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Aug 20, 2018 · In fewer than three hundred pages of cogent prose, Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative...
- Composition
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- Composition
Mar 27, 2014 · America’s power over the 21st century music industry would definitely be far less if it were not for hip hop. In February, the IRMA (Irish Recorded Music Association) showed that fifty per cent of the top ten singles in Ireland were from America, while Irish music took up a mere ten per cent.
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- Popular music
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Every epoch since the Renaissance has had an art form that seems to become a kind of universal language, one dominant artistic form and language that sweeps the world and becomes the common property of an entire civilization, from one country to another. Italian painting in the 15th century, German music in the 18th century, or French painting in the 19th and early 20th centuries—all of these forms seem to transcend their local sources and become the one essential soundscape or image of their time. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, are local and more.
At the beginning of the 21st century, and seen from a worldwide perspective, it is the American popular music that had its origins among African Americans at the end of the 19th century that, in all its many forms—ragtime, jazz, swing, jazz-influenced popular song, blues, rock and roll and its art legacy as rock and later hip-hop—has become America’s greatest contribution to the world’s culture, the one indispensable and unavoidable art form of the 20th century.
The recognition of this fact was a long time coming and has had to battle prejudice and misunderstanding that continues today. Indeed, jazz-inspired American popular music has not always been well served by its own defenders, who have tended to romanticize rather than explain and describe. In broad outlines, the history of American popular music involves the adulteration of a “pure” form of folk music, largely inspired by the work and spiritual and protest music of African Americans. But it involves less the adulteration of those pure forms by commercial motives and commercial sounds than the constant, fruitful hybridization of folk forms by other sounds, other musics—art and avant-garde and purely commercial, Bach and Broadway meeting at Birdland. Most of the watershed years turn out to be permeable; as the man who is by now recognized by many as the greatest of all American musicians, Louis Armstrong, once said, “There ain’t but two kinds of music in this world. Good music and bad music, and good music you tap your toe to.”
Armstrong’s own career is a good model of the nature and evolution of American popular music at its best. Beginning in impossibly hard circumstances, he took up the trumpet at a time when it was the military instrument, filled with the marching sounds of another American original, John Phillip Sousa. On the riverboats and in the brothels of New Orleans, as the protégé of King Oliver, Armstrong learned to play a new kind of syncopated ensemble music, decorated with solos. By the time he traveled to Chicago in the mid-1920s, his jazz had become a full-fledged art music, “full of a melancholy and majesty that were new to American music,” as Whitney Balliett has written. The duets he played with the renowned pianist Earl Hines, such as the 1928 version of “Weather Bird,” have never been equaled in surprise and authority. This art music in turn became a kind of commercial or popular music, commercialized by the swing bands that dominated American popular music in the 1930s, one of which Armstrong fronted himself, becoming a popular vocalist, who in turn influenced such white pop vocalists as Bing Crosby. The decline of the big bands led Armstrong back to a revival of his own earlier style, and, at the end, when he was no longer able to play the trumpet, he became, ironically, a still more celebrated straight “pop” performer, making hits out of Broadway tunes, among them the German-born Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” and Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly.” Throughout his career, Armstrong engaged in a constant cycling of creative crossbreeding—Sousa and the blues and Broadway each adding its own element to the mix.
By the 1940s, the craze for jazz as a popular music had begun to recede, and it began to become an art music. Duke Ellington, considered by many as the greatest American composer, assembled a matchless band to play his ambitious and inimitable compositions, and by the 1950s jazz had become dominated by such formidable and uncompromising creators as Miles Davis and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Beginning in the 1940s, it was the singers whom jazz had helped spawn—those who used microphones in place of pure lung power and who adapted the Viennese operetta-inspired songs of the great Broadway composers (who had, in turn, already been changed by jazz)—who became the bearers of the next dominant American style. Simply to list their names is to evoke a social history of the United States since World War II: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, and many others. More than any other single form or sound, it was their voices that created a national soundtrack of longing, fulfillment, and forever-renewed hope that sounded like America to Americans, and then sounded like America to the world.
Every epoch since the Renaissance has had an art form that seems to become a kind of universal language, one dominant artistic form and language that sweeps the world and becomes the common property of an entire civilization, from one country to another. Italian painting in the 15th century, German music in the 18th century, or French painting in the 19th and early 20th centuries—all of these forms seem to transcend their local sources and become the one essential soundscape or image of their time. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, are local and more.
At the beginning of the 21st century, and seen from a worldwide perspective, it is the American popular music that had its origins among African Americans at the end of the 19th century that, in all its many forms—ragtime, jazz, swing, jazz-influenced popular song, blues, rock and roll and its art legacy as rock and later hip-hop—has become America’s greatest contribution to the world’s culture, the one indispensable and unavoidable art form of the 20th century.
The recognition of this fact was a long time coming and has had to battle prejudice and misunderstanding that continues today. Indeed, jazz-inspired American popular music has not always been well served by its own defenders, who have tended to romanticize rather than explain and describe. In broad outlines, the history of American popular music involves the adulteration of a “pure” form of folk music, largely inspired by the work and spiritual and protest music of African Americans. But it involves less the adulteration of those pure forms by commercial motives and commercial sounds than the constant, fruitful hybridization of folk forms by other sounds, other musics—art and avant-garde and purely commercial, Bach and Broadway meeting at Birdland. Most of the watershed years turn out to be permeable; as the man who is by now recognized by many as the greatest of all American musicians, Louis Armstrong, once said, “There ain’t but two kinds of music in this world. Good music and bad music, and good music you tap your toe to.”
Armstrong’s own career is a good model of the nature and evolution of American popular music at its best. Beginning in impossibly hard circumstances, he took up the trumpet at a time when it was the military instrument, filled with the marching sounds of another American original, John Phillip Sousa. On the riverboats and in the brothels of New Orleans, as the protégé of King Oliver, Armstrong learned to play a new kind of syncopated ensemble music, decorated with solos. By the time he traveled to Chicago in the mid-1920s, his jazz had become a full-fledged art music, “full of a melancholy and majesty that were new to American music,” as Whitney Balliett has written. The duets he played with the renowned pianist Earl Hines, such as the 1928 version of “Weather Bird,” have never been equaled in surprise and authority. This art music in turn became a kind of commercial or popular music, commercialized by the swing bands that dominated American popular music in the 1930s, one of which Armstrong fronted himself, becoming a popular vocalist, who in turn influenced such white pop vocalists as Bing Crosby. The decline of the big bands led Armstrong back to a revival of his own earlier style, and, at the end, when he was no longer able to play the trumpet, he became, ironically, a still more celebrated straight “pop” performer, making hits out of Broadway tunes, among them the German-born Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” and Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly.” Throughout his career, Armstrong engaged in a constant cycling of creative crossbreeding—Sousa and the blues and Broadway each adding its own element to the mix.
By the 1940s, the craze for jazz as a popular music had begun to recede, and it began to become an art music. Duke Ellington, considered by many as the greatest American composer, assembled a matchless band to play his ambitious and inimitable compositions, and by the 1950s jazz had become dominated by such formidable and uncompromising creators as Miles Davis and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Beginning in the 1940s, it was the singers whom jazz had helped spawn—those who used microphones in place of pure lung power and who adapted the Viennese operetta-inspired songs of the great Broadway composers (who had, in turn, already been changed by jazz)—who became the bearers of the next dominant American style. Simply to list their names is to evoke a social history of the United States since World War II: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, and many others. More than any other single form or sound, it was their voices that created a national soundtrack of longing, fulfillment, and forever-renewed hope that sounded like America to Americans, and then sounded like America to the world.
Serious dance hardly existed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. One remarkable American, Isadora Duncan, had played as large a role at the turn of the century and after as anyone in the emancipation of dance from the rigid rules of classical ballet into a form of intense and improvisatory personal expression. But most of Duncan’s work was done and her life spent in Europe, and she bequeathed to the American imagination a shining, influential image rather than a set of steps. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, throughout the 1920s, kept dance in America alive; but it was in the work of the choreographer Martha Graham that the tradition of modern dance in the United States that Duncan had invented found its first and most influential master. Graham’s work, like that of her contemporaries among the Abstract Expressionist painters, sought a basic, timeless vocabulary of primal expression; but even after her own work seemed to belong only to a period, in the most direct sense she founded a tradition: a Graham dancer, Paul Taylor, became the most influential modern dance master of the next generation, and a Taylor dancer, Twyla Tharp, in turn the most influential choreographer of the generation after that. Where Graham had deliberately turned her back on popular culture, however, both Taylor and Tharp, typical of their generations, viewed it quizzically, admiringly, and hungrily. Whether the low inspiration comes from music—as in Tharp’s Sinatra Songs, choreographed to recordings by Frank Sinatra and employing and transforming the language of the ballroom dance—or comes directly off the street—as in a famous section of Taylor’s dance Cloven Kingdom, in which the dancer’s movement is inspired by the way Americans walk and strut and fight—both Taylor and Tharp continue to feed upon popular culture without being consumed by it. Perhaps for this reason, their art continues to seem of increasing stature around the world; they are intensely local yet greatly prized elsewhere.
A similar arc can be traced from the contributions of African American dance pioneers Katherine Dunham, beginning in the 1930s, and Alvin Ailey, who formed his own company in 1958, to Savion Glover, whose pounding style of tap dancing, know as “hitting,” was the rage of Broadway in the mid-1990s with Bring in’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk.
In many countries, the inclusion of sports, and particularly spectator sports, as part of “culture,” as opposed to the inclusion of recreation or medicine, would seem strange, even dubious. But no one can make sense of the culture of the United States without recognizing that Americans are crazy about games—playing them, watching them, and thinking about them. In no country have sports, especially commercialized, professional spectator sports, played so central a role as they have in the United States. Italy and England have their football (soccer) fanatics; the World Cups of rugby and cricket attract endless interest from the West Indies to Australia; but only in the United States do spectator sports, from “amateur” college football and basketball to the four major professional leagues—hockey, basketball, football, and baseball—play such a large role as a source of diversion, commerce, and, above all, shared common myth. In watching men (and sometimes women) play ball and comparing it with the way other men have played ball before, Americans have found their "proto-myth," a shared common romantic culture that unites them in ways that merely procedural laws cannot.
Sports are central to American culture in two ways. First, they are themselves a part of the culture, binding, unifying theatrical events that bring together cities, classes, and regions not only in a common cause, however cynically conceived, but in shared experience. They have also provided essential material for culture, the means for writing and movies and poetry. If there is a “Matter of America” in the way that the King Arthur stories were the “Matter of Britain” and La Chanson de Roland the “Matter of France,” then it lies in the lore of professional sports and, perhaps, above all in the lore of baseball.
Baseball, more than any other sport played in the United States, remains the central national pastime and seems to attract mythmakers as Troy attracted poets. Some of the mythmaking has been naive or fatuous—onetime Major League Baseball commissioner Bartlett Giamatti wrote a book called Take Time for Paradise, finding in baseball a powerful metaphor for the time before the Fall. But the myths of baseball remain powerful even when they are not aided, or adulterated, by too-self-conscious appeals to poetry. The rhythm and variety of the game, the way in which its meanings and achievements depend crucially on a context, a learned history—the way that every swing of Hank Aaron was bound by the ghost of every swing by Babe Ruth—have served generations of Americans as their first contact with the nature of aesthetic experience, which, too, always depends on context and a sense of history, on what things mean in relation to other things that have come before. It may not be necessary to understand baseball to understand the United States, as someone once wrote, but it may be that many Americans get their first ideas about the power of the performing arts by seeing the art with which baseball players perform.
Although baseball, with the declining and violent sport of boxing, remains by far the most literary of all American games, in recent decades it has been basketball—a sport invented as a small-town recreation more than a century ago and turned on American city playgrounds into the most spectacular and acrobatic of all team sports—that has attracted the most eager followers and passionate students. If baseball has provided generations of Americans with their first glimpse of the power of aesthetic context to make meaning—of the way that what happened before makes sense out of what happens next—then a new generation of spectators has often gotten its first essential glimpse of the poetry implicit in dance and sculpture, the unlimitable expressive power of the human body in motion, by watching such inimitable performers as Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan—a performer who, at the end of the 20th century, seemed to transcend not merely the boundaries between sport and art but even those between reality and myth, as larger-than-life as Paul Bunyan and as iconic as Bugs Bunny, with whom he even shared the motion picture screen (Space Jam [1996])—and Lebron James, who, as a giant but nimble man-child of age 18, went straight from the court at St. Vincent–St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, into the limelight of the National Basketball Association in 2003, becoming the youngest player in the league to win the Rookie of the Year award and score 10,000 career points on his way to becoming the game’s most dominant player.
Art is made by artists, but it is possible only with audiences; and perhaps the most worrying trait of American culture in the past half century, with high and low dancing their sometimes happy, sometimes challenging dance, has been the threatened disappearance of a broad middlebrow audience for the arts. Many magazines that had helped sustain a sense of community and debate among educated readers—Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Look—had all stopped publishing by the late 20th century or continued only as a newspaper insert (Life). Others, including Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, continue principally as philanthropies.
As the elephantine growth and devouring appetite of television has reduced the middle audience, there has also been a concurrent growth in the support of the arts in the university. The public support of higher education in the United States, although its ostensible purposes were often merely pragmatic and intended simply to produce skilled scientific workers for industry, has had the perhaps unintended effect of making the universities into cathedrals of culture. The positive side of this development should never be overlooked; things that began as scholarly pursuits—for instance, the enthusiasm for authentic performances of early music—have, after their incubation in the academy, given pleasure to increasingly larger audiences. The growth of the universities has also, for good or ill, helped decentralize culture; the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, for instance, or the regional opera companies of St. Louis, Mo., and Santa Fe, N.M., are difficult to imagine without the support and involvement of local universities. But many people believe that the “academicization” of the arts has also had the negative effect of encouraging art made by college professors for other college professors. In literature, some people believe, for instance, this has led to the development of a literature that is valued less for its engagement with the world than for its engagement with other kinds of writing.
Yet a broad, middle-class audience for the arts, if it is endangered, continues to flourish too. The establishment of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the early 1960s provided a model for subsequent centres across the country, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., which opened in l971. It is sometimes said, sourly, that the audiences who attend concerts and recitals at these centres are mere “consumers” of culture, rather than people engaged passionately in the ongoing life of the arts. But it seems probable that the motives that lead Americans to the concert hall or opera house are just as mixed as they have been in every other historical period: a desire for prestige, a sense of duty, and real love of the form all commingled together.
The deeper problem that has led to one financial crisis after another for theatre companies and dance troupes and museums (the Twyla Tharp dance company, despite its worldwide reputation, for instance, and a popular orientation that included several successful seasons on Broadway, was compelled to survive only by being absorbed into American Ballet Theatre) rests on hard and fixed facts about the economics of the arts, and about the economics of the performing arts in particular. Ballet, opera, symphony, and drama are labour-intensive industries in an era of labour-saving devices. Other industries have remained competitive by substituting automated labour for human labour; but, for all that new stage devices can help cut costs, the basic demands of the old art forms are hard to alter. The corps of a ballet cannot be mechanized or stored on software; voices belong to singers, and singers cannot be replicated. Many Americans, accustomed to the simple connection between popularity and financial success, have had a hard time grasping this fact; perhaps this is one of the reasons for the uniquely impoverished condition of government funding for the arts in the United States.
First the movies, then broadcast television, then cable television, and now the Internet—again and again, some new technology promises to revolutionize the delivery systems of culture and therefore change culture with it. Promising at once a larger audience than ever before (a truly global village) and a smaller one (e.g., tiny groups interested only in Gershwin having their choice today of 50 Gershwin Web sites), the Internet is only the latest of these candidates. Cable television, the most trumpeted of the more recent mass technologies, has so far failed sadly to multiply the opportunities for new experience of the arts open to Americans. The problem of the “lowest common denominator” is not that it is low but that it is common. It is not that there is no audience for music and dance and jazz. It is that a much larger group is interested in sex and violent images and action, and therefore the common interest is so easy to please.
Yet the growing anxiety about the future of the arts reflects, in part, the extraordinary demands Americans have come to make on them. No country has ever before, for good or ill, invested so much in the ideal of a common culture; the arts for most Americans are imagined as therapy, as education, as a common inheritance, as, in some sense, the definition of life itself and the summum bonum. Americans have increasingly asked art to play the role that religious ritual played in older cultures.
Sep 25, 2024 · The dominant strain in 21st-century U.K. hip-hop is grime, a genre that drew on dancehall, house, and drum and bass influences to produce a uniquely British sound that was, at least in part, a reaction against American trends.
May 1, 2015 · Drawing inspiration from studies of organic and cultural evolution, we view the history of pop music as a ‘fossil record’ and ask the kinds of questions that a palaeontologist might: has the variety of popular music increased or decreased over time?
- Matthias Mauch, Robert M. MacCallum, Mark Levy, Armand M. Leroi
- 2015
Explain ways that technology and media have influenced music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Identify important trends in twenty-first-century classical music. Adapted from “Making Music Modern” from Sound Reasoning. by Anthony Brandt. Edited by Francis Scully. What makes music “modern”?
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Nov 14, 2022 · Her research strikingly shows how the conservatism appearing in 1990s pop music still resonates in the 21 st century. Nevertheless, reducing resilience to a neoliberal product provides an incomplete and biased understanding of the context of world politics.
