sophisticated electronic techniques continue to expand the meanings and concepts of art.