If the information below could play the music of what you are about to read, you would hear the drums and chants of American Indian tribal songs. You would hear the music that sailed across the Atlantic from Europe: hymns, folk ballads, and symphonies. And you would hear the rhythms of Africa mingled with jazz, blues, and work songs.

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This section will help you trace the development of music in America and fulfill requirement 3d. It will give you ideas about composers and performers whose lives and works you might like to investigate. The best way to learn about them is through listening to their music and reading books about their lives.

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American music is the sounds of American life-of people praying, protesting, working, and celebrating. American music is a true melting pot of styles, ethnic backgrounds, and boundless experimentation.

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AMERICAN INDIAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS

Some American Indian tribes believed new songs came in dreams or visions. Each song had a purpose: to assure success in hunting or battle, to heal the sick, or to praise a person's generosity. Traditional instruments included flutes, whistles, drums, and rattles made from gourds.

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As American music developed, it rarely borrowed from American Indian music Meanwhile, tribes preserved their own music, songs, and dances. Today, many recording artists play traditional American Indian instruments. R. Carlos Nakai, who is of Navajo- Ute heritage, has included traditional tribal melodies in his compositions for the American Indian flute. The work of Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids has been performed at the Kennedy Center.

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THE COLONIES

Religious music was a basic part of life in the Colonies. Early New England Puritans sang psalms, but they did not use musical instruments in their churches. The Moravians in Pennsylvania, however, included singing, organ music, and orchestral instruments in their religious services.

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Settlers sang folk songs, lullabies, and sailors' chanteys from their home countries. As musical instruments from Europe became available, more music was played in Colonial homes. Traveling music masters taught the violin, flute, spinet, harpsichord, and guitar. 

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Slaves brought West African musical traditions and mixed them with the European-style music they heard around them. Techniques from Africa included complex rhythms, sliding notes, and the call-and-response form.

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The first book of entirely American music was the New England Psalm Singer by William Billings, a Boston tanner with a passion for creating music. The book was published in 1770 on American- made paper, with a frontispiece (illustration) engraved by Paul Revere. Billings' compositions had an originality and energy that reflected the frontier spirit.

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America's first hit was "Yankee Doodle." The verse that starts "Yankee Doodle came to town" was well- known before the Revolutionary War. The British sang it to insult the Colonials, but the Yankees adopted the tune and marched to war with it.

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THE 1800s

Following the Revolutionary War, Americans built theaters and started philharmonic societies and symphony orchestras in the larger cities. Professional musicians arrived from Europe and gave concerts around the country. New Orleans became known for opera.

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Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem of the United States after the bombardment of Fort McHenry at Baltimore, Maryland, during the War of 1812. When Key saw the bedraggled American flag still flying above the fort at dawn, he dashed off to pen the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner" and set it to an old English tune called "To Anacreon in Heaven."

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Settlers in the Southwest played the music of Spain and Mexico. Singing and dancing at

fiestas lasted for days. Musicians favored the guitar but also played the violin, harp, and

flute. Missions had their own choirs.

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Many American families played music from sheet music and songbooks on upright pianos in

their homes. In the mid 1800s, Stephen Foster wrote popular songs you probably know,

such as "Oh! Susanna," "De Camptown Races," and "My Old Kentucky Home." The Civil War

inspired an outpouring of songs praising the bravery of soldiers and expressing the strong

feelings people had about the war.

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Rural residents traveled to "camp meetings" to hear sermons by circuit-riding preachers.

People sang hymns, clapped their hands, and jumped for joy, creating a new style of song

called the spiritual.

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Among African Americans, spiritual style included humming, joyful

moaning, and improvisation (spur-of-the-moment invention) around the

melody - more qualities from African heritage that would have lasting

influence on American music.

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THE 1890s AND POPULAR MUSIC

In the 1890s, band music and ragtime swept the nation. The popularity of band music was due mainly to John Philip Sousa, who toured the country with his concert band. Sousa's marches, such as "Washington Post" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever," are a permanent part of American music.

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By 1900, all of America danced to ragtime. Written mainly by African American pianists, the name comes from "ragged time," or uneven rhythm. While the pianist's left hand played a regular beat, the right hand played a syncopated (irregularly accented) melody. It was technically challenging music to play.

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This complex, entertaining music has recently been revived among pianists. The popular 1973 movie The Sting used rags by composer Scott Joplin in its background score.

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INTO THE 20th CENTURY

Elements of popular, folk, and classical music begar to mix in the 20th century, thanks to new technologies and the mass media. Some of the distinctly American styles that grew out of the mix are described briefly here.

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The Blues

Around 1900, many African Americans moved from the rural South to cities. With them they brought "country" or "down-home" blues that came from work songs and spirituals. When this music met urban song styles, "city blues" resulted. Famous blues singers include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and Bessie Smith. The composer W. C. Handy became known as "Father of the Blues" because he brought the music to a wide audience. Many consider "St. Louis Blues" to be Handy's masterpiece.

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Jazz

BeTween 1900 and 1910, brass bands in the South started to "rag" their marches, and horns wailed like blues singers. Ragtime and blues set the stage for jazz, which has had enormous influence on both popular and classical music. New Orleans was the cradle of early traditional jazz, though jazz was played in other places, too. Elements typical of jazz. include improvisation around a melody, riffs (short repeated phrases), blue notes, and call-and- response between instruments or between a voice and instruments.

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Jazz often is described as America's greatest contribution to world music. Important jazz pioneers include: Charles "Buddy" Bolden, Edward "Kid" Ory, Joseph "King" Oliver, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, and Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong.

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After Louis Armstrong started improvising trumpet solos, the solo became a basic in jazz. He also introduced "scat" singing, a solo of rhythmical nonsense syllables.

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Big Band and Swing

Big band jazz came on the scene in the late 1920s with more instruments and danceable music. The bandleader Benny Goodman originated the lively sound of swing in 1935. Edward "Duke" Ellington-jazz pianist, bandleader, and one of America's foremost composers-created complex innovative jazz. Some leading vocalists with swing bands were Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

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Bebop

Swing moved too far from its jazz roots for some musicians. They rebelled in the early 1940s with bebop, or bop. Bop had complicated rhythms and harmonies meant for listening, not dancing. The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the pianist Thelonious Monk, and the saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, three of the best jazz improvisers, were important bop musicians.

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Other Jazz Styles

More jazz styles followed. Cool, or progressive, jazz had a smooth, mellow sound and sometimes included the French horn, flute or cello. The trumpeter Miles Davis was a leading cool-jazz musician.

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In the 1960s, saxophonists Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were important to free jazz. Free jazz generally allowed all musicians in a band to improvise without being guided by a basic melody. Jazz-rock fusion combined jazz's improvisations with rock's rhythms and sound. This meant the addition of synthe- sizers, along with the electric piano, guitar, and bass. Miles Davis and the pianist Herbie Hancock were pioneers in jazz-rock fusion, which started in the late 1960s.

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CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 20th CENTURY

During the first half of the 20th century, adventurous changes in classical music took place. Here are a few important modern composers.

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• Charles Ives (1874-1954) used complex rhythms and dissonances (combinations of tones that seem to clash). His highly original music is often playful and humorous. In his Holidays sym- phony, he created the effect of three marching bands playing different tunes all at once. His well-known works include "Three Places in New England" and "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven." Ives has been called the United States' first great composer.

• William Grant Still (1895-1978) was the first African American composer whose classical music was widely published and performed. Still's Afro-American symphony has a blues theme. He set his Songs of Separation to the writings of famous black poets. His Ennanga suite is a tribute to his African heritage; his opera Mota is set in Africa.

• George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote popular songs, musical comedies, orchestral works, and opera. At 20, he wrote his first Broadway musical and then a string of hit songs and musicals. Gershwin's famous Rhapsody in Blue has a blues theme and jazzlike rhythms. His folk opera, Porgy and Bess, has been performed all over the world. George Gershwin's brother, Ira Gershwin (1896-1983), usually wrote the lyrics for George's musicals.

• By the time he was 15, Aaron Copland (1900-90) knew he would be a composer. He studied in Paris, then returned home determined to write music that would be recognized as distinctly American. His music for the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring drew on American folklore.

• Milton Babbitt (1916-) built on the work of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), an Austrian composer whose "serial music" repeated a pattern of 12 selected tones. Babbitt extended this method to patterns of rhythm, timbre, dynamics, and instruments for "total serialization." The result is complex interwoven music. In the 1960s, Babbitt was one of the first composers of electronic music. He also mixed electronic music with live performances by singers and instrumentalists.

• John Cage (1912-92) composed music based cn chance. Each performance of a Cage composition is unpredictable. Some of Cage's works are for "prepared piano," a piano with its tones altered by objects such as coins, screws, hairpins, and bits of wood and rubber placed among the strings. In Fontana Mix, Cage's written music is a set of flowing-line drawings, transparent pages, and a graph that can be combined in several ways. Performers are free to interpret the result, which looks like a cross between modern art and a road map.

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MUSICAL THEATER

America's first musicals were revues, in which the plots were just excuses to te songs together. At that time, songwriters were more interested in creating hit tunes that would sell sheet music than telling stories.

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But that changed in the 1920s when composers and lyricists began to link better

stories with songs. Show Boat led the way, with its serious plot, music by Jerome

Kern, and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Its songs, such as "Ol' Man River," were

threaded into the plot and helped the audience understand the characters.

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Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) was an extremely versatile composer of musicals,

opera, ballet, choral works, and symphonies. He often used syncopation and jazz

and dance rhythms in his work. He composed the exciting music for West Side

Story, which combined music, drama, and dance in a new way. The story, based

on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, is set amid New York tenements and deals

with young love and teenage gangs. The action is both comic and tragic. The

songs, with lyrics by Sondheim, range from beautiful to tough to funny.

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POPULAR MUSIC

Whatever style of today's music you like, you can be sure it has a history. The

music sounds the way it does today because it has been shaped along the way by songwriters and performers. Pop, jazz, folk, blues, country, bluegrass, gospel, rock, and rap have borrowed from one another, and many artists work in several genres.

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POP

Pop covers a wide territory: romantic songs, novelty tunes, songs with messages, movie themes, and more. Radio "crooners" with soft, almost whispering styles were popular in the late 1920s. In the 1940s, big-band singers like Frank Sinatra became sensations. After World War II, a stronger economy meant teenagers had money to buy records. New music was written to appeal to the young consumers.

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COUNTRY

​Country music developed from British ballads and folk songs that were preserved in the South. In the mid-1920s, adio shows such as the National Barn Dance in Chicago and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville began to broadcast this "hillbilly music" to a wider audience.

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But the music was already changing. Jimmie Rodgers combined the Southern mountain ballad with the blues and a vocal embellishment called the yodel to produce a new style of country. Rodgers' songs were among the first to attract a national audience to rural Southern music.

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Country music turned to the West with the success of cowboy movies in the 1930s and 1940s. Honky-tonk music followed and dealt with subjects like love and loss. Later, a new relaxed style with an easy beat, known as "the Nashville Sound," developed.

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Country music's popularity has grown with the rise of stars such as Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn, George Strait, Alan Jackson (left), Lee Ann Womack, Faith Hill, and many others.

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BLUEGRASS

Country music gave birth to a new style called bluegrass, pioneered by Bill Monroe and his band, the Blue Grass Boys, beginning in 1939. Bluegrass is characterized by complicated vocal and instrumental solos and distinctive vocal harmonies including duet, trio, and quartet harmony singing. A typical bluegrass band has guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and bass. Bands sometimes feature a kind of steel guitar called a reso phonic guitar.

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Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were important bluegrass performers from the 1940s through the 1960s. Among the major bluegrass groups of recent years are the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Hot Rize, and Alison Krauss with her group Union Station. Earl Scruggs wrote one of bluegrass music's most famous instrumentals, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which was used in the soundtrack of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Deliverance (1972) also featured bluegrass, the famous "Dueling Banjos." In 2001, the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? exposec more people to bluegrass and traditional country music.

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GOSPEL

The father of gospel music, mcst experts agree, is Thomas A. Dorsey, composer of such well-known songs as "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and "There Will Be Peace in the Valley." As a young blues pianist, Dorsey accompanied blues singers Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Then he began to write religious music that had jazz rhythms and blues flavor. Gospel emerged from the African American church to reach an ever-widening audience. The golden age of gospel was from 1945 to 1965, but the tradition and the music thrive today. The gospel style is vigorous, fervent, and intensely spiritual. Famous gospel performers include Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Mississippi Mass Choir, James Cleveland, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama.

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FOLK

Folk music in the 20th century has often featured songs of protest against conditions of the day. Woody Guthrie wrote protest songs as the nation struggled with the poverty brought on by the dust storms and economic troubles of the 1930s. You might know his song "This Land Is Your Land."

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, folk singing became especially popular. Folk artists such as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary rose to fame.

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ROCK

Teenagers claimed rock 'n' roll, the new music that emerged in the mid-1950s, as their own music. Today's rock music evolved from early rock 'n' roll to cover a wide variety of vocal styles and instrumentation. Rock music has roots in rhythm and blues (R & B), which combines blues, jazz, and gospel styles. R & B has a powerful beat and loud, intense music and vocals. Little Richard and Chuck Berry were prominent R & B artists. Rock also drew from coun- try music. A typical rock song has a driving beat, lots of volume, and simple repetitive phrases.

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The first rock 'n' roll hit was "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets in 1954. In the late 1950s, Elvis Presley launched his career and was on his way to becoming the King of Rock 'N' Roll.

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The Beatles from Liverpool, England, toured the United States in 1964 and revolutionized rock. They sang sophisticated lyrics in styles that ranged from ballads to hard rock. Their influence encouraged other rock groups to expand styles, instrumentation, and electronic effects.

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In the 1960s, James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and others sang rock music called soul. Detroit became a center for black singers, and the "Motown" sound developed there. Well-known Motown singers include the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Diana Ross and the Supremes.

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Some famous names in rock are the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, U2, and Stevie Wonder. 

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From the 1970s through the early 2000s, rock evolved and branched into different styles that, in turn, influenced each other. Punk, heavy metal, and rap are three main rock genres.

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HEAVY METAL

Heavy metal is loud, theatrical, aggressive, wild and raw, and often controversial. Metal music has been criticized for its themes of death and destruction. Many heavy metal songs express anger or desperation and intense feelings of alienation.

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Metal music takes advantage of the modern electric guitar's abilities to make unusual sounds through effects such as feedback, distortion, and reverb (an electronically produced echo. effect). Metal borrows from rock 'n' roll and the blues, with influences from classical music.

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Early punk bands such as The Ramones and The Clash set the stage for New Wave music (with electronic influences) of the 1980s and Grunge music (with heavy metal influences) of the 1990s, inspiring artists such as Elvis Costello, New Order, Talking Heads, and Nirvana.

 

RAP

Rap, with its rhythmic spoken lyrics, is a kind of street poetry set to music. Rap speaks openly about tough topics. Rap artists often talk about the hardships and violence experienced by many young African Americans in big cities. The lyrics of some rap songs have caused controversy for their emphasis on racism and violence. The term "rap" comes from a 1960s slang word for "conversation." Rappers often speak or chant their songs to electronic beats and the sounds of records being scratched.

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Rap grew out of African American street culture in New York City during the 1970s. It became the most popular new music to emerge in the late 20th century. Early rap groups included Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Performers such as Salt-N-Pepa and MC Hammer WILL SMITH BORN TO REIGN brought rap to a mainstream audience. Other influential rap performers have included Run-DMC, Queen Latifah, and Arrested Development.

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A MIXTURE OF MUSIC

Musicians today often blur the line between classical and popular music. Josh Groban sings pop, rock, opera, and classical. Rock star Paul McCartney writes classical music. Jazz singer Bobby McFerrin and classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed together. Opera star Kathleen Battle sang with pop star Janet Jackson. Rock composer Prince wrote the score for the Joffrey Ballet's Billboards. The Kronos Quartet (a string quartet) performed works by Ornette Coleman, Charles Ives, and Jimi Hendrix. Christopher Rouse composed work influenced by Beethoven, Indian raga music, and Elvis Presley. The music of America developed out of international musical traditions and forms. But jazz, blues, and musical theater are America's unique contributions to the world of music.