America's Musical Life: A History

Přední strana obálky
W. W. Norton & Company, 2001 - Počet stran: 976
This book tells the fascinating story of music in the United States, from the sacred music of its earliest days to the jazz and rock that enliven the turn of the millennium. Beginning with the music of Native Americans and continuing with traditions introduced by European colonizers and Africans brought here as slaves, the book reveals how this bountiful heritage was developed and enhanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to produce the music we hear today. As the author points out, American musical activity has taken place in three spheres: the traditional (folk music), which emphasizes continuity and the preservation of community custom; the popular, which seeks most of all to find paying audiences; and the classical (Western art music), which places priority on the musical works themselves. We observe American music making in each of these spheres and see, for the first time, how they have continually crossed over, interacted, and combined to shape the rich tapestry of sounds of the twenty-first century. Most important, the narrative is always set in its proper historical context--we cannot, for instance, truly understand Civil War music without knowing the social and political factors that precipitated the conflict. In juggling political, social, and musical history, the author strikes a happy balance between general background and specific accounts of individual composers, performers, and pieces of music. For the earliest period, this book records activity in all domains of music. We learn of attempts by Europeans to describe the songs they heard Native Americans perform, of sacred music making among the colonists that existed side by side with secular song and dance, of Spanish Catholic missionaries who brought their own music to the New World a full century before the Pilgrims landed, of the first book printed in New England, and of the robust theater and concert life that Colonial America nourished. The nineteenth century saw commercial interests gain a strong foothold, with parlor music making money for performers and publishers, though not always for the composer. Stephen Foster wrote songs that became wildly popular while he himself was scratching out a meager living. There were idealists, such as the quirky Anthony Philip Heinrich, who moved to the "wilds" of Kentucky; show-offs, such as the enormously talented pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk; "serious" academic composers, including John Knowles Paine at Harvard and Horatio Parker at Yale; and talented women composer/performers, including Amy Marcy Cheney, who performed and published as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Thrown into the mix are ethnic musics, slave songs, American musical nationalism, band music, the advent of the phonograph, Tin Pan Alley, and a host of other influences. However wide American tastes ranged before 1900, the twentieth century offered an even broader array of musical genres, encompassing blues, jazz, musicals, movie soundtracks, folk-revival music, swing, classical music, and rock, to name just a few. Musicians discussed in this section include Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the Beatles, the Roberta Martin Singers, Philip Glass--the list is almost endless. Bringing order to this cacophony, this book gives us a highly readable and informative account of this country's rich musical traditions. --Adapted from dust jacket.
 

Obsah

The First Song Native American Music
3
European Inroads Early Christian Music Making
15
From Ritual to Art The Flowering of Sacred Music
29
Old Simple Ditties Colonial Song Dance and Home Music Making
56
Performing By Particular Desire Colonial Military Concert and Theater Music
83
Maintaining Oral Traditions African Music in Early America
102
Correcting the Harshness of Our Singing New England Psalmody Reformed
125
The Nineteenth Century
137
After the Ball The Rise of Tin Pan Alley
471
The Twentieth Century
493
To Stretch Our Ears The Music of Charles Ives
495
Come On and Hear The Early Twentieth Century
524
The Jazz Age Dawns Blues Jazz and a Rhapsody
557
The Birthright of All of Us Classical Music the Mass Media and the Depression
580
All That Is Native and Fine American Folk Song and Its Collectors
597
From New Orleans to Chicago Jazz Goes National
619

Edification and Economics The Career of Lowell Mason
139
Singing Praises Southern and Frontier Devotional Music
156
Be It Ever So Humble Theater and Opera 18001860
173
Blacks Whites and the Minstrel Stage
196
Home Music Making and the Publishing Industry
221
From Ramparts to Romance Parlor Songs 18001865
240
Of Yankee Doodle and Ophicleides Bands and Orchestras 1800 to the 1870s
272
From Church to Concert Hall The Rise of Classical Music
293
From Log House to Opera House Anthony Philip Heinrich and William Henry Fry
314
A New Orleans Original Gottschalk of Louisiana
331
Two Classic Bostonians George W Chadwick and Amy Beach
351
Edward MacDowell and Musical Nationalism
372
Travel in the Winds Native American Music from 1820
387
Make a Noise Slave Songs and Other Black Music to the 1880s
407
Songs of the Later Nineteenth Century
430
Stars Stripes and Cylinders Sousa the Band and the Phonograph
453
Crescendo in Blue Ellington Basie and the Swing Band
641
The Golden Age of the American Musical
664
Classical Music in the Postwar Years
689
Rock Around the Clock The Rise of Rock and Roll
714
Songs of Loneliness and Praise Postwar Vernacular Trends
736
Jazz Broadway and Musical Permanence
755
Melting Pot or Pluralism? Popular Music and Ethnicity
778
From Accessibility to Transcendence The Beatles Rock and Popular Music
799
Trouble Girls Minimalists and The Gap The 1960s to the 1980s
813
Black Music and American Identity
837
Epilogue
853
Notes
861
Bibliography
897
Credits
925
Index
931
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