The Progression of American Music in the 20th Century
"It is America's music - born out of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between happy and sad, country and city; between black and white and men and women; between the Old Africa and the Old Europe - which could only have happened in an entirely new world." (Ward 2) Jazz was truly the music of America. It is a mixture of the musical roots of all the people in America at that time. It borrows European classical themes, using harmonious melodies and peculiar scales, which allows it to be one of the only improvisational art forms allowing the artist to literally make up music on the spot. "Many composers, both European and American, introduced aspects of jazz into their concert music. Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Milhaud at one time or another imitated the rhythms of jazz, its typical harmonies, or its improvisational manners of playing the trumpet, saxophone, or percussion." (Hanning 542) Through all that it fuses the rhythmic percussion and backgrounds of African music, incorporating many gospel themes and complicated drum patterns, even often borrowing Latin styles. Prior to jazz, ragtime music, which used complicated chord structures with confusing rhythms and tempos, was very popu
The stereotypical blues song tells a story of woe, explaining why the performer is singing the blues in the first place. " (Brody/Campbell 33) Combined with jazz, blues helped form one of the most important types of American music. They would usually smash all their equipment on stage and then trash their hotel room afterwards, all in the name of rock. tactics - most notoriously, the My Lai massacre - and the deception of government and military leaders became public, public sentiment turned against the war. Many bands of the 80s harnessed the awesome power of the synthesizer to make the "sounds of the future" as it was known back then, more commonly known today as New Wave. His lyrics might tell us what exactly he's saying, but it was his overall delivery of the message that lets a person feel his pain. There was no 'liquor jazz' or 'heroin bebop,' but there was acid rock. East coast performers like Notorious B. The older generation viewed their younger counterparts with contempt, thinking they seemed to be out of control and bent on destroying all the core American values. Rock and roll and much of the postwar rhythm and blues had begun to break down this hierarchy by making the rhythm section and background riffs more prominent. "Exciting, but also a little scary - frightening. During World War II, swing and boogie music became very popular with the younger generation and even had its own lingo, kind of like hip-hop music today. It can be traced back to Elizabethan English, and by the middle of the 1800s in the United States it was used in much the same way it is today.
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Acceptance Essays
