Music
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Music has always been a part of African American culture. It was originated by enslaved Africans in the southern United States and was composed, played and sung in several forms. In African music, in both its original and its various Americanized forms, different beats are frequently superimposed, creating powerful polyrhythms that are perhaps the most striking and moving element of African music. Music was used as a way of expressing feelings and to get through the workday in the fields. When African Americans as slaves were not allowed to speak, they would say what they were feeling through a song. The music created and performed by black people was ragtime, jazz, and the blues.
Ragtime, a form of music that is played on the piano, emerged in the 1890s , with musical roots tied to plantation life. Ragtime pieces were not accompanied by lyrics and were not meant to be sung; it combined a sixteenth-note-based syncopated melody with the form and feel of a march. On the piano this was achieved by the left hand playing a steady “boom-chic” bass and chord pattern and the right hand playing the syncopated tune. Playing in this syncopated style was called “ragging”, which is probably the origin of the term “ragtime”. The ragtime era dominated the music scene of the first decade of the 20th century, featuring ragtime, blues, and stride piano, which was the foundation for novelty piano, modern jazz, and blues rock. Ragtime was the first music before jazz, which began as dance music in popular music settings before it was published as sheet music for the piano. Scott Joplin, the most famous ragtime composer, was the creative genius of this form of music. He learned to play on a piano purchased by his mother from her earnings as a maid; he also received free lessons from a local German piano teacher, which included elements of music theory. In 1899, Joplins first rag was published, ÐOriginal Rags. Ragtime was one of the early musical styles that contributed to the development of jazz.
Jazz started out with a mixture of many types of music, and its roots date back to the 1880s with African origins. Jazz is a great form of art, which musicians are making contributions to everyday. It is a way for musicians to express their emotions and views. Jazz gradually replaced ragtime in popularity in the early twentieth century. Unlike ragtime, jazz was mostly improvised, not composed, and it was not confined to the piano. Jazz incorporated African and European musical elements drawn from such diverse sources as plantation bands, minstrel shows, riverboat ensembles, and Irish and Scottish folk tunes. The first jazz bands emerged in and around New Orleans where they played at parades, funerals, clubs, and outdoor concerts. These bands relied on brass, reeds, and drums; whereas, black musical groups of earlier times used pipes, banjos, fifes, and the violin. The tunes of New Orleans jazz were usually based on well known pieces such as marches, church melodies, ragtime pieces, popular songs, or especially the 12-bar blues. The jazz bands rarely used written music; in fact, most of the musicians were self-taught and could not read music. A new player was told to just listen for a while, and then play what you feel. Like folk music, this type of jazz was handed down through oral tradition, not by a written one. Creating jazz music is like the Three Witches in Macbeth, everyone tends to throw their ingredients into the pot in varying proportions and call the resulting stew Ðjazz. Slavery, a European musical notation, the American Civil War, the Ðcall and response techniques in African music, Ðlining out in Christian Church practices, all played their part in the development of what we have come to call Ðjazz. By the 1940s jazz has developed into many styles of music. There were Bop, Traditional, Swing, Dixieland, and Latin influences of jazz. It is becoming more and more popular these days. Jazz has such a great mixture of rhythm and beats that jazz will never cease to exist. In the 21st century, there are still many jazz musicians. These musicians are so talented that they can take a song that is meant to be lyrical and turn it into jazz, which is a soothing and relaxing form of music.
The Blues first emerged as a distinct type of music in the late 1880s. Blues music is from isolated areas of the south where poor black people composed and sang songs about their lives and experiences. Blues singers accompanied themselves on anything from a guitar, to a harmonica, to a washboard. They played in juke joints, which were also known as rural night clubs, at picnics, lumber camps, and urban night clubs. By 1920, the blues was well along in its evolution. It also was a form of music that drew on African and American musical elements as well as on European styles. But most of all, it was music that represented the experiences of African Americans and the creativity of the exceptional musicians who developed and performed the music. The blues consist of a three-line, twelve-bar pattern. Each line of the verse corresponds to four measures of the music; there are two complete melodic statements, each ending on the tonic, followed by the melodic “response”, which also ends on the tonic. Spirituals, work songs, seculars, field hollers and arhoolies all had some form of influence on the blues. Early blues were a curious amalgam of African cross-rhythms and vocal techniques, Anglo-American melodies and thematic material from fables and folktales, and tales of personal experience on plantations and prison farms. After the war, blacks were still slave to King Cotton, and many found themselves struggling to support themselves working on plantations well into the mid twentieth century, or struggling to support themselves as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. The blues developed into a distinct form of folk music as a direct result of this. The emergence of the blues coincided with the worsening of the social and economic conditions for blacks in the south. Blues, as an oral music is intended to take on its shape and style during the performance. Generally, but not always, the blues reflects the personal response of its inventor to a specific occurrence or situation. By singing about their misery, the blues singer achieves a kind of catharsis and life becomes bearable again. Although the blues typically concerns itself with the problems and/or experiences of the individual, it is impossible to convey precisely the sentiments of the blues. The blues, like all Negro folk songs, was drawn from a “well of sorrow”. With the most popular blues being those closest to soul music, the older styles are dying away. However, the roots of the blues remain in