13USADMusicResourceGuide ED

to n o i t c u d o r sic u M y r An Int u t n h- Ce t e i t n e w T Early
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .. . . . . . . . . .
SECTION I:
RHYTHMIC NOTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 TIME SIGNATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Basic Elements of Music Theory .. . . . . . . .
SIMPLE AND COMPOUND METER . . . . . . . . . . . 19
MIXED AND IRREGULAR METER . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 SYNCOPATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 POLYRHYTHM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 RHYTHM: SUMMARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Sound and Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

MUSIC IS SOUND ORGANIZED IN TIME. . . . . . . . 8 MUSIC OF THE WESTERN WORLD. . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Harmony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
COMMON-PRACTICE TONALITY. . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 CHORDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 TRIADS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 INVERSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 KEYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 KEY SIGNATURES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 HIERARCHY OF KEYS: CIRCLE OF FIFTHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 HARMONIC PROGRESSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE .. . . . . . . 25
The Physics of Musical Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

SOUND WAVES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 INSTRUMENTS AS SOUND SOURCES. . . . . . . . . . 8
Pitch, Rhythm, and Harmony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Pitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

PITCH, FREQUENCY, AND OCTAVES . . . . . . . . . 10 PITCH ON A KEYBOARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 PITCH ON THE GRAND STAFF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 OVERTONES AND PARTIALS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 EQUAL TEMPERAMENT: GENERATING THE TWELVE PITCHES BY DIVIDING THE OCTAVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 SCALES: LEADING TONE, TONIC, DOMINANT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 INTERVALS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 INTERVALS OF THE MAJOR SCALE. . . . . . . . . . 14 MINOR SCALES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 MELODY DEFINED WITH AN EXAMPLE USING SCALE DEGREES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 CONTOUR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 RANGE AND TESSITURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Diatonic Triads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
THE DOMINANT TRIADS SPECIAL ROLE. . 27 BASS LINES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 THE DOMINANT SEVENTH CHORD .. . . . . . 27 EXAMPLE: A HARMONIZED MELODY. . . . . 28 OTHER DIATONIC CHORDS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 CHROMATIC HARMONIES AND MODULATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 BEYOND COMMON PRACTICE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Other Aspects of Musical Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Texture, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, and More Timbre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Dynamics, Articulation, Ornamentation . . . . . . . 31 Form in Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Perceiving Musical Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Rhythm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
BEAT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 TEMPO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 METER: DUPLE AND TRIPLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE
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Elements of Form. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
MOTIVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 PHRASE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 CADENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 THEME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 INTRODUCTION AND CODA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 INTERNATIONAL INTEREST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

LISTENING COMPANION LISTENING EXAMPLE 1:
Prludes, Book I, No. 2 Voiles (1909) Claude Debussy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Expressionism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

VISUAL ART: CHARACTERISTICS AND PAINTERS. . . . . . . . . . 47 MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 COMPOSERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Common Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
REPETITION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 VARIATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 THEME AND VARIATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 TWELVE-BAR BLUES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 IMPROVISATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 CONTRAST. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 TERNARY AND RONDO FORMS .. . . . . . . . . 35 32-BAR FORM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 VERSE-CHORUS FORM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, No. 8 Nacht (1912) Arnold Schoenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

STRUCTURING NACHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Primitivism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
VISUAL ART: CHARACTERISTICS AND PAINTERS. . . . . . . . . . 52 MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND COMPOSERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
FUGUE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 SONATA FORM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Which Is the Real Music? Scores, Recordings, and Performance. . . . . . . . . . . 36 Section I Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 SECTION II:
The Rite of Spring , Introduction and Omens of Spring (1913) Igor Stravinsky . . . . 53
THE NEW CHORD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 THE RIOT OF SPRING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Classical Music and Modernism .. . . . . . . . . 38

Style Periods, Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Music Historys Traditional Eras .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 What is Modernism?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Clinging to the Past .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Embracing the Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 The Early Twentieth Century Technology Takes the Lead. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Radio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 The Advent of Recording . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
AUDIO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 FILM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
ROOTED IN THE PAST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 MUSIC AND NATIONAL IDENTITY . . . . . . . . . . . 58 NEW TOOLS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. . 60
Romanian Christmas Carols (Sz. 57 / BB 67), First Series (1915) Bla Bartk. . . . . 62
THE ROMANIAN SPIRIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Atonality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
PARALLELS WITH CUBISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 EMANCIPATION OF THE DISSONANCE. . . . . . 65 THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL. . . . . . . . . . 65 CHARACTERISTICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
The Early Twentieth Centurys New Classical Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 An Explosion of -isms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Impressionism .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
THE PAINTING THAT STARTED IT ALL. . . . . . . 43
Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, No. 5 uerst langsam (191113) Anton Webern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
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NEW FOCUS ON TIMBRE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Section II Summary: Classical Music and Modernism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 SECTION III:
Dippermouth Blues (1923) Joe King Oliver .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

CLASSICAL/JAZZ HYBRIDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music. . . . . . . . . . 71

Continuities from the Past. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Folk Music .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Multiple Stage Traditions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
MINSTREL SHOWS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 MUSIC HALL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 VAUDEVILLE (VARIETY) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Theatrical Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
OPERETTA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 MUSICAL COMEDY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 SPEED! SPEED!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 AFRICAN-AMERICANS ON BROADWAY AND BEYOND. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 A STAR-TURN FOR A STAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Bands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Gospel.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Politicized Music .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

NATIONAL ANTHEMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 MUSIC FOR CAUSES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady), from In Dahomey (1902) Harry von Tilzer and Vincent Bryan .. . . . . . . . 99 Revue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
A FRENCH EXPORT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 KEEPING IT FRESH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Many New Styles and Genres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Ragtime .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

SYNTHESIS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 COMPOSERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Tin Pan Alley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

A PLACE AND A STYLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 PLUGGERS AND BARBERSHOPPERS . . . . . . . . 101 THE BIRTH OF ASCAP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 THE THIRD MOST FREQUENTLY SUNG SONG IN AMERICA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Maple Leaf Rag (1899) Scott Joplin .. . . . . . . 83

DESCENDANTS OF RAGTIME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 RAGTIME IN EUROPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1908) Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer. . . . . . . 103
CRACKER JACK AND ASCAP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Blues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
ORIGINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 THE BLUE DEVILS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 BUILDING THE BLUES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 COUNTRY BLUES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 CLASSIC BLUES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Film.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
MUSIC OVER NOISE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 THE VAUDEVILLE LEGACY AND NICKELODEONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 CUSTOM (ORIGINAL) SCORES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 THE BIRTH OF A NATION AND BREILS SCORE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 LIVE VS. RECORDED SOUND. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
St. Louis Blues (1914) W.C. Handy. . . . . . . . . 90 Jazz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

THE CRADLE OF JAZZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 A RECIPE FOR JAZZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 THE END OF STORYVILLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 HEADING NORTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Section III Summary: Early Twentieth-Century Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 SECTION IV:
Musical Responses to The Great War. . . . . . . . . 109

To Serve or Not to Serve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
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Eager to Go .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Longing to Stay.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 To Play or Not to Play. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Performing the Enemys Music, Letting the Enemy Perform .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
NATIONAL ATTITUDES (AND RESISTANCE). . 111 HYPHEN-AMERICANS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
PACIFISMTHE PARENTS SPEAK. . . . . . . . . . . 123

I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier (1915) Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi. . . . . . 123
RECRUITMENT SONGS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 ANTHEMS AND PATRIOTIC SONGS . . . . . . . . . 126 MUSIC FOR MARKETING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 RAISING THE PATRIOTIC SPIRIT. . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Transcending the Boundaries .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The Christmas Truce of 1914.. . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 To Create or Not to Create. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Creative Blocks .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Creative Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
SUPPORTING WAR EFFORTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 COMMEMORATING THE FALLEN. . . . . . . . . . . 115 WORKS ABOUT (AND FOR) SOLDIERS. . . . . . . 116
Over There (1917) George M. Cohan .. . . . . 128 Groundbreaking Music (Bit by Bit) . . . . . . . . . . 132
SOLDIERS OF COLOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 MUSICAL REALISM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Popular MusicFrom Tin Pan Alley to the Trenches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Music for Emotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Vulgar and Cheap?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
SENTIMENT AND NOSTALGIA TUGGING THE HEARTSTRINGS. . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
On Patrol in No Mans Land (1918) Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and James Reese Europe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Section IV Summary: Musical Responses to The Great War. . . . . . . . . 137
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Glossary.. . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Timeline of Events. . . . . . . 143 Notes .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Bibliography .. . . . . . . . . 155
Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary (1912) Jack Judge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

WORSHIP AND LAMENTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 LAUGHING IT OFF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Music to Persuade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
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INTRODUCTION
During a typical day at your high school, you are likely to see many young people in jeans and a rainbow array of tops; other students might be wearing dressier outfits. There might also be football players in game-day jerseys, club members dressed in matching t-shirts, and the goth crowd wearing dark clothing. School administrators might walk by, dressed more formally, and various other campus workersin the cafeteria, or on the groundsmight also be recognizable by their attire. A similar variety exists in the music you hear: the spirit squad (perhaps in uniform) might be practicing their routines to a blaring speaker, while the band might be heard in the distance, rehearsing very different pieces. Vocal music might drift out of the choir room. And, everywhere you look, there are iPods and mp3 players, as people listen to music of their choice, whenever they want to hear it. The diversity and freedom seen in the fashions and musical activity at a typical American high school resemble, in many ways, the musical life of early twentieth-century society preceding and during World War I. The conformity of style that characterized much of the music of earlier eras was more frequently challenged, and although the mainstream approaches to musical composition were still fairly consistent (just as there is a lot of denim worn on most campuses), there was more and more musical experimentation. Technology was developing that could record and broadcast music, giving listeners increasing control over their musical choicesprivileges we now take for granted.
This Resource Guide explores many of the diverse strands of musical activity during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Section I provides an introduction to the specialized vocabulary and notation system used in Western music. It explains many of the ways that musical pitches are manipulated and combined, and it identifies various larger relationships and structures that can be crafted from these components. Section II of the Resource Guide looks at the battle between the past and the future that began to rage in art music at the turn of the twentieth century. It also considers the birth of radio and of the gramophoneeven portable versions that could be taken to the trenches during World War I. We will learn about five of the most influential new musical styles and will discuss listening examples that challenged audiences a hundred years ago; some of these may still seem daunting today. Section III of the Resource Guide surveys popular music, which also saw a huge flowering of styles and genres in the early twentieth century. We will take a closer look at five approaches that will be showcased via the listening selections. Some of the pieces may be unfamiliar, but there are very few people today who dont recognize Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which emphasizes why this music is called popular. In the final section of the guide, we will consider how both classical and popular musicians (and their nations) responded to the outbreak of war, and the
NOTE TO STUDENTS: Throughout the resource guide you will notice that some terms have been boldfaced and others have been both boldfaced and underlined. Boldface indicates a key term or phrase. Terms that are underlined as well as boldfaced are included in the glossary of terms at the end of the resource guide.
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kinds of purposes to which music was put during the war years. Four listening examples will illustrate some of the varied objectives that music can serve.
As you will see, music played a role in almost every dimension of peoples lives, both in the armed forces and at home.
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NI O I T SEC
BASIC ELEMENTS OF MUSIC THEORY
Sound and Music Definitions

MUSIC IS SOUND ORGANIZED IN TIME
the music of the Western Worldthe musical traditions that developed in Europe in the past two millennia and their cultural extensions in the Americas.
The broadest definition of music is sound organized in time. Many kinds of soundsincluding noises and tones produced by any means, not only by musical instrumentscan be used to create music, particularly in the twentieth century. All that is required is a time frame, sound waves, and a cognizant mind to perceive and interpret those sounds. Common but not required factors include a person (often called a composer) who first imagines the music, human or mechanical performers to generate the sounds, and a mechanical means of recording and reproducing them. Sometimes the composition and performance happen simultaneously (this is known as improvisation). Some degree of human intention and perception are necessary for music to exist, but defining this exactly continues to puzzle scientists and philosophers, who debate questions like whether birdsong can qualify as music, whether accidental sound can be music, or whether a phonograph playing in the forest is music if no one hears it.
MUSIC OF THE WESTERN WORLD
The Physics of Musical Sound

SOUND WAVES
It should be noted that many cultures have markedly different views of music; indeed in some cultures, music is so interconnected with ritual, language, dance, and other aspects of life that in some languages there is no separate word for music. At certain times in history, Western traditions have encountered and incorporated the music of non-Western cultures. And, in recent decades, globalization has made the boundaries between Western and non-Western culture increasingly permeable. Nonetheless, the material in this guide will pertain to what is called
In the abstract, sound is described as a wave of energy. As a wave, it has both amplitude and frequency. The amplitude affects the decibel level, or how loud or soft the tone is. The higher the amplitude of a sound wave, the louder it is. The frequency affects the pitch, which is the highness or lowness of the sound. The greater the frequency of a sound wave, the higher its pitch. When the frequency of a wave is between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, the normal human ear hears it as a single, sustained tone. A pure sine wave at 440 Hz (cycles per second) sounds like an A above middle C. Orchestral musicians in the United States usually tune their instruments to A-440, meaning 440 Hz. Of course, not every sound has a regular frequency. When you drop a book on the floor, the sound quickly dies down and has no discernable pitch because the wave pattern is so irregular and short. Thus, there are two kinds of musical sounds: pitched and non-pitched. Percussion instruments provide most of the nonpitched sounds in music.
INSTRUMENTS AS SOUND SOURCES
How is a musical sound wave produced? In the late nineteenth century, two ethnomusicologists (the modern term for scholars who study the music of other cultures, or who study multiple cultures comparatively), Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel, categorized instruments into four groups. Chordophones, such as violins, harps, and guitars, have one or more strings, which are plucked, bowed,
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Table 1
The most common Western orchestral instruments.
or struck; the vibrating string creates the sound wave. Aerophones (brass and wind instruments such as the many varieties of horns and flutes) feature a vibrating column of air. Membranophones have a skin or other membrane stretched across some kind of frame. The membrane, but not the frame, vibrates when struck. With Idiophones, the body of the instrument itself vibrates when struck. Some examples of idiophones are bells, woodblocks, and xylophones. A fifth category was added later: electrophones, which create sound waves using a mechanical device known as an oscillator and are dependent upon electricity. Centuries before Sachs and Hornbostel, Western orchestral instruments were grouped into families. These categories are still used for Western instruments today. Strings or stringed instruments are usually bowed or plucked. Brass instruments, which are aerophones made of metal, are sounded by the performers buzzing lips, which make the column of air vibrate. Woodwind instruments are also aerophones in which the column of air is moved by breath aloneas in the case of flutes, recorders, and related instrumentsor by one or two vibrating reeds. Percussion instruments include membranophones as well as idiophones, plus some chordophones that are struck rather than bowed or plucked, such as the piano. In some cases, keyboard instruments constitute a fifth category. TABLE 1 above lists the most common members of each family of instruments. The first electronic instruments began to appear in the first decades of the twentieth century. The
The theremins inventor, Russian physicist Leon Theremin (1896 1993) with his instrument.
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Figure 11
Pitch on a keyboard.
theremin is among the best known and is still occasionally used today. When playing this instrument, the performer regulates frequency with one hand and amplitude with the other by disturbing the electrical fields that surround the protruding bars. The next important step in electronic instruments came at the end of World War II. Enormous advances in electronics and radio technology had been made for wartime purposes, but after the war, many state-of-the-art studios were no longer needed for military purposes. Within a few years, scientists and composers began collaborating to make art with the new equipment. Electronically generated sounds and sounds produced by live instruments were recorded on tape, where they could be edited, manipulated, and mechanically recombined to form collages of sound that were performed via loudspeaker. This type of composition was first known as musique concrte ; the term used is French due to the fact that the first practitioners were based in Paris. The basic techniques of tape music (later followed by more purely electronic music produced on computers) are looping and splicing, both of which allow for compositions that cannot be reproduced by a human performer. Rome, Paris, Cologne, and New York City all had famous postwar centers for electronic music.
Bernard; a kittens meow is higher pitched than a tomcats yowl. A tuba is pitched lower than a piccolo. When musicians speak of a pitch they are referring to a single tone whose highness or lowness does not changethat is, a sound that consists of a steadily oscillating sound wave, like A-440. When you pluck the A string on a guitar (A-110), find the exact midpoint and press it firmly to the fret board, and then pluck the now-half-as-long string (either side), you hear the next-higher A. This is because when you halve the length of the string, it naturally vibrates twice as fast (220 Hz) producing a pitch twice as high. The musical term for the distance between A and the next-higher or next lower A is called an octave.
PITCH ON A KEYBOARD
A piano keyboard provides an excellent visual aid for understanding pitch and harmony. High pitches are to the right, low pitches to the left. Middle C is roughly equidistant from either end. The black keys are arranged in alternating groups of two and three. Middle C is located to the left of the group of two black keys closest to the middle of the keyboard. FIGURE 11 identifies middle C, A440, A 220, A 110, and the names of the other keys on the keyboard. Note that all the As appear between the upper two of the three black keys on the keyboard. Note that the distance between each key on the keyboard is a half-step, or semi-tone. A whole step is the distance between every other key. Both half steps and whole steps are the basic intervals of any scale (a sequence of notes in ascending or descending order) in Western music. The signs (sharp) and (flat) indicate that a given pitch, such as A, has been raised or lowered, respectively, by a half step. So the
Pitch, Rhythm, and Harmony

A single, isolated musical sound has four properties: pitch, duration, volume, and timbre.
Pitch
PITCH, FREQUENCY, AND OCTAVES
Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound. A Chihuahua has a higher pitched bark than a St.
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Figure 12
Grand staff, with all sharps and flats. Vertical lines from below point to white notes and lines from above point to black notes.
next note above A on the keyboard is A . Starting from B, the same key is B since it is half a step (one key) below.
PITCH ON THE GRAND STAFF
FIGURE 12 shows a grand staff with the pitches labeled that correspond to the white notes and black notes on the keyboard.
OVERTONES AND PARTIALS
Very few pitches consist of a single, pure frequency. Rather, one frequency dominates, but many other
frequencies are also present at very faint volume. For example, when the A string of a guitar is plucked, the strongest sound wave produced is 110 Hz. But many other waves can exist on the string at the same time. One is half the length of the string, another is onethird the length of the string, another is one-quarter the length of the string, and so on. The lowest A is called the fundamental. It is by far the loudest and strongest. But it is colored by the faint presence of the higher pitches, which are called partials, or overtones.
Figure 13
Wave and harmonics.
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Figure 14
Diagram of overtone series on a staff and a keyboard.
EQUAL TEMPERAMENT: GENERATING THE TWELVE PITCHES BY DIVIDING THE OCTAVE
In the world of pure sound waves and overtones, pitches follow mathematical patterns. But, in the Western tradition, after about 1750, a system of tuning called equal temperament has dominated. With
equal temperament tuning, the mathematical ratios are adjusted so that the octave is divided into twelve equal parts. Equal temperament is so common that it is assumed; tuning systems are mentioned only if they differ from equal temperament, and this is very rare. The twelve different pitches in ascending order
Figure 15
Keyboard with all chromatic pitches labeled.
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Table 2
The Most Common Intervals
are called the chromatic scale. The distance between any two consecutive pitches in the chromatic scale is called a half step. Each of the black keys has two names. Sharp ( ) means raised and flat means lowered. Thus E and D are identical in pitch; we call them enharmonic pitches. (Note: In older tuning systems, an E and a D are not identical and differ slightly in the number of cycles per second.)
SCALES : LEADING TONE, TONIC, DOMINANT
7. The seventh scale degree is known as the leading tone because to Western ears it begs to resolve upward to the C above. In the C major scale and the melodies that use it, C is the anchor, a point of repose and completion. Sometimes called the resting tone or Do (as in Doe, a deer. from The Sound of Music), it is most often known as the tonic pitch. In a C scale, C is the tonic pitch. In an A scale, A is the tonic pitch. In an A-flat scale, A-flat is the tonic pitch, and so on. The fifth scale degree, called the dominant pitch, is nearly as important as the tonic. In non-technical terms, it functions like a second gravitational center that sets melodies in motion by pulling them away from the tonic. The dominant pitch may appear in a melody more often than the tonic pitch, though the tonic remains the final resting point. In the key of C, G is the dominant pitch, and B is the leading tone.
INTERVALS
( )
In the Western tradition, most music is based on seven of the pitches. When arranged in ascending order, the seven pitches fall into one of four different patterns (major, and three varieties of minor) and are known as a scale. By definition, a scale is an arrangement, in ascending order, of the seven basic pitches from which a piece of music is constructed. The C major scale is perhaps the most common scale.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ C (^ 1) D (2) E (3) F ( 4) G ( 5) A (6) B (7) C
When playing or writing down a scale, the first pitch is normally repeated at the top, as the last pitch. It would sound very unstable to stop at pitch number
The distance between any two pitches is called an interval. In a scale, the intervals are small and evenly spaced. When describing any interval, the unit of measurement is the half step (sometimes called a semitone). A half step is easily visualized
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Figure 16
Diagram of keyboard with the C scale degrees labeled 1, 2, 3, etc.
as the distance between any two consecutive keys on a keyboard: black to white or white to black, whenever a black key is present. An interval can be harmonic (the two pitches occur simultaneously) or melodic, with the two pitches occurring in succession. Melodic intervals are either ascending (the lower pitch occurs first) or descending. TABLE 2 gives the names for the most common intervals. A few intervals that exceed an octave are the major and minor ninth and the major and minor tenth. They can be thought of as an octave plus a m2 (13 half-steps), M2 (14), m3 (15), and M3 (16 half-steps).
INTERVALS OF THE MAJOR SCALE
and 4, however, there is no intermediate pitch. The E and the F are only a half step apart. FIGURE 17 reproduces the C major scale on the piano keyboard, with the melodic intervals labeled. By using the same sequence of melodic intervals, you can create a major scale starting on any of the twelve different pitches. For instance, a G major scale proceeds up the keyboard looking very much like a C scale (all white notes), until you get to the seventh ^ scale degree. By definition, if a scale is major, ^ 6 to 7 ^ ^ must be a whole step, and 7 to 8 a half step apart. A whole step above ^ 6 (E) is F-sharp. Why not call this note G-flat? Mainly because it is simply convention to call it F-sharp. Whenever possible, the seven pitches of a scale are spelled using seven different letters. Also, an E to a G would properly be called a diminished third, not a major second. Compare the keyboard diagrams shown in FIGURE 17, and you will see the same sequence of intervals is preserved, even though one begins on G and the other begins on C. FIGURE 18 shows an A major scale. The sequence of intervals, labeled below the diagram, is identical
A scale can be described as a succession of whole and half steps. Referring back to the C major scale on the keyboard, you can see that the distance ^ between ^ 1 and 2, in this case C to D, is a whole step. (The C /D key, which is skipped over, is the intermediate half step in between.) Pitch numbers 2 and 3 are also a whole step apart. (D to E is one half-step; E to E makes two half steps, which added together make a single whole step.) Between pitch numbers 3
Figure 17
Diagram of keyboard with C scale, left, and G scale, right, with symbols beneath to indicate intervals.
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Figure 18
Diagram of an A major scale.
to the C and G major scales and every other major scale, regardless of the starting pitch. Since there are twelve different pitches, there are twelve different-sounding major scales. (G major and F major are notated differently, but they sound the same in equal temperament.) To ears accustomed to Western music, the major scale is the most familiar.
MINOR SCALES
of pitches, relative major and minor scales are perceived as being more closely related to each other than parallel scales. A scale with blues inflections combines elements of both major and minor. In a blues scale, scale degrees 3 and 7 can be either lowered, as in a minor scale, or normal as in a major scale, or somewhere in between, using a pitch between the keys of the piano. Often the pitch is part of a small slidefor example, from 3 to 3. Less commonly, the 5th scale degree is lowered in a similar manner.
MELODY DEFINED WITH AN EXAMPLE USING SCALE DEGREES
The next most common scale is the minor scale. There are three slightly different varieties: natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor. FIGURE 19 shows each of the three, beginning on A. All minor scales feature a lowered third scale degree. ^ Note that the half steps are located between 2 and ^ 3, ^ ^ and 5 and 6. The major scales upward pull from ^ 7 to ^ 8 is not present in the natural minor. Try playing the scale through ^ 7. It can just as easily fall back down ^ ^ to ^ 6 then 5, as it can rise to 8. In order to create that pull, many pieces of music in the minor mode raise the seventh scale degree by adding a sharp or natural. Melodic minor, shown with intervals marked in FIGURE 19, is the final option. The alterations here encourage a sense of upward motion to the higher tonic and a pull downward to the fifth scale degree.
A melody is a series of successive pitches perceived by the ear to form a coherent whole. Only one pitch occurs at a time in a melody; if two pitches occur together, you have either harmony or counterpoint. Most melodies use the seven notes of a single scale. The song Happy Birthday, which is in the major mode, uses the scale indicated at the bottom of the page. It follows the same scale degrees whether you use the C major, F major, E major, A major, or any of the twelve major scales. You can transpose the melody Happy Birthday to any major key by beginning the same pattern of intervals on a different note, and it will remain the same melody.
CONTOUR
Because C minor and E major use the same pitchesjust different tonicsthey are called the relative major and minor. Their relationship is still relative even when the natural minor is altered to make the harmonic or melodic minor scales. Major and minor scales that begin and end on the same tonic pitch are called parallel. Since they use the same collection
All melodies have a contour, or profile. A conjunct melody moves smoothly, in stepwise motion, that is, in mostly half steps and whole steps. Row, Row, Row Your Boat is a familiar tune using conjunct motion.
5 5 6 5 1 7 5 5 6 5 2 1 5 5 5 3 1 7 6, 4 4 3 1 2 1 Hap-py birth-day to you, hap-py birth-day to you! Hap-py birth-day, dear Susie, hap-py birth-day to you!
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Figure 19
NATURAL MINOR
HARMONIC MINOR
MELODIC MINOR
Minor scales: natural, harmonic, and melodic.
Apart from merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, all the intervals are whole-steps and half steps. A disjunct melody, on the other hand, contains proportionally more leaps (intervals larger than a major second). The Star Spangled Banner, for instance, uses far more leaps than steps, so it is disjunct. There is even a melodic leap of a major tenth (equivalent to 16 halfsteps) between gleam -ing and and the rockets red glare. Another way to describe a melodys contour is by direction. Melodies may ascend, descend, or move in a wavelike manner. Row, Row, Row Your Boat ascends to the first merrily, then mainly descends to the end. A very common contour for melodies is
that of an arch, ascending at the beginning, reaching a climactic high point, and descending toward the end. Contour is normally described in general terms. Exact intervals and pitches are named when more precision is needed.
RANGE AND TESSITURA
Every instrument (including the human voice) has a range of possible pitches that it is capable of producing. In order to indicate exactly which A, B, or C , etc., is being played or discussed, each pitch is numbered from the bottom of the grand staff up: C1 through B/C 1, followed by C2 through B/C 2, and so on. A violas range (C3 to E6) is higher and
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Figure 110
Relative major and minor. C natural (left) and E major (right).

slightly narrower than a cellos (C2 to A5). The high, middle, and low parts of an instruments range are often called the high, middle, or low register ; in The Rite of Spring (LISTENING E XAMPLE 3), the first notes are played by a bassoon in a very high range. In contrast, Nacht from Pierrot lunaire (LISTENING E XAMPLE 2) begins with the piano playing in a very low range. A melody with a high tessitura calls for more pitches in the performers high register than does a melody with a medium or low tessitura. This Italian term is applied most often to vocal music.
Rhythm
Rhythm is the way music is organized in time.
BEAT
Beat is the steady pulse that underlies most music. Sometimes the beat is audible, sometimes not, but it is present, like the silent ticking second-hand on a mechanical clock.
TEMPO
The speed of the beat is called the tempo. Occasionally, the beat slows or pauses. TABLE 3
Table 3
Common tempo markings
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Figure 111
St. Louis Blues rhythm.
shows different tempos and their traditional Italian names. The numbers in the left-hand column indicate the approximate number of beats per minute. Substantial variations exist in the beats-per-minute. The Italian terms predate the invention of exact timekeeping, so they originally indicated mood or other expressive qualities as related to tempo. For example, Allegro means happy, and so the music should be executed in a fairly lively, or slightly fast manner. Tempo can slow down (ritardando) or speed up (accelerando), and it can do either gradually (poco a poco) or suddenly (subito). I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) (LISTENING E XAMPLE 9) features a subito tempo change between its verses and choruses. When there is no steady tempowhich is the same as no discernable beatmusic is said to be unmetered ; if there is a perceived beat, but it speeds up and slows down for expressive effect, it is called rubato.
METER: DUPLE AND TRIPLE
common are groups of four, with 1 being the strong beat, 3 being the secondary beat, and 2 and 4 being weak beats. FIGURE 111 shows a couple of measures from St. Louis Blues (LISTENING E XAMPLE 7) with the beats numbered. Several of the Listening Examples on the CD will feature a clear duple meter, such as Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary (LISTENING E XAMPLE 11) and Over There (LISTENING E XAMPLE 13). The song Happy Birthday, with its groupings of three beats, is in triple meter as is shown in FIGURE 112. The first word falls before the downbeat. This is called a pickup or anacrusis. Another illustration of triple meter occurs in Take Me Out to the Ball Game (LISTENING E XAMPLE 10); this song begins on the downbeat.
RHYTHMIC NOTATION
The duration of a pitch is indicated by its note-head, flags added to the stem, and small dots.
TIME SIGNATURE
All beats are of equal length, but not all beats are of equal importance. Normally, beats are grouped into measures (or more informally, bars), which are separated by bar lines. The first beat of any measure is always strongest. It is usually called the downbeat or strong beat. Meter describes the pattern of emphasis superimposed on groups of beats. In general terms, meters are duple, triple, compound, or irregular. Music with groups of two and four beats is in duple meter. Most
In music notation, the meter is indicated with a time signature, which consists of two numbers. The lower number indicates a durational value, with 2 meaning the half note, 4 the quarter note, 8 the eighth, and 16 the sixteenth note. The upper number indicates how many of those durational values (or their equivalents) will occur in one measure. Thus, if the time , the measure will contain the combined signature is time value of six 8th notes.
Figure 112
Happy Birthdayfour measures with words over beat numbers.
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Figure 113
RHYTHMIC NOTATION Pyramid Diagram: whole note = 2 half notes = 4 quarters = 8 eighths = 16 16ths = 32 32nds. Chart: 3 half notes = w . 3 quarters = h. 3 8ths = q. 3 16ths = e.
SIMPLE AND COMPOUND METER MIXED AND IRREGULAR METER
Normally each beat is divided in half (1 & 2 & 3 & or 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &), which is referred to as simple subdivision. If the beat is subdivided into three equal parts, then the meter is compound. For example: meter can be counted 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6, or ONE&-a TWO- &-a, ONE- &-a TWO- &-a. The rhythms used time, in swing music are notated as if they are in but played as if they are . Put Your Head on My Shoulder is a rock song from the 1950s that has a clearly articulated compound meter.
Mixed meter and irregular or asymmetrical meter are variations on the grouping of beats. In mixed meter, measures that have different meters occur in rapid succession. Irregular meter features measures that have different meters alternating in an irregular pattern. Irregular meter may also mean there is a steady beat but it is grouped unpredictably or inconsistently. A measure of seven beats, for example, may go ONE-two-three ONE-two ONE-two, or ONE-two ONE-two ONE-two-three. Several of the carols within
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Figure 114
Swing example: Notated (left); performed (right).
Romanian Christmas Carols (LISTENING E XAMPLE 4) use mixed meters or irregular meter. When two or more meters are operating simultaneously it is referred to as polymeter. For instance, a melody with three large beats per measure played over a bass line with four beats per measurewith the downbeats (but not the weaker beats) aligned would be an example of polymeter. Some sections of The Rite of Spring employ polymeter.
SYNCOPATION
ragtime, as heard in Maple Leaf Rag (LISTENING E XAMPLE 6).

POLYRHYTHM
Polyrhythm, also called cross-rhythm, occurs when two conflicting rhythmic patterns are present simultaneously. The most common are two against three and three against four (see FIGURE 116). Note that the meter does not change. Some sections of The Rite of Spring employ layered polyrhythms.
RHYTHM: SUMMARY
Rhythm is syncopated when accented or emphasized notes fall on weak beats, or in between beats. The rhythms in Happy Birthday are regular and coincide with the beat, so it is not considered syncopated. The rhythms in St. Louis Blues, however, do not coincide with the beat. In the first two measures, many notes fall just before the beat, especially in the second measure, where go is stressed because it is longer, but it occurs between the third and fourth beats. In the same way, Down precedes the downbeat of the next measure by a half of a beat. Syncopation is the prized rhythmic component of
The important distinction to keep in mind is that rhythm is a collection of varying durations, and it is always audible. Beat refers to a regular underlying pulse that is not always audible but is always felt or imagined, and meter is the grouping of beats and the associated patterns of strong and weak beats.
Harmony
Harmony occurs whenever two or more tones are sounding simultaneously.
Figure 115
Examples of asymmetrical (irregular) meters.
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Figure 116
Two against three polyrhythm (top). Three against four polyrhythm (bottom).
COMMON-PRACTICE TONALITY
CHORDS
Common-practice tonality is the system of organizing pitch and harmony that we find intuitive today in Western cultures. It developed in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages and was codified by about 1750. Since then, layers of complexity have been added, vigorous challenges have been made by various composers, and knowledge of non-Western music traditions has increased dramatically. Despite these changes, conventions of common-practice tonality govern nearly all of the music produced and consumed in the Western world.
A chord is three or more pitches sounding simultaneously. A book, or a forearm, pressed down on a piano keyboard creates a chord. However, the most common and useful chords are more carefully constructed. TRIADS. A triad is a three-note chord consisting * of two intervals of a third. Triads come in four qualities: major, minor, diminished, and augmented. A major triad has a major third on the bottom and a minor third on top. A minor triad has a minor third on the bottom and a major third above. Less common are the diminished
Figure 117
Examples of triads: C-E-G, C-E-G, A-C -E, B-D-F, B-D -F .
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Figure 118
Example: C triad and its inversions, all three with different spacing: CEG C G E CGEC CGCE // E C G E G C ECGC // etc.
triad (two minor thirds) and the augmented triad (two major thirds). The basic chords in any piece of music are the triads built on each note of the scale. The root is the lowest of the three notes. The middle note is called the third, and the highest note is called the fifth. When the root is on the bottom, the chord is in root position. INVERSIONS. Any pitch of a triad can be moved * up or down any number of octaves. When the third of the triad is on the bottom, the chord is in first inversion. When the fifth is on the bottom, it is in second inversion. When describing inverted chords, first inversion is indicated by a six following the chord symbol; second inversion is indicated by a six and a four aligned vertically like a fraction with the line missing. Any triad may be inverted. The bottom pitch determines the inversion; the other pitches may be in any order, and any of the triads three pitches may be duplicated in the same, or different, octaves without changing the chords classification as a triad.
KEYS
In music theory, the key is the world of pitch relationships within which a piece or substantial section of music takes place. Key in music theory is not to be confused with the piano key one presses to produce a single pitch. The gravitational center of a key is the tonic pitch, which in turn lends its name to the entire key. A piece of music whose tonic pitch is D is said to be in the key of D; an A major scale consists of the seven pitches of the key of A. Whether the key is major or minor depends upon other scale degrees, ^ ^ namely ^ 3, 6, and 7. Within a key, pitches and harmonies relate to one another in specific ways. Each chord has a different relationship to the tonic. Unless otherwise specified, the key of C means the key of C major. (The other options in commonpractice tonality are C natural minor, C harmonic minor, and C melodic minor.) Music in the key of C major uses mainly the seven pitches of a C major scale, and their octave transpositions. If other pitches occur, they are called chromatic pitches and are usually decorative or expressive, but not structural.
Figure 119
E major scale on a keyboard (left), E major scale on a staff without key signature (center), and E scale on staff with key signature (right).
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Figure 120
Circle of Fifths.
KEY SIGNATURES. The key signature E is a set * of accidentals (sharps or flats) at the beginning of a written piece of music that indicates the key of the music. The key signature signals which seven pitches make up the scale for that piece by indicating which pitches will be consistently raised or lowered. When an F-sharp appears in the key signature at the beginning of the piece that means all Fs in the entire composition are
automatically raised, unless otherwise indicated (which would be done with a natural sign in front of the individual note). There are only two scales that need only an F : G major and E minor. A white-note scale beginning on E needs only the second note (F) raised to have the order of whole- and half-steps common to all natural minor scales. A scale starting on G needs only the 7th degree (F) raised to fall into the major
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Figure 121
Diagram of keyboard and two resolutions for F-B tritone.
scale pattern of whole- and half-steps. When music is notated, all three types of minor scales use the same key signaturethe one for natural minorand add accidentals to individual notes throughout the score for harmonic or melodic inflections. The key signature is a convenience. See the E major scale in FIGURE 19, on the keyboard and on the staff. HIERARCHY OF KEYS: CIRCLE OF FIFTHS. Key sig* natures fall into a fascinating pattern. Remember, there are twelve major and twelve minor scales, one for each of the twelve equal divisions of the octave. Each scale corresponds to a key of the same name. And each major scale contains the same pitches as one of the minor keys. (See the example in FIGURE 119. E minor is the relative minor of G major; G is the relative major of E minor.) So there are only twelve key signatures needed. Because those scales have to preserve a certain order of whole and half steps, there are only twenty-four possible keys. (For instance, if only the E and D are flatted, there is no way
to form a major or minor scale no matter which pitch is used for the tonic.) Refer to the circle of fifths shown in FIGURE 120 while locating the named pitch on the keyboard. C, the key signature at the top of the chart, uses no sharps or flats. The key of F uses only a B-flat. The key of B-flat is closely related to F; it needs only one additional flatE-flat. The flats are added in the same order, for a maximum of six. To go the other direction, you add sharps one at a time, progressing from the key of C to G, D, A, E, B, and F . The cycle meets at the opposite side of the circle at six sharps, which is the enharmonic equivalent of six flats. (F-sharp major and G-flat major use precisely the same keys on the piano). For visual convenience, the triads here are notated as close as possible to the center of the staff. However, remember that to get from C to F, you can ascend a 4th or descend a 5th. The diagram shown in FIGURE 120 is really a circle of clockwise, ascending fifths.
Figure 122
Resolutions for F-B tritone.
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Figure 123
Diatonic triads.
HARMONIC PROGRESSION
A harmonic progression is a series of chords or intervals that moves from tension (dissonance) toward resolution (consonance). DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE. Dissonance * is the quality of a pitch, interval, or chord that makes it seem unstable or tense. The more dissonant a sound, the more the listener longs to hear a resolution. The opposite of dissonance is consonance, the quality of a pitch, interval, or chord that makes it seem a suitable point of rest or resolution. Nacht uses considerable amounts of dissonance to add to its frightening atmosphere. Dissonance is relative. The most consonant chords are ones that stress the lower partials on the overtone series. Few things will sound more consonant than an octave with a fifth added above the bass. A major triad, especially with the root doubled, is also extremely consonant. But other chords can sound dissonant or consonant
depending upon what precedes them. A cluster of whole steps (say, C, D, E, F ) sounds dissonant compared to a C-E-G triad. But that same cluster is consonant when compared with a chord composed of C, D , F, Gb.
Ears accustomed to Western music expect dissonance to resolve. Tension is created as the listener waits for a tense interval or chord to come to resolution in something more restful. Dissonance and its resolution are central to harmonic progression. An example of this is the tritone. Play an F and B together on the piano. The two most natural sounding resolutions are either G and B , or E and C, as shown on the keyboard diagram in FIGURE 122. Try playing the tritone followed by its resolution a few times. Then try playing it backwards to see if there is a way to make the tritone sound more restful than the other interval. It is difficult if not impossible. Any chord that contains a tritone will sound more dissonant than a chord without one.
Figure 124
ii-V-I and IV-V-I as simple triads in root position.
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Figure 125
Here the same pitches are present in each chord, but the notes are rearranged (i.e., the chords are inverted).
DIATONIC TRIADS. The term diatonic means * within the key. A chord or melody is diatonic if no accidentals are needed other than those already indicated in the key signature. The quality (major, minor, diminished, or augmented) of a diatonic triad depends upon which scale degree is its root. If a melody or chord borrows notes from outside the key, then it is chromatic. Chords within any given key are related to each other in a predetermined pattern that sounds perfectly intuitive to Western ears. The fascinating thing is that the pattern connecting diatonic chords is also based on the circle of fifths, but
first, lets take a closer look at the individual triads. The tonic triad (also called the tonic chord or simply the tonic) is a diatonic triad built on the tonic pitch, ^ 1. This is perceived as the most stable chord in a key. Nearly all pieces of music end on the tonic chord. In a major key, the tonic triad is always major. The other major triads that occur naturally in a ^ major key are on scale degrees ^ 4 and 5. The dia^ ^ ^ tonic triads on 2, 3, and 6 are minor (even though they are part of a major key). The triad built on the seventh scale degree is unique, consisting
Figure 126
Chord progressions with bass lines added.
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Figure 127
Figure 128
A descending fifths bass line supports a chain of harmonies that includes every diatonic triad in root position and ends in a perfect authentic cadence. V 7 on staff and keyboard with scale degrees, pitches, and all intervals labeled.
of two minor thirds. This is a diminished triad, and it is highly unstable; intuitively the listener wants to hear it resolve to something more restful. The diagram in FIGURE 123 shows a C major scale (left) and a D major scale (right) with a triad built on each scale degree. They are labeled with Roman numerals. The single diminished triad is lower case with a small superscript circle added. Capitalized letters indicate major triads and lower case letters indicate minor triads.
If one person sings the top notes, and another sings the bottom notes, and a third person sings the middle pitches, no one person has to leap around excessively, making the progression easier to sing. BASS LINES. A bass line, added below, is the low* est voice in a series of chords. It provides the finishing touch, reinforcing the forward pull of the progression. Bass lines often, but not always, play the root of the harmony. The most final sounding, strongest kind of bass line is one that descends a fifth.
^
THE DOMINANT TRIADS SPECIAL ROLE. Aside from the tonic chord, the dominant chord (V) is the most important. It contains the leading tone (^ 7) and the fifth scale degree, both of which resolve to the tonic pitch. Other harmonies, in turn, pull to the dominant: these are called pre-dominant harmonies. The triads built on the second and fourth scale degree (iialso called the supertonic, and IV, the subdominant) are the most common predominant harmonies.
5 to 1 is the most common bass motion at strong
A chain of triads, each pulling to the next is called a chord progression. The most common chord progression is predominant-dominant-tonic. This can be ii-V-I or IV-V-I. In FIGURE 124, these are written as simple triads in root position. More often, some of the chords are inverted, to create what is called smoother voice leading. This means if you think of the three chords as three horizontal layers, each layer is relatively conjunct and easy to sing. (This is due to the fact that when Western art music developed, the vast majority of music was written for the voice.) In FIGURE 125, note that the same pitches are present in each chord, but the notes are rearranged (that is, the chords are inverted).
cadences, like those which occur at the end of ^ pieces or significant sections of music. A ^ 5-1 bass line supports a V-I harmonic progression. The most natural sounding chord progressions within a key are a chain of descending fifths, such as moving counterclockwise through the circle of fifths. The example in FIGURE 127 shows how a simple descending-fifths bass line supports a chain of harmonies that includes every diatonic triad in root position and ends in a perfect authentic cadence when the harmony moves from V to I and the melody (in the topmost notes) ends on ^ 1. THE DOMINANT SEVENTH CHORD. To intensify * its pull to the tonic triad, the dominant triad is often turned into a dominant seventh chord, or V7. In the key of C, the dominant triad is G-B-D, so the dominant seventh chord is G-B-D-F. (No
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Figure 129
Happy Birthday harmonized.
matter what the key, a dominant seventh chord ^ ^ ^ always consists of scale degrees ^ 5 - 7- 2 and 4.) The dominant seventh chord contains a tritone, and as such the chord holds a great deal of tension. As was true for the dominant triad, the urge ^ for V-I and ^ 5 - 1 harmonic resolution (explained in the section on the circle of fifths) is powerful in a dominant seventh. Again, the leading tone pulls ^ strongly to ^ 1. But the additional pitch, 4 (a sev-
enth above the root), pulls just as strongly down a half-step to ^ 3. The seventh chord, built on ^ 7, usually functions as a dominant harmony because unless it is chro^ matically altered, it contains the ^ 7- 4 tritone that pulls so strongly to the tonic. EXAMPLE: A HARMONIZED MELODY. The song * Happy Birthday can serve to illustrate the idea
Figure 130
C major triads with added notes.
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of harmonic progression. In FIGURE 129, it is harmonized with diatonic triads and labeled with roman numerals.
OTHER DIATONIC CHORDS
As common practice harmony developed beyond 1750, it became more complex. Triads remained the basis for the music, but additional pitches began to be used to embellish the triads. The most common embellishing notes are a sixth, seventh, and ninth above the root of the chord. Examples are given in FIGURE 130. Two samples of each chord are given. The first is in close position, and the second, which contains the same pitches, is spread out (open position) as it would be more likely to appear in a piece of music. As long as the root is on the bottom, the chord is considered in root position; the upper notes can be mixed in any order. (Sometimes composers omit the fifth, making identification tricky.) Aside from the dominant-seventh chord, other diatonic seventh chords can be used to create a more complex, sophisticated sound. They can be built on any scale step by adding an interval of a seventh above the root to any diatonic triad. The addition of the fourth pitch, particularly when it is diatonic, rarely changes the function of the original triad, but it does add richness or atmosphere to the music.
CHROMATIC HARMONIES AND MODULATION
gradually and at the right time. Getting from C major to F major is quite easy because they are closely related keys, adjacent on the circle of fifths. To modulate smoothly from B major to C, the harmonies would need to progress through every intervening key in the circle of fifths, so the two keys are said to be less closely related. After a modulation, if the music remains in the new key for a significant amount of time, a double bar appears, and the new key signature is inserted. If the new key is temporary, the key signature does not need to change.
BEYOND COMMON PRACTICE
Modulation and chromatic harmonies allowed composers to write music that strayed further and further from the home base tonic. Compositions could be longer and longer and more and more chromatic. Composers generally pursued these changes in order to be more expressive. Throughout common practice, resolution of dissonance is the driving force behind harmony. In the nineteenth century, many Romantic composers sought out new ways to portray emotion and individuality in music. To many musicians and listeners, complex chromatic harmonies were better able to express the subtle variations of an individuals feelings. Richly textured chords could effectively convey the power, intensity, and transcendence of emotions. Another way of increasing complexity (and, composers believed, expressivity) was to delay the resolution to the tonic. Sometimes through deceptive harmonic turns and temporary modulations to ever-more-distant keys, it could take five or ten minutes for a dominant harmony to resolve to a tonic. Around 1910, a composer named Arnold Schoenberg concluded that music had become so chromatic that the only possible next step forward was to free dissonance from the need to resolve to the tonic. Schoenberg called this the emancipation of the dissonance.1 He called for composers to abandon the conventions of common-practice harmony that made one pitch lead to another. Lacking a fixed tonal center, this music soon became known as atonal music. Weberns Six Bagatelles, No. 5 (LISTENING E XAMPLE 5) has no tonic pitch, nor does Schoenbergs song Nacht. By 1925, Schoenberg developed a new system for determining pitch relationships. This system was known as the twelve-tone method. Instead of a scale, each piece had its own tone row (sometimes more than one) consisting of all twelve chromatic pitches. Constructing this tone row was a crucial part of the composition process, for there was no pre-set pattern of intervals to follow as there was for a major or minor scale. Each composition would have
Simple harmony is diatonic. Complex harmony uses more chromatic pitches. Four or more separate pitches may sound at one time. Sometimes the added pitches are diatonic, but sometimes they are chromatic, adding color. A brief passage of chromaticism is heard in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, during the phrase Buy me some peanuts Sometimes one or two pitches of the basic triad are altered, resulting in modal mixture. This normally happens between a major key and its parallel minor key. For instance, in a piece using the C major scale, a C minor triad or F minor triad might occasionally appearusing accidentals to indicate the E in the former and the A in the latter. Unless they adhere strictly to the natural-minor scale, minor keys are more chromatic than major ones. Most crucially, the natural minor scale has no ^ leading tone. Unaltered, ^ 7 is a whole step below 1, and it lacks the strong pull to tonic. Without a raised ^ 7, the dominant seventh chord is relatively weak because it contains no tritone. Another way that harmony can be made more complex is to modulate (that is, change keys) frequently. The simplest way to modulate is to use accidentals to create the dominant seventh chord of the new key and then resolve it to the new tonic. However, if the composer wants a smooth transition, it must be done
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its own row of twelve tones from which its melodies, motives, bass lines, and chords would be derived. Schoenbergs protgs, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, used his methods extensively in the 1930s, but twelve-tone techniques (as they are now called) and other serial techniques (a term that reflects the serial ordering of the pitches in the row) caught on more widely only after World War II. Today, most composers consider Schoenbergs approach to be one of many intriguing ways to organize pitch. Other challenges to common practice tonality were mounted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some composers sought to redefine music. Luigi Russolo sought to generate and categorize noises. Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky were among composers who sometimes used familiar chords from the common-practice tradition without ever resolving them (non-functional harmonies), adopted unusual scales (including pentatonic, whole-tone and octatonic), and sometimes wrote music in two different keys to be performed simultaneously ( polytonality). Examples of pentatonic and whole-tone scales can be heard in Debussys Voiles (LISTENING E XAMPLE 1), while the introductory section of Stravinskys Rite of Spring was derived from an octatonic scale. As the twentieth century progressed, an increasing number of experimental composers rejected the idea of forward motion in music, preferring to create music that was meditative, static, or circular rather than linear.
them to relate to each other on a note-by-note basis while retaining their independence. If two performers are producing versions of the same melody at the same time, but are not playing in precise unisonthat is, each has its own slight differencesthe texture is called heterophony. Heterophonic texture is fairly rare in Western music, but was employed quite often in the earliest styles of jazz. Dippermouth Blues (LISTENING E XAMPLE 8), for instance, opens with homophonic texture, and then switches to heterophonic texture. Counterpoint is the process developed by Western composers after about 1350 to create polyphony (that is, music with a polyphonic texture). These simultaneous melodies are usually in different registers. They are independenteach has its own pitches, contour, shape, and rhythmbut they follow the same beat. Most importantly, their pitches fit into the same harmonic progression. The two (or more) melodies are carefully coordinated by the composer on a note-by-note basis. Any dissonances or non-harmonic tones must occur within a complicated and detailed set of parameters. If the rules are broken, the music will not sound right to experienced Western ears, and most performers will find the music especially difficult to play or sing. The rules are a bit like grammar rules; they were created to describe a complex process, but can also be used in a prescriptive way to create successful sentences. Composing counterpoint is a bit like completing a difficult number puzzle, like Sudoku, or a diagram-less crossword puzzle. Every choice affects many other choices. When complete, everything fits together in a complex but fulfilling system in which vertical and horizontal components mesh at every point of intersection. Imitative polyphony, on the other hand, features only one melody, but it is played by multiple people at staggered intervals, such as the way that children are taught to sing Row Row Row Your Boat: each group sings the same tune, but starts slightly later in time than the previous group, so that polyphony (many sounds) results. A subtle illustration of imitative polyphony occurs in Weberns Bagatelle No. 5. Instrumentation, the instrument or combination of instruments used, is among the most noticeable features of a given piece of music. If the pitches of a melody fall within the range of an instrument, that instrument can play the melody. An electric guitar playing Happy Birthday sounds quite different from a piano playing ityet even a small child will recognize it as the same tune. If the same pitches were divided up and given to members of a symphony orchestra, a marching band, or a four-part choir, the effect would be drastically different each time. Arranging is the art of taking an existing piece
Other Aspects of Musical Sound Texture, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, and More Timbre
Besides melody, rhythm, and harmony, a number of factors greatly affect how a performance sounds. Texture in music has a specific meaning. It describes the number of things that are going on at once in a piece of music. The four types of texture in Western music are monophony, homophony, polyphony, and heterophony. Monophonic music consists of a single, unaccompanied melodic line, such as the bassoon line that opens The Rite of Spring. Multiple instruments or voices may be playing that melody, but they are all performing the same pitch at the same timethat is, they are playing the melody in unison. Homophonic texture has two different things going on at once: a melody and a harmonic accompaniment. The accompaniment differs from the melody, but plays a clearly subordinate role. All of the popular songs on this years Music CD (LISTENING E XAMPLES 1014) employ homophonic texture; as listeners, we focus on the voice, but the voice is supported by background instruments. In a polyphonic texture, two or more melodic lines unfold simultaneously. Each could stand alone, but the composer created
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of music (melody, harmony, rhythm) and giving instructions as to what each individual performer should play. Two different arrangements of Happy Birthday for the same combination of instruments may sound very different, depending upon which instruments are given prominent, as opposed to secondary or background, roles. Each instrument has a unique pattern of overtones. All the partials we have discussed are present to some degree, but they differ in their relative strength. With a clarinet, for instance, the fundamental, first, and third partials are very strong. These produce the same pitch in different octaves. Partials that produce other pitches are relatively very weak on the clarinet. In addition, few extraneous sounds occur when a clarinet is played (clicks, rattles, buzzes, sympathetic vibrations of the mouthpiece or keys). As a result, the clarinet produces a sound wave that looks very close to a pure sine wave, with little ambiguity in pitch. On the opposite end of the spectrum are church bells. Sometimes the overtones with bells are so strong that they seem to drown out the fundamental, and the listener may wonder what the real pitch is supposed to be. The timbre of a pitch is also affected by the thickness and density of the instruments material and the amount of resonance. The timbre of an acoustic guitar is affected by the size and shape of its hollow wooden body, where the sound waves produced by the strings resonate and are amplified. For much twentieth-century music, both popular and classical, the choice of instruments and the way they are combined play a central role in making each piece a unique work of art. In the absence of
common-practice harmony, many twentieth-century compositions use changes in timbre to mark changes in form. Weberns Bagatelle No. 5 pays very close attention to different timbres, such as plucking the strings or bowing in unaccustomed places on the instrument. In popular music, many listeners can distinguish stylesrockabilly, Motown, bluegrass, disco, punk, or houseafter hearing just a few seconds of music, due to the differences in characteristic combinations of instruments and timbres.
Dynamics, Articulation, Ornamentation

Dynamics, the loudness and softness of a sound, are useful to performers and composers for expressive purposes. TABLE 4 shows the common Italian terms for different dynamic levels and their abbreviations. Early in the history of the modern piano, the instrument was called the pianoforte because unlike its predecessors, it could play both quietly (piano) and loudly (forte) in response to changes in the pianists touch. A gradual increase in dynamics is called a crescendo and a gradual decrease is called a decrescendo or diminuendo. In a score, either the abbreviations cresc. or dim. or a symbol shaped like an elongated V rotated ninety degrees clockwise (for crescendo) or counterclockwise (for diminuendo) indicate a gradual change in volume. The dynamic level for even a single pitch can change multiple times if its duration is long enough. Imagine a consonant chord, such as the first syllable of the A-men at the end of a sacred piece of music, swelling from a soft to a loud dynamic level then
Table 4
Dynamics Chart
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Table 5
Common Articulation Symbols
decrescendo-ing back to a whisper: a very dramatic effect. Another expressive factor affecting the sound of a piece is articulation. Articulation has to do with the mechanics of starting and ending a sound. Staccato indicates that the performer should shorten the duration of a note rather than letting it sound for its full value; this produces extra silence before the next note, often making the musical phrase sound crisper or choppier. Legato means multiple pitches are played in a smooth, connected but not overlapping manner. On a keyboard, one can produce staccato by poising the finger above a key and pecking down quickly, then quickly returning the finger to its original position. On wind instruments, players use their tongue to produce a distinct beginning for a given pitch. On a violin, the bow may be bounced from the string, or the finger used to pluck it (called pizzicato); Webern occasionally requires the string instruments to perform pizzicato during Bagatelle No. 5. Legato involves leaving the finger (with the weight of the arm balanced on it) on the key until it is time for the next pitch, at which time the weight is transferred to another finger on the next key. An accent involves more sudden sound than a staccato, and, unlike staccato, silent space before the next pitch is not required. Various degrees of pressure, tonguing, and bow pressure all contribute to articulation. Ornamentation refers to localized embellishments, which are often not written down. A pop singer can swoop into a pitch, and a trumpet player can add a trill to the last pitch of a melody as a grand finale.
Form in Music
Form describes how music is organized on a larger time scalehow units are combined to make larger structures. Form is the architecture of music.
Perceiving Musical Form

Music takes place in time. By the time the final notes are heard, the sound waves from the beginning have long disappeared. To have a sense of the whole shape of a piece of music, a listener must remember what came before. Most people use some kind of visual representation of the music to think about its overall form, such as scores (music notation) and diagrams. Memory and anticipation are the key components to the listening experience. A listener who expects a dissonant passage to resolve into a consonant one may encounter one of several results. The expectation may be met, it may be thwarted, or it may be deferred. As the listener hears a piece, he/she experiences an ebb and flow of tension and release. Tension and release, we know, lend shape to a chord progression or melody. Tension and release also operate on a larger scale, though the listener is often less conscious of it. The primary way that tension is created is through harmonic dissonance. Besides dissonance, tension can be created in other ways, including increased dynamic level, increased tempo, or increased rhythmic activity using shorter durations. Some combination of all of these is needed to sustain tension and release throughout a long composition of more than a minute or two in length. In the next section, we will describe the building blocks of musical form: motives, phrases, cadences, and themes. Then, we will examine how Western
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composers combine these to create larger forms using the principles of repetition, variation, development, and contrast.
^ ^ ^ pitches up one scale degree (^ 2- 1 rather than 1- 7), it is now possible for a tonic chord to support you this time.
Elements of Form
MOTIVE
CADENCE
A motive is the smallest unit of form. A motive is best defined as the smallest identifiable recurring musical idea. A motive has a distinctive melodic and rhythmic profile. In Happy Birthday, the first four notes (corresponding to the four syllables of text) could be called a motive. This motive has rhythmic traits (happy consists of a long duration followed by a shorter one, while birthday consists of two durations of equal length, and birth falls on the downbeat, which gives that syllable rhythmic emphasis) and melodic traits (The two notes of happy occur on the same pitch; then on birthday, the melody rises a step and falls back to the first pitch.) To describe the motives melodic contour, we would say it rises and falls. A melodic or rhythmic motive that is repeated many, many times in immediate succession is called an ostinato (from the Italian word for obstinate). Ostinatos can be heard in Nacht and in many sections of The Rite of Spring.
PHRASE
The term for a resting point in a piece of music is cadence. Not all cadences have the same amount of strength or finality, and there are different names to indicate this. A half cadence rests on the dominant harmony, like the first short phrase of Happy Birthday. A full cadence, also called an authentic cadence, uses the progression V-I, as the second short phrase does. Authentic cadences are broken down further by the degree of finality they convey. Other types of cadences also exist, but the important idea is that a cadence is a point of relative rest in music, roughly analogous to a comma, semicolon, or period in language. Cadences occur at the ends of most phrases, themes, larger sections, and entire pieces of music.
THEME
A phrase is a cohesive musical thought. In Happy Birthday, the music for the first four words can be thought of as a short phrase. It has a beginning (the motive) and an end (you), followed by a brief pause. The second time the words Happy Birthday to you are sung, they constitute a second short musical phrase, also followed by a brief pause. It begins with the same motive, but ends a little differently. Phrases often come in related pairs. The first member of the pair is called the antecedent phrase, and the second is called the consequent phrase. As in the Happy Birthday example, the two phrases are very similar in length, rhythm, and melodic contour. The difference lies in the way each phrase ends. The first phrase ends somewhat inconclusively; this is something the listener can sense, feeling that something more is needed for closure. Musical terminology can describe this sense of inconclusiveness. The phrases rhythm does indeed come to a rest on a downbeat (you), but the harmony supporting the end of the phrase is a dominant harmony, and the melodic pitch is scale degree seven, the leading tone. To ears accustomed to Western music, both of these are particularly unstable. The consequent phrase provides the perfect solution. It begins with similar musical material, in what is called a parallel structure. In this case, it duplicates the entire rhythm and first four pitches of the antecedent phrase. The difference is that the consequent phrase comes to a more restful end. Merely by moving the last two
A theme is a set of phrases that make a complete melody, which plays a prominent role in a longer piece of music. For example, the entire song Happy Birthday could be used as the main theme for a twelve-minute composition called Variations on a Birthday Tune, for Concert Band.
INTRODUCTION AND CODA
Many pieces of music begin with an introduction, which is music that precedes the first main theme of the piece. Similarly, a great many pieces end with a coda, which means tail in Italian. A coda sounds conclusive, as if it is wrapping up the composition. When analyzing the form in a piece of music, introductions and codas are usually disregarded; they serve mainly as an outer frame for the central piece.
Common Forms
Musical form controls larger spans of time. Just as mystery novels, thirty-minute television sitcoms, and movie scripts tend to follow certain patterns, so does music. Balance, proportion, drama, climax, and denouement operate in musical form. Some musicspecific vocabulary will help explain common forms. Repetition, variation, and contrast are the most basic formal processes in music. The listener must remember what he/she has already heard in order to recognize any of these. Often, musical memory happens on a subconscious level. A phrase may simply sound right; a song heard for the first time may seem oddly familiar when the composer makes skillful use of repetition.
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REPETITION
Repetition means, literally, repeating musical material, using the identical pitches, rhythms, and harmonies, or at least a very close approximation. If a musical idea (usually two measures or less) is repeated at a different pitch level, it is called a sequence. A sequence can be rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, or any combination thereof. When describing musical form, complete sections of music are labeled with capital letters. The music to a song made up of a single, multi-phrased melody (perhaps two sets of antecedent-consequent phrases), repeated four times with different words each time would be diagrammed as follows: A A A A.
VARIATION
progression is repeated, with variations in the melodic material, for several minutes or more. Usually in a moderate or relaxed tempo, with four beats to the measure, the blues progression can be played in any key, though C, B , and F are traditional favorites. Minor-key blues are possible but less common. The basic shape can be summarized as three lines of four measures, each ending at the tonic. The first line lays out the tonic harmonyand the singers main lament. The second line starts with a harmonic attempt to escape the tonic, but is pulled back down, while the singer repeats his/her complaint. The third line begins with an even stronger effort to rise above the tonic, but it too sinks quickly back to the starting point. Harmonic alterations that embellish but do not change this three-line profile are common.2 This form is used in Dippermouth Blues and in portions of St. Louis Blues.
IMPROVISATION
The principle of variation is also central to music. Generally speaking, variation is repetition with enough alterations that the listener senses both continuity and contrast.
THEME AND VARIATIONS
Theme and variations is a common way of structuring a composition. Such a piece generally starts with a straightforward statement of the theme, and then follows it with a new section that repeats the theme but makes significant changes. The listener recognizes that the theme is recurring, but different harmonies, or a new accompaniment pattern, or a fancier rhythm, or a more complicated texture clearly delineate a new section. A variation may involve changes in any of the basic musical elements, but enough must remain unchanged that on some level, it remains the same musical idea. A variation is diagrammed by adding a prime mark to the same capital letter used for the theme. Aaron Coplands Piano Variations could be diagrammed A A' A'' A''' A'''', etc. TWELVE-BAR BLUES. The twelve-bar blues is * also a variation form. This twelve-measure chord
Improvisation in jazz, especially the styles common before 1950, uses the principle of variation. Individual performers create spontaneous variations of a familiar melody while the other instruments play its harmonies in a steady tempo. Dippermouth Blues (LISTENING E XAMPLE 8) illustrates improvisation during several instrumental solos. Repetition and variation occur throughout music on more abstract and more localized levels. As a localized example, the second, consequent phrase of Happy Birthday varies the material of the antecedent phrase. Rhythmically, the song is quite repetitive: try speaking the rhythms on a neutral, un-pitched syllable, and youll find it impossible to distinguish the first, second, and fourth phrases. On a larger scale, you can think of every new birthday performance as a repetition. Sometimes a brave soul will attempt to add harmony, or vary the words or the tune. Everyone present usually realizes this is
Figure 131
Twelve-bar blues, basic progression.
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a variation on the familiar song, not a new composition out of left field. Whether taking place on a small scale or in the form of a lengthy piece, repetition and variation lend continuity to music. They prevent a piece of music from sounding like a string of unrelated events by providing musical coherence.
CONTRAST
Development
Fugue is not actually a standard form, * FUGUE. but a technique. However, the form of many classical pieces is determined by the way the composer uses fugal technique, rather than by any of the other forms described here. A fugue usually has a single theme, called a fugue subject, which the composer develops using the technique of imitative counterpoint. When there is a companion theme, it is called a countersubject. Imitation, the approximate repetition of a melodic idea at a different pitch level, is central to fugal technique. At the beginning of a fugue, the subject is usually heard alone, without accompaniment or harmony. A second line of music then enters, imitating the subject (usually a fourth lower or a fifth higher), and soon a third and sometimes a fourth line enter, also imitating the subject, until a thick polyphonic texture has been created. As the fugue continues, the subject may be inverted (turned upside down), reversed, elongated, fragmented, transposed, and overlapped with itself or with polyphonic countermelodies. Fugue techniques are much older than the majorminor tonal system, but composers even into the twenty-first century have found them intriguing and flexible. Webern uses recurring timbre as the basis for short fugues in Bagatelle No. 5. FORM. Sonata form is a standard form * SONATA used for the first movements of many Western classical compositions, beginning around 1730. Sonata form has three main sectionsexposition, development, and recapitulationand two main musical ideas. The exposition presents the first idea in the tonic key, modulates to a different key (usually the dominant key), and presents the second idea in the new key. These ideas can be easy to identify when they are themes made of antecedent and consequent phrases. But sometimes they are simply collections of motives or chords, in which case the key change is the best signal that Idea #2 is about to begin. The key change, or transition, is usually characterized by increased rhythmic activity, louder dynamics, turbulent or unstable harmonies, and new accidentals. Idea #2, in the new key, has an element of contrast. It may be gentler, lighter in texture, higher in range, or contain moreor lessmotion than Idea #1. Idea #2 is most often in the dominant, or the key that takes the fifth degree of the opening keys scale as tonic. The exposition ends with a strong cadence in the new key. Traditionally, the exposition is repeated from the beginning, in part to help establish the ideas in the listeners memory. The development section of sonata form is harmonically unstable and exploratory. Melodic,
Contrast is an important characteristic of many larger musical forms. AND RONDO FORMS. The simplest * TERNARY form using contrast is three-part or ternary form, also called ABA form, in which two sections of very similar music frame a contrasting middle section. Each of the three sections is selfcontained; each normally ends with an authentic cadence. (Although Voiles is in ternary form, its cadences are not clear-cut; this blurriness is a feature of the pieces Impressionistic style.) In classical music, ternary form is often used for the inner movement(s) of multi-movement works. First movements more often use sonata form (discussed later) while last movements are usually in sonata or rondo form. Rondo form is also built from distinct sections, one of which keeps returning. Typical diagrams for rondo form include ABACABA or ABACA. There are no hardand-fast rules about length, proportions, or the nature of the contrast. FORM. In mid-twentieth-century popular * 32-BAR music, most choruses contain a section of contrasting material. The song I Got Rhythm is an excellent example. The form of the chorus is A (I got rhythm), A (I got daisies), B (Old man trouble), A (I got starlight). The pitches, contour, and harmony of the B section contrast with the A material, though in this song the rhythm remains similar. Somewhere Over the Rainbow is another good example. The A sections all begin with Somewhere and the B section starts with Someday Ill wish upon a star. Many popular song choruses follow a similar AABA format. Because each section usually consists of two 4-bar phrases, this is known as 32-bar form. FORM. In the early days of * VERSE-CHORUS popular music, the most popular formal architecture was verse-chorus form. It consists of multiple verses, each with different words, and a repetitive chorus, or refrain. This form is often diagrammed as a-B-a-B, etc., with the uppercase B indicating that both the melody and the words repeat. During the verses, it is only the melody that repeats. Most of the popular music examples on the CD illustrate verse-chorus form; see LISTENING E XAMPLES 1013.
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harmonic, and rhythmic material from the exposition reappears, fragmented and varied. Phrases of irregular length, sudden changes in dynamics and texture, chromatic alterations, unexpected chord progressions, and frequent modulations convey a sense of struggle. The development section ends in a half cadence on the dominant chord of the original key. With the recapitulation, order is restored. Idea #1 returns, just as it was presented in the exposition. The transition and Idea #2 follow, in what is almost a literal repetition of the exposition. The big exception is that the transition does not modulate. When Idea #2 arrives, it is in the same key as Idea #1. Not only has order been restored, but the contrasting Idea #2, off in its own key at the beginning, has now been pulled into the key of Idea #1, the key that had started the whole movement. A concluding section in the original key brings the entire movement to a close. The first movements of countless symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, and other compositions are in sonata form. Early on, sonata form was simply known as first movement form. Very long works often consist of three or four shorter, distinct pieces called movements. The sonata cycle is the most prevalent multi-movement composition. The term sonata cycle is rarely used, but it is seen everywhere, particularly in longer instrumental works from about 1730 to 1950. Thousands of three-movement works titled Sonata exist for solo piano, for solo instrument unaccompanied or with keyboard, and for small groups of instruments. In addition, most compositions titled String Quartet or Symphony from the same date range use a four-movement sonata cycle form. Three-movement sonata cycles usually follow a fast-slow-fast pattern of tempos. The first movement is usually a dramatic sonata form; the second slower and more lyrical, using ABA form; and the final movement lively, in either sonata form, rondo form, or a hybrid of the two. In the four-movement sonata cycle, which is favored by composers writing for string quartets or orchestras, a dance-like minuet and trio movement normally appears before the last movement.
legato phrase. Historians have found written comments suggesting that the exact pitch for concert A may have varied as much as a minor third in either direction from todays A440which even today is not universally adopted. Recording technology has allowed us to preserve far more information than notation allows, but this too is limited in different ways. An entire sub-field called performance practice exists to address the question, how did the music really sound? Perhaps critics like Christopher Small have it right when they propose that in addition to marveling at the intricate structure of Western music, we should also study the human activity he calls Musicking.3
Section I Summary Sound and Music

Music is sound organized in time. *
Pitch, Rhythm, Harmony
Developed over centuries in the Western world, * common-practice tonality is the widely accepted system for describing the relationships among pitches and harmonies. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound. It is * the basic building block for melody and harmony. Harmony occurs when two or more pitches sound simultaneously.
The octave occurs naturally in the overtone * series. Western tradition divides it into twelve equal intervals called half steps. Melody is a coherent succession of pitches per* ceived as a whole, with a beginning, middle, and end. Major and minor scales are sets of seven dif* ferent pitches arranged in a specific pattern of whole and half steps within a single octave. The beat is the steady, regular pulse underlying * most music. Tempo is the speed of the beat. Meter groups beats into * strong and weak beats. regular patterns of of varying
Which Is the Real Music? Scores, Recordings, and Performance

Music theory traditionally describes pieces of music as if they were fixed objects. However, it is important to remember that music is performed. Music notation is able to convey some things preciselypitch relationships, rhythms, instrumentation, and, to some degree, phrasing, dynamics, and articulation. Yet it also has obvious limitations. We cannot know how smoothly people in the 1870s performed a
Rhythm is the series of durations * lengths that overlie the beat.
Nearly all Western music is built upon the need * for dominant harmony to resolve to the tonic, or resting tone. A key is a hierarchical set of harmonic and * melodic pitch relationships organized around a tonic and using one of the twenty-four major and minor scales. Diatonic music uses only pitches from a single * scale; music is chromatic when it uses accidentals (sharps and flats) to add pitches from outside the key, or to change keys.
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The triad is the most basic type of chord. It conMusical material may be repeated, varied, devel* * sists of two stacked thirds. oped, or contrasted with different material to Some composers in the last 120 years have * sought to expand and even overturn commonpractice tonality. create longer forms; it can be framed by an introduction and/or a coda. Common forms include theme and variations, * twelve-bar blues, thirty-two-bar form, ABA form, verse-chorus, and sonata form.
Other Aspects
Texture, counterpoint, dynamics, articulation, * and ornamentation are important features that can distinguish otherwise similar musical sounds.
Conclusion
Music can be represented by diagrams, with * notation, or on sound recordings, each of which has limitations. Because music is an art form that structures time * rather than space, some people consider it an activity rather than a fixed object.
Form
Tension and release, memory and anticipation, * and continuity and contrast are fundamental to the listeners musical experience. Motives, phrases, cadences, and themes are the * smallest building blocks of form.
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I NI O I T SEC
CLASsICAL MUSIC AND MODE RNISM
Style Periods, Past and Present Music Historys Traditional Eras

Anyone who has laughed at the hairstyles and clothing in an old yearbook is aware of the changes in fashion that take place over time. Someone who is very attuned to attire might be able to guess a photographs date within a year or two simply from the types of outfits being worn. Even someone who doesnt know much about the latest fashion trends would be pretty confident that an illustration of a woman wearing a hoop skirt was drawn from the past, unless perhaps the woman was participating in a wedding. It is often the case, in fashion and in many of the arts, that older approaches are retained for ritual occasions. Similarly, musical styles have ebbed and flowed over the centuries, sometimes changing characteristics fairly rapidly, and sometimes holding on to certain approaches for long, long stretches. As with fashion, there are always people who are on the cutting edge, striving to create things that are new and different, and there are those who cling to the past, long after most people have moved on to something else. But, when a majority of composers are writing music in similar ways, historians call this similarity a style period or era. Both visual art and architecture can also be grouped into style periods, and many of the names for those eras have been borrowed by music historians to describe large-scale stylistic shifts in music-making. It has become conventional to divide musical epochs into six broad eras, starting with the Middle Ages (c. 8001400), sometimes called the Medieval period. This dating is not to imply that there was no music prior to the ninth century! Rather it is an indication of the fact that the earliest attempts in the Western
world to develop musical notationa way of writing music downdate from this time. With this invention, we begin to have examples of the actual music performed in each time periodnot just the verbal descriptions of contemporary observers. The Catholic Church took the lead in developing this new notational system, since the Church leadership wanted to standardize music across the far-flung Holy Roman Empire. As the power of the Church began to wane somewhat with the rise of Humanism, new musical practices were adopted; this era is now designated as the Renaissance period and dates from around 1400 to 1600. The Renaissance yielded in turn to the Baroque era. Traditionally, the end of the Baroque is placed at 1750, since that was the year that the noted composer Johann Sebastian Bach (16851750) died. However, in recent years, many historians have pointed out that Bachs approach to composition was seen as very old fashioned by the time of his death, and that it is likely that the next erathe Classical periodwas already underway some years prior to 1750. There is also considerable debate about when the Classical period merged into the next era, the Romantic period. We can see some Romantic innovations appearing as early as 1800, but there were a lot of people still composing music in the Classical style as late as 1830. At some point during those thirty years, however, the balance changed. Certainly, though, by the mid-nineteenth century, the rich harmonies and lush expressiveness that characterize Romantic music were in the majority, and Romanticism would dominate until the end of the century.
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What is Modernism?
Most scholars agree that a sixth stylistic era was born at the start of the twentieth centurybut they dont agree on what to call this era. This disagreement is nothing new all of music historys style period names have been applied retroactively, and often pejoratively, by subsequent generations. Baroque, for instance, means misshapen or distorted, so the label certainly wasnt initially meant as a compliment. No consensus yet exists for labeling the music of our own time, and there are obvious problems with some of the leading proposals. For instance, it seems implausible to look at a composition from 1905 and call it Contemporary music. A similar problem exists with one of the most frequent names, the Modern era. Not only does music from over a hundred years ago not seem very modern, but also this term has been used many times in the past to designate the latest music of those historical eras. At the dawn of the Baroque, for instance, composers and theorists argued vigorously over the merits of the stile antico (antique style) and stile moderno (modern style). In short, modern is a term that inevitably becomes obsolete, so only time will tell which designation will win out as the best descriptor for the music of our recent past.
Clinging to the Past

Complicating matters even further for music historians, Romanticism did not fully die out at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, faced with some of the radical experimentation of many Modernist composers, there were those who held on tighter than ever to the tonal music of years gone by. In earlier centuries, concert-goers generally wanted to hear fresh, new music; in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more and more people clamored to hear old favorites by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and so forth. Historians describe this trend as the development of a canon what we might call the classics. (When commentators refer to the classics, or to classical musicusually with a lower-case cthey do not mean music solely from the Classical period, but rather art music or concert music from any era, in contrast to popular music.) When a society has developed a canon of musical works, composers face a special challenge: not only are they in competition with each other, but they also must compete with music from the past. Some people in this situation, such as Gustav Mahler (18601911), Richard Strauss (18641949), Ralph Vaughan Williams (18721958), and Sergei Rachmaninoff (18731943), took the attitude of if you cant beat em, join em! Their music is often categorized as post-Romanticism. It uses many of the features that would have been showcased in
Conductor Leopold Stokowski, photographed by George Grantham Bain. Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was especially influential in shaping American musical tastes.
nineteenth-century music, such as common-practice harmony with extended chords, an emphasis on expressiveness and long-ranging melodic flow, and a rich array of timbres, sometimes referred to as tone colors. However, post-Romantic music often combined these Romantic features with some of the Modern eras innovations, or with techniques from the more distant past. Audience demand for the canonand for new works that resembled the most beloved features of that older repertorydid offer many benefits to musicians. New opera companies were founded in numerous European and American cities; similarly, concert societies established a wide array of performance series. Many more communities began to sponsor professional orchestras. Americans tended to hire European-born conductors to direct these ensembles, and Leopold Stokowski (18821977), conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was especially influential in shaping American tastes. Since Stokowski consistently emphasized European works in his repertory, other orchestras in the United States did the same, thus cementing the canon even
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further. These concert and opera activities had to be staffed by qualified performers, increasing the demand for good training programs. Although American music conservatories were much younger than their European counterparts, they had begun to flourish from the mid-nineteenth century onward: Peabody, in Baltimore, was founded in 1857; Bostons New England Conservatory was established in 1867; and the conservatory known today as the Juilliard School opened its doors in New York in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art. Music training was also becoming an option at an increasing number of colleges and universities.
Radio
One of the most exciting technical innovations of the new era was the development of the wireless transmission of sound. Through much of the nineteenth century, wires had been used for long-distance communication, via the telegraph and the telephone, and even music was occasionally transmitted via the telephone. But there was no such thing as a cordless or mobile phone; there had to be a physical connection between the source and the receiver. Things began to change in the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874 1937) and others achieved several breakthroughs in wireless technology. Initially, they focused on sending Morse code signals, but on December 23, 1900, speech was transmitted for the first time.4 Over the next decade, more and more wireless enthusiasts started building transmitters, and various musical performances were broadcast along the way, over longer and longer distances. Lee De Forest (18731961) presented what are considered to be the first public radio broadcasts on January 12 and 13, 1910, when he transmitted two performances of New Yorks Metropolitan Opera, including the voice of the legendary singer Enrico Caruso (18731921).5 Reports vary as to the audibility of the broadcasts, but one radio engineer on board a ship in the Atlantic reported, The reception was excellent.6 The importance of radio was underscored in a surprising but unfortunate way by the 1912 Titanic disaster. From its radio room, the damaged oceanliner sent an S.O.S. signalbut one of the nearest ships, the S. S. Californian, had only one radio operator, and he was off-duty. In response to this tragic incident, the United States passed the Radio Act of 1912, with two main requirements: all seagoing vessels needed to hire enough radio operators so that distress frequencies could be monitored continuously, and all U.S. radio stations needed to be licensed by the federal government (because there had been incidents of amateur radio operators sending out false distress signals).7 Another provision of the Act gave the president the power to close these radio stations in the time of warand this is exactly what happened on April 7, 1917, when the Department of Commerce shut down all private radio operations in the United States. Historians are quick to point out that this action wasnt as drastic as it might seem since commercial broadcasting had not yet started and would not begin until 1920. Still, the potential for radio as a means to distribute music to a wideranging audience had already been demonstrated, and listeners were eager for public radio broadcasting to resume after World War I. (To read more about early radio development, visit http://transition.fcc. gov/omd/history/radio/.)
Embracing the Future

Even as music of the past retained a firm grip on a great deal of concert programming, there were those who longed to shake off the old ways and seek new paths. In fact, in the early twentieth century, there was a greater diversity of styles than had ever been heard before, not only in classical music, but also in popular entertainmentand there were new audiences for this music as well. Technology played an important role in this burgeoning activity. Innovations in instrument-building in the nineteenth century had already benefited musicians through the development of valves and pistons for brass instruments, improved key designs for woodwinds, and iron frames for pianos. Brand-new instruments such as the saxophone, piccolo, and tuba began to be manufactured. Not only did similar achievements continue into the twentieth century, but also other kinds of technologies were making it possible to communicate in ways never before imagined. Very rapidly, the game was changing: if listeners didnt like one kind of music, technology now made it easy to switch to some other style. It was no longer a situation in which people had to come to where the music was being performed. Now, the music through various mechanical meanscould be taken directly to them. This increase in the number of potential listeners meant that more types of music could find an audience; prior limits on space were no longer a factor.
The Early Twentieth Century Technology Takes the Lead

For eons, music had been accessible solely to those who were in the immediate vicinity of the musician, and of course the music had to be experienced live. However, such limitations were being challenged at the dawn of the new century. Certainly, live music continued (and continues) to be enjoyed and highly valued, but some technological changes occurred in the early twentieth century that fundamentally altered the relationship between musicians and listeners.
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Photograph of the Titanics Marconi room, taken by passenger Fr. Browne. The Titanics radio operator broadcast an S.O.S. after the liner struck an iceberg. Not all the nearby ships were monitoring their radio frequencies, so only some lives were saved.
Photograph from the Fr. Browne Collection.
The Advent of Recording

Paralleling the development of wireless transmissions, nineteenth-century experimenters were also figuring out ways to make acoustic recordings of sound. Thomas Edison recorded the spoken poem Mary Had a Little Lamb onto tinfoil in 1877, but he did little with this cylinder phonograph over the next several years, as he instead spent his time developing electric light. When Edison returned to his audio device in 1888, he considered it to be a dictation machine, for use in business offices, and didnt initially anticipate the potential it would have for entertainment.
AUDIO
1910, 78 rpm discs were common in affluent houses, and in 1913, the Berlin Philharmonic recorded the complete Fifth Symphony by Beethoven. It required eight discs that were bound into an album, which introduced this now-standard term into the recording vocabulary. Enrico Caruso had begun making recordings in 1904, and his average yearly sales up to 1920 were $115,000.9 Technical improvements to the design meant that movable equipment also became feasible, and so during World War I many soldiers took portable gramophones to the front; the manufacturer Decca even marketed one of its designs as a trench model.10 These machines contributed to morale in numerous ways. One grieving musician, Arthur Bliss, whose brother had been killed in 1916, wrote, I have suddenly found solace in the gramophone.11 Corporal A.D. Pankhurst was highly entertained by one experience with his gramophone: On my leave Id brought back a small portable gramophoneIt was a Decca and Id brought back about a dozen records, mostly of musical comedy. It started shellingWe had to evacuate our barn and we spent the night in the open. It rained heavily. I woke upfinding myself
Other inventors were quick to see the commercial possibilities of sound recording. Columbia introduced the graphophone at the same time that Edison was marketing his phonograph; both devices now used wax cylinders, rather than the earlier tinfoil surface. From 1890 onward, it was increasingly easy for customers to purchase recordings of musicians. The gramophone soon followed, which played flatdisc recordings instead of cylinders. These discs were much easier to mass-produce, but both technologies coexisted for about twenty-five years.8 By
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Not only were customers eagerly purchasing the recordings and playback equipment, but there was also a growing market for the new machines that could record sound. Not all of these devices were used commercially. There were a number of scholars who realized that as the world was growing increasingly industrialized, some musical traditions were being lost. These researchers used the recording machines to preserve folk and ethnic music in a great many countries. In the United States, Frances Densmore recorded more than two thousand Native American melodies.14 (One problem with the technology was that only short amounts of music could be recorded on each cylinder or disk, so many recordings contained performances that were no longer authenticsome pieces were drastically shortened, or had been performed much more quickly than usual.) A new term, ethnomusicology, was developed to describe the work of these pioneers. Some of the early ethnomusicologists, such as the Hungarians Zoltn Kodly (18821967) and Bla Bartk (18811945), were not just scholars but composers as well. Kodly and Bartk often used the music they were collecting as their inspiration for new compositions, illustrating nationalism, one of the styles we will discuss later in this Resource Guide.
An advertisement for one of Deccas portable gramophone models, which could be carried to the Front. FILM
practically covered with water in the shell hole, but too tired to move, but we went up into the line and took part in the battle. At the end of the day we went back and I thought Id go into the barnBy good fortune my gramophone was perched on the joists, so when the floor collapsed the gramophone remained there Well, the gramophone started, to my great surprise. It played The End of a Perfect Day. That was the record! People may think Im making it up, but its perfectly true. That was my twenty-first birthday. April the ninth, 1918.12 The British even used at least one gramophone as an assault weapon against the Germans in 1918. About to be overrun, an English battery commander, Captain Parrish, set up a record containing a defiant anti-German song on the gramophone in his trench, then fled the dugout. The German lieutenant who first entered the trench, Ernst Junger, spoke English. He wound up the gramophone and listened to the songs message, and, having just lost four men during the assault, he was so infuriated that he crashed the gramophone onto the ground.13
In addition to his innovations with sound, Edison was one of the first to experiment successfully with moving pictures. In 1891 he unveiled the Kinetoscope, which allowed one person at a time to view (silent) images. He then devised the Kinetophone, which was equipped with one of his phonographs inside the Kinetoscope cabinetthus allowing sound to be played via headphones while the moving images were being viewed.15 Individual people enjoyed these peephole devices, but early film projectors seemed even more sensational since they allowed a group of viewers to enjoy the moving pictures at the same time. However, these were silent films, and if there was music during the experience, it was provided by live musicians. Nevertheless, during the early twentieth century, experimenters tried to develop ways of synchronizing the film images with recorded sound, either by coordinating a phonograph or gramophone with the projector (known as sound-on-disc technology), or by creating a soundtrack, in which the sound was imbedded onto the filmstrip itself (called sound-on-film).16 Both technologies were hampered by the fact that they could not amplify the sound sufficiently to fill a room, and early experiments in Germany and France came to a standstill during the war years; development was slowed in the United States as well. It was not until the 1920s that the American inventor Lee
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This thirst for a new independence was not unique to composers; artists and architects were pursuing similar efforts. Just as music had borrowed names from art and architecture for its historical eras, the labels applied to various new musical styles were again often borrowed from the visual arts. Many definable artistic movements (-isms) began to flourish, including Impressionism, Expressionism, and Primitivism, among others. As some artists and composers were innovators throughout their careers, a single person might be linked to multiple artistic movements. If any one feature could be said to characterize the Modern era, it might be a pervasive interest in experimentation. Later in the century, the painter Jackson Pollack (191256) would become famous for his drip paintings, in which he poured or threw paint over his canvas. Similarly, the composer Henry Cowell (18971965) achieved early notoriety for works such as The Tides of Manaunaun (c. 1912), which made use of tone clusters. These blocks of sound were produced by using a fist or even the entire forearm on the piano keyboard, introducing a very new performance technique.
Edisons Kinetophone, 1913. The Kinetophone was equipped with a phonograph inside the Kinetoscope cabinet, allowing sound to be played via headphones while moving images were being viewed.
Image courtesy of the National Park Service.
De Forest and others perfected a vacuum tube that permitted louder sound amplification. Even then, the film industry was somewhat slow to adopt the new audio technology. Although various newsreels and shorts (short films) were released with sound in the early twenties, it was not until The Jazz Singer (1927) that spoken dialogue first appeared in a feature film. Prior to the birth of these talkies, most cinemas continued to rely on live musicians to provide audio entertainment while a film was being shown. (To read more about the development of film, visit http://www.earlycinema.com/index.html.)
Impressionism
One of the earliest forms of modern artistic experimentation was Impressionism, which developed in France in the late nineteenth century.
THE PAINTING THAT STARTED IT ALL
The Early Twentieth Centurys New Classical Music An Explosion of -isms

Earlier eras of music history almost inevitably contained some broad, uniform musical features that gave each period its characteristic style. This stylistic unity completely changed with the dawning of the new Modern era. In fact, originality became a prized objective for many composers. Moreover, the expectations of past eras were sometimes deliberately mocked. For example, the French composer Erik Satie (18661925) responded to Claude Debussys mild criticism that his music was shapeless and lacked form by writing Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear (c. 1903).17 Satie, like many other composers, often created avant-garde music, in the sense that his compositions tried to shake off past practices and start anew.
In 1872, Claude Monet exhibited a painting titled Impression: soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise) that immediately sparked a controversy. The painting challenged traditional values of representational art; it gave new precedence to color and light over line and form. Its images were vague, suggestive, and not at all clear-cut. A number of French artists were experimenting along the same lines as Monet, including artists such as douard Manet (18321883), Edgar Degas (18341917), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 1919). The English painter J.M.W. Turner (177551) was a pioneer of Impressionism as well. The Impressionists paintings were usually landscapes, and the artists often were fascinated with depicting the effects of light. Colors frequently were not blended, and surface textures often received great attention. (Visit http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/learn-about-art/guide-to-impressionism/ guide-to-impressionism/*/viewPage/1; http://www. metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm; http:// www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/impressionism/French-Impressionism.html to see examples of Impressionist paintings.)
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Monets 1872 painting, titled Impression: Sunrise, inspired the nickname for the entire artistic movement.
Many critics were flummoxed by the new approaches of Impressionism, and Louis Leroy, who roundly condemned these experimental artists, delivered one of the most notorious critiques. In a satirical review published in a French newspaper, he completely dismissed Monets painting, claiming, Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.18 Not everyone was put off by the new style, however, and the first person to label these painters as Impressionists was the art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary (183088); he wrote, They render not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape.19
MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
ing sensations were common. Their harmony was still usually based on common-practice tonality, but with more and more added pitches, blurring the function of many chords. In fact, some pieces used unconventional scales, such as the whole-tone scale, which has no half-steps at all. Without half-steps, there is no natural pull to the tonic, as there is between steps 7 and 8 in a major scale. The rhythmic pulse was often deemphasized in Impressionism, and Impressionist composers often explored new tone colors, or timbres. Pieces might call for unusual instruments, such as antique cymbals with their bell-like tone, or choirs might be asked to sing with closed lips. Historians see parallels between musical Impressionism and an earlier movement in French poetry called Symbolism. Symbolist poets, such as Charles Baudelaire (182167), Stphane Mallarm (184298), Paul Verlaine (184496), and the Belgian Albert Giraud (18601929), wrote poems that emphasized imagery over narrative structure. Their syntax
Not long after the French Impressionist painters gained public attention, some French musicians began trying new approaches that seemed to resemble the artistic movement, and thus their compositions were likewise described as Impressionism. The forms of their pieces were often vague and inexact, and float-
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was often interrupted, which contributed to a vague, dreamlike atmosphereand these breaks in the flow resembled what some Impressionist composers would do. One of the most famous Impressionist compositions is Debussys orchestral piece titled Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), which is based on a Symbolist poem by Mallarm. Similar to the initial reactions to visual Impressionism, most early critics were dissatisfied with this piece, although it has now become one of the most popular and frequently performed concert works by Debussy.20
INTERNATIONAL INTEREST
The novelty of the Impressionist musical style appealed to numerous other musicians. Debussys fellow Frenchman Maurice Ravel (18751937) wrote some Impressionist pieces, as did Lili Boulanger (18931918), who was the first woman to win the
prestigious Prix de Rome. This award gave the victor the opportunity to study in Italy for a year; Boulanger won the prize while still a teenager. In Italy, Ottorino Respighi (18791936) used Impressionist ideas in his Fountains of Rome (1916), and the English composer Frederick Delius (18621934), who lived in France until World War I, wrote several Impressionist pieces before his departure. Charles Griffes (18841920) helped introduce Impressionist ideas to the United States with The White Peacock from his Roman Sketches of 191516. As time went by, Impressionism came to be more and more appreciated although Debussy himself always hated the term. He insisted, I am trying to make something new realities, as it were: what the imbeciles call impressionism.21
LIST E
NG COMPA NI
A lovely illustration of Impressionism can be heard in Claude Debussys Voiles, the second piece in his Prludes, Book I. There are two books of Prludes, each with a dozen works for solo piano; two of EN the most famous are The Sunken Cathedral and The Girl with the M IN G EXA Flaxen Hair. Because of these descriptive titles, Prludes are character pieces, a genre that had become popular in the Romantic period. Character pieces are often called miniatures, since they are usually quite short, and their purpose is to express the imagery suggested by their titles. An impromptu, for instance, might have segments of music that sound as if they are being improvised on the spot. The original meaning of the word prelude was used in reference to a piece that led to some other piece, such as the many paired Preludes and Fugues composed by J.S. Bach. However, the Romantic composer Frdric Chopin (181049) challenged listeners expectations by putting together entire sets of character pieces that he labeled preludes; these did not have a preludial function that would lead listeners onward. With his twentieth-century books of preludes, Debussy was making a tribute to Chopin, and Book I was published in 1910, the year that marked the centennial anniversary of Chopins birth. Unlike Chopin, Debussy assigned individual titles to each of his Prludes, but in a surprisingly unclear way: he put the title at the end of each piece, within parentheses and preceded by ellipses. Moreover, the title of Voiles is also completely ambiguous: is it the plural of le voile (the veil) or of la voile (the sail)? The lack of clarity in Debussys title is a perfect manifestation of Impressionisms vagueness. Equally vague is the form in Voiles. Analysts generally agree that it follows a ternary structure of ABA, but there is much disagreement as to where each section begins and ends. LISTENING GUIDE 1 suggests a labeling that focuses on the different scales Debussy uses in the course of the piece. The opening of the prelude (A) uses pitches drawn from a whole-tone scale, and Debussy crafts three motifs from that scale: a downward cascade (heard at the very start), a figure that climbs slowly upward, and an oscillating motif that follows a gentle zigzag motion.
Prludes, Book I, No. 2 Voiles (1909) - Claude Debussy
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The end of the sheet music for Debussys Voiles, with its title that seems almost to be an afterthought.
In contrast to the opening whole-tone section of Voiles, Debussy switches to a pentatonic scale for the middle portion (B) of this character piece. He glides upward through the pentatonic notes in a glissando, a rapid gesture that resembles the sweeping motion of a harp. Debussy then returns to the whole-tone pitches (A) that began this prelude, but now they are set to the glissandos that distinguished the start of the pentatonic section. Bit by bit, Debussy reintroduces motifs that have been heard before: first come the climbing figure and then the cascades that had launched the piece. To many ears, these final cascades sound conclusive, suggesting that they are ushering in a coda to wrap up the piece. Debussy once told his teacher Ernest Guiraud: The music will begin where the words are impotent; music is made for this inexpressible. I would like it to appear as though it came from a shadow and that from time to time it will return there.22 Certainly, the veiled, floating-sail-like mysteries of Voiles fully achieve that ambition. Although Voiles does not contain catchy tunes or a danceable rhythm, it still invites us to focus on its smallest details. Debussys colleague Maurice Ravel observed, The French composers of today work on small canvases but each stroke of the brush is of vital importance.23
L I S TE N I N G G U I D E 1
Prludes, No. 2: Voiles 1909; pub. 1910 [4:00]
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (18621918)
Formal Segment
Timeline
:00 :14
Musical Features
Downward cascades through whole-tone scales (G -F -E-D-C- B -A ) Quiet off-beat pulsation on a low B in the pianos left hand Slowly climbing figures Downward whole-tone cascades return over climbing figures New oscillating figure Climbing figure appears in higher register Upward glissandos based on pentatonic scale (G -A -B -D -E ) Upward glissandos, now based on whole-tone pitches Slowly climbing figures added to glissandos Quiet pulsation on B with brief rhythmic pattern (played twice)
:20 :31 1:10 1:40
2:09 2:20 2:40 2:49
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Coda
3:26 3:41
Downward cascades return, above short climbing motifs in left hand Upward glissandos return
Expressionism
Expressionism is an artistic movement that confronts human reality, rather than offering an escape from it. Expressionist artists seek to depict emotional responsesespecially strong (sometimes distorted) emotions. With that general understanding of the term, it is possible to find examples of Expressionism in the artwork of many past centuries, but a renewed and focused interest in this type of art took hold in the early twentieth century.
VISUAL ART: CHARACTERISTICS AND PAINTERS
necessity26 a statement that captures the attitude of most Expressionist artists. (For more examples of Expressionism, see http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10959.)
MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
A common feature of Expressionism is that it reflects uneasiness. Expressionist painting is seldom relaxing to view; its colors are often non-naturalistic, and its shapes are exaggerated or distorted. It is sometimes said that these depictions reflect the destruction of the traditional trust between humans and the world. An Expressionist painting of a building might depict the structure with jagged, non-parallel lines: is that building safe? Is any place truly safe? These kinds of questions pervade much Expressionist artwork. An Expressionist artist isnt concerned with portraying serene beauty, but with conveying heightened, extreme feelings. Sometimes the result seems clumsy or unskilled, but one of the earliest discussions of Expressionism defended the approach as a violent storm of emotion beating up from the unconscious mind.24 In this sense, Expressionism is seen as a way of conveying inner reality, or truth; it is a truth that demanded emancipation from the lie of convention and tradition.25 The most prominent Expressionist painters worked in Germany and Austria, including Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, and Egon Schiele. The notable Expressionist artist Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia, but he, too, came to Germany to hone his craft. However, the most widely recognized Expressionist painting, The Scream (1893), was painted by a Norwegian, Edvard Munch. Munch returned to that startling image multiple times, twice in oil paint, twice in pastels, and in many prints and woodcuts. One of the pioneers of musical Expressionism, Arnold Schoenberg, also painted; he used himself as a model for a number of self-portraits, producing images that sometimes seem stressed or even anguished. His maxim, in both music and painting, was, Art comes not from ability but from
Listening to Expressionist musicsimilar to the experience of viewing Expressionist artcan be unsettling. For many people, Expressionism is the first style they think of when the term avantgarde is mentioned. Composers often achieved this cutting-edge quality by subverting the musical elements that seem comfortingly familiar. Musical Expressionism often avoids clear cadences and balanced phrases. Forms might be almost indistinguishable, since a clear sense of architecture might
Edvard Munchs The Scream (1893) is one of the worlds most recognizable Expressionist artworks.
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seem too reassuring. Rhythm can be erratic, contributing to a destabilized feeling, or it might be forceful and inescapable, as if it holds the listener within its power. In nearly all Expressionist works, dissonance will dominate over consonance. Some Expressionist compositions still rely on common-practice harmony, but others might use the technique of atonality, which we will discuss later in the Resource Guide. As the century progressed, some compositions employed Schoenbergs new method of twelve-tone serialism that he would unveil in the 1920s. Many Expressionist compositions are based on texts that themselves are Expressionistic; the circumstances of unhappy people would clearly justify distressing music.
COMPOSERS
As with visual Expressionism, the leading composers of musical Expressionism worked in close proximity to each other, with Vienna as their hub. Arnold Schoenberg is usually regarded as the ear-
liest composer to employ this style, and one of his landmark achievements was Erwartung (1909). This work features just one singer, accompanied by orchestra, and she narrates her experience of searching for her lover at night, stumbling through a dark forest, finding his corpse, and suffering a mental breakdownleading one to wonder if she herself is responsible for his death. Schoenbergs innovative compositional approaches attracted a number of students, and his most renowned followers were Alban Berg (18851935) and Anton Webern (18831945). Collectively, these three men are nicknamed the Second Viennese School. Both of the younger men would follow Schoenbergs lead through Expressionism, atonality, and, later, twelve-tone serialism. Webern did not write many Expressionist pieces; the best example is his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10 (191113). Bergs most celebrated Expressionist work was the opera Wozzeck (191722), which features a soldier who is bullied beyond the point of madness.
LIST E
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Madness is a common theme in Expressionist music, and it is a central feature in Schoenbergs Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21. The title EN translates as Moonstruck Pierrot. Over the centuries, the moon has M IN G EXA often been blamed for bizarre behaviorthe word lunatic stems from luna (moon). The name Pierrot is drawn from a traditional commedia dellarte character. In the sixteenth century commedia dellarte performers traveled through Italy, acting out comic scenarios and often improvising their dialogue during the skits to suit the locale. The actors played the roles of stock figures who would behave in predictable (but funny) ways; Harlequin and Colombine (the love interest) are two of the more familiar names. Pierrot (known in other languages as Petrushka and Pagliacci) was a mischief-maker who would repeatedly get into trouble but would always manage to land on his feet. He was customarily painted with heavy white make-up and dressed in a white costumehence the image of him as a lunar, or moonstruck, clown. In 1884, the Symbolist poet Albert Giraud published a set of fifty poems in French that described various (mis)adventures of Pierrot, and in 1912 Schoenberg selected twenty-one of the poemsafter they had been translated into German by Otto Erich Hartlebento create a song cycle. A song cycle is a set of vocal pieces that are connected in some way, sometimes by musical motifs, and sometimes by the text. In Pierrot lunaire, the trickster Pierrot gets drunk on moonbeams, which distorts his perception of reality. His experiences through the course of the cycle grow increasingly more disturbing, and some of the songs have religious connotations that might be viewed as sacrilegious. Gradually, as the last song approaches, Pierrot sobers up while the sun rises once more. Schoenberg was commissioned to write this song cycle by the cabaret performer Albertine Zehme. Zehme expected that Schoenberg would simply compose a piano accompaniment, but, bit by bit, he persuaded her to accept additional instrumentalists (which meant she would have to pay for each extra person). By the end, the group consisted of five players, but they
Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, No. 8 Nacht (1912) Arnold Schoenberg
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are required to play eight different instruments: beside a cello and piano, the flutist doubles on piccolo, the clarinetist also plays bass clarinet, and at times the violinist is expected to play the viola. Every song employs a unique combination of instruments, and only the final number uses all eight instruments during the course of the song. Besides instruments, of course, the songs all employ the singer, whom Schoenberg calls the reciter, and when the vocalist enters for the first time, we get a sharp reminder that Schoenberg is using the style of Expressionism. The singer uses a vocal technique called Sprechstimme (spoken song) in which the notes are half-sung, half-spoken, creating an eerie, almost singsong effect. The instrumentalists are also asked on occasion to produce some unusual timbres, adding to the unsettled atmosphere. The voice seldom has a clear relationship to the accompanying instruments; perhaps this is a subtle Expressionist message that we each are alone in the world.
STRUCTURING NACHT
Schoenberg divides his twenty-one songs into three sets of seven each, so the eighth song, Nacht (LISTENING E XAMPLE 2), is the first piece in the second set. Nacht means night, and the poem implies that it seems like night to the inebriated Pierrot because the sun has been obscured by the giant wings of enormous, black moths (or perhaps butterflies since the word Riesenfalter can be translated in multiple ways). These terrifying creatures have not only succeeded in blocking out the sun, but they are also headed toward human heartstruly, this is ominous, Expressionist poetry. In all of the poems, Giraud used a poetic rondo pattern of A B A C A. This pattern can be seen in the first column of LISTENING GUIDE 2, in which A is the line Dark, black, giant moths killed the suns brightness. (The phrase is shortened in its final appearance.) However, Schoenberg made no attempt to coordinate the music with the texts structure; instead, he divides the poetry into two large chunks, with no obvious repetition in the vocal melody. Nevertheless, Schoenberg does have a subtle way of creating unity in the course of the song, and he indicates the connecting device in the subtitle of the piece: Passacaglia. This old term, stemming from the Baroque period, describes a variation form in which new melodies appear over a repeating bass line. Schoenbergs passacaglia bass line is a tiny motif, only three notes long. It consists of a rising minor third followed by a descending major third, usually using the pitches E-G-E . Because it appears over and over again, we could also describe it as an ostinato. This Italian term shares a stem with the English word obstinate; it refers to a short pattern that repeats many, many times. (This is, of course, the nature of a passacaglia bass line, which is sometimes referred to as a basso ostinato.) The three-note ostinato is heard in almost every measure of Nacht, sometimes overlapping between the different performers. The ostinato is the first thing played by the pianos left hand in a very low register. It is also very prominent when the vocalist sings verschwiegen (mutely)and, we should note, this word is truly sung, instead of using the Sprechstimme technique. It may be that the pervasiveness of the ostinato is a subtle depiction of the inescapable black moths. Further emphasizing the dark, fearsome atmosphere, Schoenberg uses only the lowest instruments of his ensemble: the piano, the cello, and the bass clarinet. After presenting the ostinato motif at the start of the song, they all prolong their last pitches at the end of the short introduction, using a device called a fermata. This score indication tells the performers to sustain a particular note (or silence) longer than its written value. Besides signaling the end of the introduction, the fermata may also depict the instruments being frozen in fear. Besides their deep register, the players contribute to the mood in other ways. They frequently produce a trembling effect through rapid oscillations, and at times the cellist is asked to play on the bridge. This command tells the player to draw the bow directly over the instruments bridge (the wooden piece that elevates the strings away from the instruments body) instead of the usual bowing location, which is slightly offset from the bridge. When the bow travels
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Pierrot lunaires original ensemble; Schoenberg is third from the left.
right over the bridge, the strings cannot vibrate very freely, and the cellos timbre sounds glassy and chillyanother suitable enhancement for the frightening character of Nacht. Although Nacht is full of Modernist twists, Schoenberg does employ older devices as well, such as the occasional use of word-painting. This venerable technique can be found as early as the Renaissance and has likely endured because its fun to perform. When a composer word-paints, he or she is setting the music so that it illustrates the literal meaning of a particular word, such as singing whisper at a pianissimo dynamic level. Word-painting is a subset of the broader concept of text expression. In text expression, the composer might make very general associations between the poetry and the musical setting, such as selecting the minor mode when composing a song about a funeral. The choice of mode does not reflect the literal meaning of funeral, but it certainly suits the general mood, thereby helping to express the text. In Nacht, Schoenberg word-paints several times, such as when he uses an upward leap during the word Duft (fragrance). A melodic jump might not seem to convey the exact meaning of fragrance, but the full poetic phrase is Steigt ein Duft arises a fragranceso the leap upward depicts the verb. Another instance of word-painting is even subtler: the word verschwiegenwhich, as noted earlier, is the only word in this song to be performed by conventional singing rather than by Sprechstimme can be translated as mutely. After the singer finishes singing the word, a silence is prolonged by a fermata: all the performers have been briefly muted. It is difficult for non-German-speakers to catch all the subtleties of Schoenbergs word-painting technique, but it is another dimension of the song that can be discovered through careful listening. This cycle is a challenge, even for listeners hearing it more than a hundred years after its composition. However, the impact of Pierrot lunaire on subsequent composers of the Modern
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era cannot be overestimated. Even Igor Stravinskyseldom one to have a kind word for anything written by his rival Schoenbergcalled this cycle the solar plexus of the twentieth century.27
Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, No. 8 Nacht (Night) Passacaglia 1912 [2:06]
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (18741951)
Poetic Structure
Timeline
0:00
Musical Features
Slow statements of the ostinato motif in piano Cello, then bass clarinet add sustained notes Piano strikes its eighth pitch; all instruments sustain a fermata Bass clarinet resumes the ostinato; reciter enters Cello resumes the ostinato Piano resumes the ostinato
Poetry
Translation
Instl Intro
0:09
0:15
0:20 Refrain (A) 0:25 0:30
Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter Tteten der Sonne Glanz. Ein geschlossnes Zauberbuch, Ruht der Horizont
Dark, black giant moths Killed the suns brightness. Like a closed book of magic spells, The horizon rests
0:35
Reciter re-enters
0:49
Cello trembles on the bridge; Reciter sings (not using Sprechstimme); ends with fermata All performers sustain a silent fermata Ostinato in different speeds in piano & bass clarinet; trembling effect in bass clarinet & cello Upward leap on Duft wordpaints steigt
verschwiegen.
mutely.
:55
:58
Aus dem Qualm verlorner Tiefen Steigt ein Duft, Erinnrung mordend! Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter Tteten der Sonne Glanz.
Out of the vapor of lost depths Arises a fragrance, murdering all memory! Dark, black giant moths Killed the suns brightness.
1:04
Refrain (A)
1:09
Running lines seem to sag downward
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1:25
Melody word-paints by rising to Heaven, then falling earthwards
Und vom Himmel erdenwrts Senken sich mit schweren Schwingen Unsichtbar die Ungetme Auf die Menschenherzen nieder Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter.
And from Heaven earthwards, Descending from there on heavy pinions, Invisible, the monsters Onto human hearts Dark, black giant moths.
Refrain (A) Instl Coda
1:48 2:00
Melody sinks down (in despair?) Piano plays two quiet chords, then sharp answer from bass clarinet & cello
Primitivism
VISUAL ART: CHARACTERISTICS AND PAINTERS
The painting style of Expressionism shares a great deal with another turn-of-the-century artistic
style, Primitivism. Usually, though, Primitivist artworks do not convey the most disturbing effects of Expressionism. Instead, they use bold colors and simple lines to present exotic juxtapositions of humans and nature. Primitivist artists frequently draw from the traditional arts of Africa or the Pacific Islands; their artwork generally expresses a desire to start again, unhindered by history, by abandoning a contemporary sophistication.28 The subject matter often focuses on primal or ancestral images, but there can be a wide variety of approaches. Sometimes the artwork is stark or severe, while other examples can display an extravagant exuberance. Many Primitivist artworks could be described as barbaric, andespecially in Primitivist sculptureviewers might have the sense that there is a symbolic power to the art object.29 There is often a great deal of energy in Primitivist art, but without the sense of impending doom that might be found in Expressionism. One of the most famous Primitivist painters, Paul Gauguin, was inspired by his journeys to Martinique, Tahiti, and various Pacific islands. Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and others visited ethnographic museums to learn about non-Western art. The Primitivist Henri Rousseau employed such simplicity in depicting landscapes that his works are sometimes labeled nave art. Henri Matisse also used Primitivist techniques to simplify the human form, both in his paintings and in his sculptures. (For more examples of Primitivism, visit http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/ show-list/movement/?search=Primitivism.)
Primitivist paintings, like Primitivist music, offer bold, simple designs, as seen in Paul Gauguins Landscape on La Dominique (1903).
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MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND COMPOSERS
Musical Primitivism also focused on creating primal, uncultured effects. As in the visual arts, composers shunned any techniques that would seem polished and elegant. Because they viewed contemporary society as artificial, they tried to avoid the conventional earmarks of sophisticated concert music. Imagining what the music of ancient peoples might have sounded like, composers put a great deal of emphasis on percussive rhythms, often in ostinato patterns. The customary expectations of commonpractice harmony were simplified and sometimes abandoned altogether. Just as in the visual arts,
Primitivist music manipulated levels of energy, and its focus on elemental power could be seen as a positive, purifying force.30 Primitivism did not find as many followers in music as did some of the other styles of early twentieth-century composition, but Bla Bartks Allegro barbaro (1911) is an excellent illustration of the Primitivist approach. The most famousor infamousexample of Primitivism is The Rite of Spring, completed in 1913 by Igor Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring is now a favorite of the concert hall, but when it premiered as the score to a ballet, the audience actually rioted at the first performance.
LIST E
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In 1910, the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky was living in Paris, as was the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (18721929). (An impresario is analogous to a film producer; he is the chief money-manager and deciEN M IN G EXA sion-maker for artistic organizations such as ballet companies, opera troupes, etc.) Diaghilev wanted to showcase Russian culture in a fusion of the arts, so he had introduced his ballet troupe, the Ballets Russes, to Paris the year before. The French public had responded to the exoticism of these Russian visitors with wild enthusiasm. The Ballets Russes initial performances in 1909 and 1910 were choreographed to preexisting Russian music, such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakovs Schhrazade (1888), but in 1910 Diaghilev commissioned an original custom ballet score from the young Stravinsky. The result was The Firebird, and it, too, was received rapturously by the French. Stravinsky became a household name in Paris. Diaghilev immediately commissioned another ballet score from Stravinsky, which led to Petrushka (1911). This story of a puppet-come-to-life (the same commedia dellarte character who had inspired Schoenbergs Pierrot lunaire) showcased the dancer Vaclav Nijinsky (18901950), whose performance is regarded as legendary. Even as Stravinsky worked on the two commissions, though, he was toying with a new ballet subject, which would in time become The Rite of Spring. He envisioned a pagan ritual in prehistoric Russia involving human sacrifice;31 a young girl would dance herself to death in the belief that this would placate the God of Spring. Stravinsky began meeting with the painter Nikolai Roerich (18741947), who was an expert on the culture of the ancient Slavs, a people who had inhabited Russia in the prehistoric era. Roerich helped Stravinsky work out the scenario, or storyline, for the ballet (see FIGURE 2-1), and Roerich also designed the stage sets and costumes. The dancers wore rustic outfits based on the attire of medieval Russian peasantsa far cry from the elegant tutus and leotards of classical ballet. Viewers are sometimes struck by the similarities between these costumes and the clothing of various Native American tribes. Diaghilev allowed Nijinsky to choreograph the ballet; Nijinskys designs for the dancers used the same Primitivist principles that are heard in the music. Their motions are far removed from the graceful, refined movements associated with traditional ballets such as Swan Lake (1877). The dancers seem awkward and clumsy, with toes that often turn inward, employing quick jumps that frequently land on flat feet. The performers are less involved in depicting a narrative story than they are in dancing a series of rituals and games, and the choreography is filled with unexpected hops and leaps. At one point, an aged dancer drops to the floor to
The Rite of Spring, Introduction and Omens of Spring (1913) Igor Stravinsky
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Figure 21
Premire Partie: LAdoration de la Terre Part I: Adoration of the Earth Introduction Introduction Les Augures Printaniers: Dances des Adolescentes Omens of Spring: Dances of the Adolescents Jeu du Rapt The Game [Ritual] of Abduction Rondes Printanires Spring Rounds Jeux des Cits Rivales Games/Rituals of the Rival Tribes Cortge du Sage Procession of the Sage [Oldest and Wisest One] Adoration de la Terre (Le Sage) Adoration [Kiss] of the Earth Danse de la Terre Dance of the Earth Seconde Partie: Le Sacrifice Part II: The Sacrifice Introduction Introduction Cercles Mystrieux des Adolescentes Mystic Circles of the Adolescents [Young Girls] Glorification de lElue Glorification of the Chosen One Evocation des Anctres Evocation of the Ancestors Action Rituelle des Anctres Ritual Action of the Ancestors Danse Sacrale (LElue) Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)
Scenario of The Rite of Spring: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring; literally Holy Spring) Scenes of Pagan Russia in Two Parts
kiss the ground in a visual demonstration of the tribes subservience to the earth. Some of the floor patterns created by the dancers resemble details on the costumes, which, in turn, have similarities with motifs in the music, so all the arts are closely intertwined in this production. Just as visual Primitivism shares certain characteristics with Expressionism, there are aspects of Stravinskys score for The Rite of Spring that have elements of musical Expressionism. For instance, the first notes heard are played by a solo bassoon, but the bassoonist is asked to play in a shockingly high register, which distorts the instruments usual timbre to the point that it is almost unrecognizable as a bassoon. There is no big fanfare to launch the piece; instead, the bassoon seems to meander freely through the opening melody, with no sense of meter or rhythmic steadiness to orient the listener. Stravinsky derived the melody from an old Lithuanian wedding tune, which is another dimension of Primitivism; scholars have found at least a dozen quoted folk tunes in the course of the ballet.32 (This type of quotation can also be linked to the influence of nationalism, which we will discuss in the next section of the Resource Guide.) Bit by bit, Stravinsky complicates the texture, adding instrument after instrument to transform the opening monophony to homophony and Photograph of Russian ballet eventually to polyphony. In later years, he impresario Sergei Diaghilev (l) and explained, My idea was that the Prelude composer Igor Stravinsky (r). [Introduction] should represent the awaken-
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ing of nature, the scratching, gnawing, wiggling of birds and beasts.33 This conception is a vivid illustration of Primitivism.
THE NEW CHORD
Because Stravinsky envisioned a primeval, barbaric landscape, he did all he could to avoid any suggestion of common-practice tonality. During the Introduction, he makes use of an octatonic scale. Later, when the Omens of Spring section begins, Stravinsky uses a polychord, consisting of two distinct harmonies played simultaneously. The lower instruments perform an F major triad (F -A -C , which sounds to our ears like an E major chord, E-G -B). At the same time, the upper instruments collectively produce an E dominant seventh chord (E -G-B -D ). Stravinsky was proud of this massive harmony, which he called a new chord; it certainly was unlike any pitch grouping the Parisians had heard before. The jarring dissonance of the polychord was one affront to the listeners ears; the pounding rhythm to which it is set was another. The famous rhythmic hammering that launches the Omens of Spring is quintessential Primitivism since the percussive effect evokes ritual drumming by an ancient culture. Adding to this effect, Stravinsky peppered the pounded chord with syncopated accents, which jolt us even further with their unexpected appearance. The accents destroy any sense of a steady meter; they produce uneven phrases, with eighth notes that follow a pattern of 9+2+6+3+4+5+3. However, we might notice that this series of eighth notes, when added up, totals 32and this was Stravinskys clever way of accommodating the needs of the dancers. Dancers are accustomed to counting even-numbered sets as they perform, so during the Omens of Spring, they could simply ignore the accents and count four groups of eight. FIGURE 2-2 shows the 32-count pattern in its entirely, subdivided into its eightcount subgroups, with bold-face, underlined numbers to represent the accented eighth notes. Despite this ingenuity, things did not always proceed smoothly during rehearsals of the ballet. Stravinsky remembered Nijinsky saying, I will count to forty while you playand we will see where we come out. Stravinsky complained, [Nijinsky] could not understand that though we might at some point come out together, this did not necessarily mean that we had been together on the way. The dancers followed Nijinskys beat, too, rather than the musical beat. Nijinsky counted in Russian, of course, and as Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic eighteen, for example, is vosemndsatin fast-tempo movements, neither he nor they could keep pace with the music.34 Another prevalent device that contributes to the Primitivist atmosphere of The Rite of Spring is Stravinskys frequent use of ostinato patterns, which again might suggest the ritual percussion of a tribal people. During the portion of the ballet that is presented in LISTENING GUIDE 3, three different ostinatos play a role. The first is a tiny sing-song motif, introduced by the violins, that follows a duple-meter pulse. (The sing-song quality of Ostinato 1 is a common motif in Slavic folk music.) The bassoons play the second ostinato pattern; their series of fast descending and ascending pitches fall into a triple-meter pattern. A third ostinato motif in the cellos also ascends and descends, but more slowly than the bassoon ostinato. Like Ostinato 1, this is another duple-meter ostinato. When all three ostinato patterns occur simultaneously, the result is a polymetric passageanother unconventional, Primitivist feature.
Figure 22
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 // 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 // 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 // 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Pulse Groupings of Omens of Spring (beginning).
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The scenario, shown in FIGURE 2-1, guides the structure of the overall ballet. Within each of the two large parts there are multiple dances or rituals, each of which is set to distinctive music. There are no clear pauses within each part; generally, the music proceeds directly from dance to dance, perhaps after a fermata. Since the dances are independent units, there is no large-scale form to the ballet overall. However, the Introduction of Part 1 might be viewed as a loose ternary form (as shown in LISTENING GUIDE 3) because the monophonic bassoon returns at the end to interrupt the dense polyphony that has developed, shifting our attention to the just-raised curtain and the dancers who are about to begin their ritual festivities. The climax of the ballet is the Sacrificial Dance, when the Chosen One is driven by the incessant music to dance herself to death.
THE RIOT OF SPRING
Artist Jean Cocteau drew his impression of a 1913 Rite of Spring rehearsal with Stravinsky at the piano.
One of the most notorious incidents in classical music history occurred on the night of May 29, 1913, when The Rite of Spring made its stormy debut in front of a restless Parisian audience. In retrospect, it is apparent that the deck was stacked against the ill-fated premiere: it was an unseasonably warm early summer evening in a venue that lacked air conditioning (an innovation that had been introduced just over a decade earlier35). Many Parisians disliked the still-new venuethe Thtre des Champs-lysesbecause they regarded its architecture as too Germanic, reflecting the long-standing national resentment that had percolated since the Franco-Prussian War of 187071 (and which would explode again the following year during World War I). Moreover, many people in the audience were already irked at the notion of seeing another work by Nijinsky since they had disliked his choreography to Debussys Jeux that had been presented two weeks earlier. Under these prejudicial conditions, the Primitivist score and choreography didnt stand a chance. Stravinsky recalled the evening in his memoirs: Mild protests against the music could be heard from the very beginning of the performance. Then, when the curtain opened on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down,the storm broke. After describing some of the jeers and cat-calls that filled the theater, Stravinsky went on: The uproar continued,and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door. I have never again been that angry. I arrived in a fury backstage, where I saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a last effort to quiet the hall. For the rest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac [dress coat], while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers.36 The uproar in the audience had grown so loud, with some people shrieking with laughter, others shouting in outrage, and even some fist-fights, that the dancers could not hear the orchestra in the pit. Nijinsky tried valiantly to hold things together with his bellowed counting. The riotous reaction took nearly everyone by surprise since the dress rehearsal on the preceding day had been enthusiastically applauded. And, when the Ballets Russes traveled to London a couple of weeks later to perform at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the ballet was received without incident. Ironically, it was less than a year later that conductor Pierre Monteux nervously decided to program The Rite of Spring once again in Paris, this time as a concert work.
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Stravinsky reported, At the end of the Danse sacrale the entire audience jumped to its feet and cheered . A crowd swept backstage. I was hoisted to anonymous shoulders and carried into the street and up to the Place de la Trinit.37 The Rite of Spring went on to triumph as a twentieth-century concert piece, but Nijinskys choreography was replaced in later ballet stagings. The impact of Nijinskys choreography, however, was not forgotten. A young American dance historian, Millicent Hodson, later became intrigued by the infamous dance and spent over twenty years interviewing dancers and tracking down elusive source materials in an effort to reconstruct the lost choreography. In the end, she was able to recapture about eighty percent of Nijinskys dance movements.38 Hodsons impressive feat of detective work came to fruition in 1987, when the Joffrey Ballet performed the reconstructed Nijinsky versionand this time, the reception was much more favorable. Primitivism in ballet had at last found its audience.
The Rite of Spring, Part 1: Introduction and Omens of Spring (excerpt) 1913 [c. 4:54]
IGOR STRAVINSKY (18821971)
Formal Segment
Intro A
Timeline
:00 :10 :20 :46 :55 1:01
Musical Features
Monophonic bassoon melody Horn joins in to create homophony. Various clarinets enter to create polyphony. English horn is featured over sustained notes. Bassoon and layered clarinets re-enter. English horn featured again More and more instruments enter. Quieter oscillating patterns take over. More and more instruments enter. Briefly quieter for oboe, then high clarinet, but build-up of orchestra begins again Monophonic bassoon melody returns. Clarinet adds accompanying trill; both instruments sustain a fermata. Violins introduce a few interrupted repetitions of Ostinato 1. Violins resume Ostinato 1.
Intro B
1:14 1:38 1:52 2:18 2:53
Intro A 3:03 3:06 Transition 3:21
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3:27 3:36 3:40 Omens of Spring 3:51 4:04 4:13 4:41 4:48
Pounding of new polychord with syncopated accents (see FIGURE 2-2) English horn plays Ostinato 1, Bassoons play Ostinato 2, Cellos play Ostinato 3. Pounded polychord & syncopated accents resume; more instruments added. Layered ostinatos return, with more instruments added. Pounded polychord & syncopated accents resume. Bassoons introduce folk tune in alternation with pounded polychord. Loud fermata Layered ostinatos return (fade out of recording excerpt).
Nationalism
ROOTED IN THE PAST
Unlike most of the classical musical styles that flourished in the early twentieth century, nationalism did not have many direct parallels with the visual arts of its day. Instead, it was an older style, which had already been a frequent concern of composers in the preceding Romantic era, in part due to the somewhat elastic geographic boundaries of European nations during the nineteenth century. Even as different countries were overrun by invaders, nationalism offered musicians a means to convey their patriotism and defiance. The issue of nationalism became even more marked for twentieth-century composers since many nations were impacted by a shifting political landscape. Nationalism offered composers and listeners a way of expressing and holding on to their countrys identity, and this preservation was especially needed when so much change was taking place: in the year 1900, there were fifty-five sovereign nations; by the year 2000, there were 192.39
MUSIC AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
and other French composers founded the Socit Nationale de Musique (1871) in an effort to rebuild national pride after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (territory that would be regained by France at the end of World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles). The societys motto was Ars gallica (French Art) since it sought to promote French music and reject the Germanic traditions of composers like Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann that had long dominated concert programs in France. The Socit Nationale de Musique was the emotional ancestor of Les Six, a group of six young French composers who developed an informal coalition in 1917. Musically speaking, these six artists had very little in common with each other, but they did share an important ambition: to write music devoid of Germanic (i.e., Wagnerian) characteristics. Admittedly, the youngsters also rejected the Impressionistic approach of their fellow countrymen Debussy and Ravel, and they turned their backs on many of the ideas of Stravinsky and Schoenberg too.40 The composers of Les Six were an effective force in the promotion of French artistry during the war years and beyond. In England, many musicians focused on rediscovering and celebrating the lost music of the nation. Several new associations were founded that were devoted to specific repertories, such as the Purcell Society, the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society, and the Musical Antiquarian Society. New attention was given to the compositions of Renaissance composers such as William Byrd (15401623), Orlando
Nationalist composers could be found in virtually every country. Some composers sought to elevate listeners patriotic feelings and love of country. The ambition of other composers was to reject the musical conventions of an enemy. Both objectives were certainly an issue in France: after the FrancoPrussian War (187071), Csar Franck (182290)
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Gibbons (15831625), Thomas Tallis (150585), Thomas Weelkes (15761623), and John Wilbye (15741638). As some of this rediscovered music reentered the British concert repertory, it inspired new works by composers of the day. For instance, Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Vaughan Williams used old English materials as the foundation for many of his works; his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910) is one of the best known. Other English composers exhibited nationalism in a different way, by showcasing geographic features of their country in musical settings, as the composer Gustav Holst (18741934) did in his Somerset Rhapsody (19067). In Finland, the composer Jean Sibelius (18651957) galvanized his nation with Finlandia (1900). At the start of the twentieth century, Finland was a grand duchy controlled by Russia. Resentment of that dominance was already percolating, and Finns latched onto Finlandia with exuberance: it was a noisy celebration of Finnish culture that ended with a rousing hymn. This melody became an unofficial national anthem for Finland, and Russia inadvertently made Finlandia even more popular by banning it. After Finland succeeded in declaring its independence in 1917, Sibeliusviewed as a national herowas eventually awarded a state stipend that helped support him to the end of his days.41 In the early twentieth century, a great deal of music that glorified Spain was written by Frenchmen, such as Debussys Ibria (190508) and Ravels Rapsodie espagnole (19078); Ravels Bolero would follow in 1928. (Ravel did have some claim to Spanish heritage through his mother, who was born in the Basque region that straddles the border between Spain and France.) Spanish composers soon pursued this style themselves. Some of the more famous examples of Spanish nationalism are Manuel de Fallas Nights in the Gardens of Spain (190916) and Isaac Albnizs own Iberia (19058). The composer Enrique Granados (18671916) created two musical tributes to one of Spains greatest painters, Francisco Goya. The first was a piano suite, titled Goyescas (1911), and it is regarded as Granados finest composition. Moreover, he reused much of the piano music for an opera, which was also titled Goyescas. Because of World War I, the opera could not premiere in Paris as planned; it instead made its debut at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera in 1916, and Granados and his wife Amparo traveled from Spain to attend. Afterward, President Woodrow Wilson invited the couple to the White House although this opportunity meant they missed the scheduled sailing of their return ship. They booked passage on a later vessel, but during the second leg of the voyage, their ferry was torpedoed by a German submarine. Many passengers were thrown into the ocean, and although Granados was picked up by a life raft, he
Photograph of Les Six, a group of young French composers who shared an ambition to write music devoid of Germanic characteristics.
spotted his wife still struggling in the water. He tried, in vain, to save her, and they both drowned.42 In the United States, there was a huge outpouring of patriotic music in the early twentieth century, but these works were almost entirely popular in style. The bias toward European composers in the repertory of most American orchestras meant that there werent many opportunities for young classical composers in the United States. When those young composers were drawn to experimental ideas, as was the case with Charles Ives (18741954), their pieces were met with a marked lack of enthusiasm since American tastes did not embrace Modernist innovations as early as European audiences did. So, although Ives is now widely regarded as Americas first great composer, he worked in virtual isolation for the first two decades of the twentieth century, supporting himself with his insurance business. Much of Ives music celebrated the America he loved; he quoted hymns and patriotic songs, and like his European counterparts, he wrote music that commemorated
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the American landscape, history, and artists. One of the first pieces Ives published, his Piano Sonata No. 2 (pub. 1920), is subtitled Concord Mass., 184060, and its movements are named for some of Americas Transcendentalist writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, and Thoreau. Only gradually, after he suffered a heart attack in 1918, as well as a series of strokes, did Ives start to unveil what he had been composing over the previous twenty years. Much of his output is now cherished for its clear nationalism. Somewhat ironically, the best-known proponent of Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century was Igor Stravinsky, who wrote most of his nationalist works while he was far away from Russia; his compositions were thus little known in his homeland. Russian composers of the Romantic era had been strong nationalists, but usually in ways that glorified their nation. They used folk material fairly sparingly, and incorporated it into their art music in sophisticated, polished ways. Stravinsky used a much more raw approach with folk tunes, as we have seen in The Rite of Spring. The ballets subtitle, Scenes from Pagan Russia, underscored Stravinskys desire not to sound cultivated and refined.
NEW TOOLS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
As the preceding examples from various countries demonstrate, there were a variety of approaches to writing nationalistic music in the early twentieth century. Most frequently, though, composers showed a desire to return to their cultural roots, and the most common source materials were national folksongs and folkdances. The world was changing rapidly, however, and many people who lived in rural areas were moving to the cities, supporting themselves by means of the growing industries to be found there. As traditional ways were left behind, cultural legacies often withered away as well. Ethnographers and cultural anthropologists strove to record and preserve as much folklore as they could, but music was a special challenge: it was hard to transcribe unless one had considerable training in music notation. The invention of portable audio recording devices was therefore an inestimable boon to scholars. At the start of the century, hundreds of researchers traveled the globe to record performances of folk and ethnic music. These field recordings are now an irreplaceable documentation of music from distant times and remote places, and even an important way of studying music closer to home. Field recordings make it easier for scholars to develop a broader understanding of distinct musical traditions in various locales, which is the foundation of the modern scholarly discipline of ethnomusicology. Some of the early ethnomusicologists were themselves composers, and so the folk materials they were
Photograph of Bla Bartk and Zoltn Kodly, notable ethnomusicologist/composers who collected thousands of Hungarian folksongs.
rescuing offered them compositional inspiration as well. Two of the most notable ethnomusicologist/ composers were Zoltn Kodly and Bla Bartk. They were both natives of Hungary, and they worked in collaboration; they divided up the local districts to ensure that their collecting efforts proceeded systematically. They published an initial book of twenty songs in 1906, with each of them adding piano accompaniments to ten of the tunes. By 1924, when Bartk published a summary of their work as Hungarian Folksong, the volume contained some eight thousand melodies.43 Their folksong collections were actually far more extensive, however. In 1900, the Austro-Hungarian Empire encompassed much of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Poland, and even Italy, so Kodly and Bartk gathered thousands of songs and dances from many of these other cultural traditions. Bartk also recorded some music from North Africa and Turkey. Much to their regret, however, the two men were unable to do much collecting during the war years because of the risks to their safety. (The escalating ethnic tensions between the many cultural groups of this region had created a
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Bla Bartk used a gramophone to record folk songs sung by Czech peasants, 1908.
political powder keg, which exploded with the 1914 assassination of Austrias Archduke Franz Ferdinand, sparking the outbreak of the First World War.) Besides making exact transcriptions in musical notation of the recordings so that the songs could be printed in collections like the 1924 publication, both Kodly and Bartk found extended uses for many of these materials in their own compositions. They transformed the folk music in various ways and to varying degrees. Bartk scholar Benjamin Suchoff has classified five levels of folk-music adaptation that can be found in Bartks music:
3. The folk tune is presented as a kind of musical motto, and the invented material is of greater significance; 4. The composition is based on themes which imitate genuine folk tunes; 5. The highest level is abstract composition in which neither folk tune nor its imitation is used, but the work is nevertheless pervaded by the spirit of folk music.44
Moreover, one important dimension of Bartks nationalist work was that he was a pioneer in developing a specifically Hungarian kind of musican ideal for which his German-trained teachers had little sympathy.45 The composition selected for LISTENING E XAMPLE 4, Romanian Christmas Carols, illustrates Bartks first approach. The original folk tunes are very clear, but the harmonization of the melodies adds a significant level of musical interest to them.
1. Genuine folk tunes are featured, and the invented additions are of secondary importance. In other words, the folk tune is the jewel, and the added parts function as its mounting; 2. The folk tune and the invented material are treated equally;
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LIST E
NG COMPA NI
The boundaries of Hungary were not the same prior to World War I as they were at the end of the war, when the Treaty of Trianon sharply reduced the size of Hungarys borders. In the first decade of the twenEN M IN G EXA tieth century, when Bartk began his collecting activities, greater Hungary contained a number of ethnic subcultures. A collection of teaching pieces that he published in 190809, called For Children, contained Hungarian and Slovak folksongs transcribed for piano, so the Romanian Christmas Carols representing the third largest ethnic group in Hungary at that timeis thought to be a suitably nationalistic continuation of those earlier educational pieces. As Bartk announces on the title page of the carols, the intervals of his setting never exceed one octave on the keyboard, making them more readily playable by small hands.
Romanian Christmas Carols (Sz. 57 / BB 67), First Series (1915) Bla Bartk
Bartk had collected the twenty melodies of the Romanian Christmas Carols from the Transylvanian sector of Romania in 1909, and this was the first of his works that contained a list of the source colinde, or carols, within the published score. He included a transcription of the first melodic phrase of each colinda with its Romanian text and also listed the specific place he had collected each tune. Although this composition is a work for solo piano, LISTENING GUIDE 4 contains excerpts from the original poetry for each songand a quick browse through those lyrics may be surprising: although these are called Christmas carols, several of them seem to have nothing at all to do with the Christian Nativity story. Bartk explained, We must not think of the colindein terms of the religious Christmas carols of the West. First of all, the most important part of these textsperhaps one-third of themhave no connection with Christmas. Instead of the Bethlehem legend we hear about a wonderful battle between the victorious hero and theuntil thenunvanquished lion (or stag), we are told the tale of the nine sons whoafter hunting for so many years in the old foresthave been changed into stags, or we listen to a marvelous story about the sun who has asked in marriage the hand of his sister, the moon, and so on. Thus here are texts truly preserved from ancient pagan times!Caroling usually takes place in the following custom: after several weeks of study (choral singing in unison) of the colinde, on Christmas Eve a group of eight to ten boys, under the leadership of a chief, set out for the performance itself. They stop in front of each house and ask whether the hosts will receive them. Once inside the house, the group sings four or five colinda songs. At the end of the performance, the hosts present a gift to the carolers who go on to the neighbours house.46
THE ROMANIAN SPIRIT
The Romanian Christmas Carols use a modern piano, but they contain a number of musical elements that evoke their ethnic origins. For one thing, the tunes are modal, meaning they use various scales that predate the common-practice system. In truth, the major and minor scales used in common-practice tonality are two survivors from the earlier modal system; major was formerly known as Ionian, while minor was called Aeolian. The other modes that appear in Series 1Dorian, Phrygian, and Mixolydianwill sound a bit strange to our modern ears because they use different patterns of half- and whole-steps. Moreover, many colinde end on a relatively high pitch, which can leave them sounding unfinished; the ending of the fourth carol is a good example of this. However, Bartk intended for all ten pieces in the series to be played without pause, so the open-ended sensation does not last for long. Another Romanian feature of these tunes is their flexible meter. Only some of these pieces use the same pulse grouping throughout. It was conventional in much Eastern European folk
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music for the rhythm to follow the poetic syllables, so the irregularity makes it hard to tap ones foot during most of these settings. Another Hungarian gesture is heard at the very beginning of this set when Bartk includes a drone accompaniment. The rustic bagpipe, a popular folk instrument in Hungary, sustains long pitches through its open pipes, or drones. So, Bartk has the piano play a single pitch E in both hands, letting it resonate for more than four measures, and thereby mimicking the prolonged sound of a bagpipe. Despite their modal harmonies and rhythmic flexibility, these carols are quite simple pieces, reflecting their folk origins. Therefore, Bartk employs a good deal of variety in his settings to give these ten short pieces greater interest. He places the folk tune in different registers of the piano, and he uses different kinds of accompaniments in both the right and left hands. The tempo changes several times during the series, and there is a considerable amount of dynamic contrast as well. Although these are pedagogical pieces, Bartk uses every means at his disposal to make the tiny jewels shine.
L I S TE N I N G G U I D E 4 :
Romanian Christmas Carols (Sz. 57 / BB 67), First Series 1915 [c. 4:21]
BLA BARTK (18811945)
Song Number & Tempo
Timeline
:00
Musical Features
Var. 1 - drone accompaniment Var. 2 accompaniment descends Var. 3 lower octave accompaniment Var. 1 melody in RH (right hand) Var. 2 melody in LH Var. 1 melody in RH Var. 2 melody in LH Var. 3 melody in RH Var. 1 melody in higher register, followed by brief silence Var. 2 melody in lower register, followed by brief silence (sounds open-ended)
Meter(s)
Mode and Text of Original Colinda 47

E Dorian: Through that mountain meadow, sheep are going. But who is walking ahead of them? Lo the shepherd[Refrain:] Lord God, hoy, to the Almighty! G Ionian: They are asking the saints of the Lord, of what is made the wine, the wheat, and the holy oil? [Refrain:] To the almighty, to the dear Lord! D Aeolian: The youthful bridegroom is praying [Refrain:] To the Lord Almighty! D Dorian: Let us come inside; the rain is pouring and our horses have gone lame and they should be shod with horseshoes of pastry and with nails of sausage. [Refrain:] For the Almighty!
No. 1 Allegro
:10 :18 :29
Duple with some triple
No. 2 Allegro
:36 :45
Meter alternates , , and
No. 3 Allegro
:55 1:03 1:16
Meter alternates between and
No. 4 Andante 1:34
Shifting meter: , ,
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1:52 No. 5 Allegro moderato 1:59 2:06 2:17 No. 6 Andante
Var. 1 simple accompaniment Var. 2 very similar Var. 3 accompaniment more syncopated Var. 1 melody in LH E Phrygian & Aeolian: In all the worlds four corners, all who bear the name of mankind shall be called to go to judgment[Refrain 1:] Yearning may cast me down! [Refrain 2:] World of mine, world of mine! Duple meter G Aeolian: Come to me, come to me, beloved Ileana!
&
2:31 Var. 2 melody in RH
alternate
2:47 2:56 3:04 3:13 3:17 3:20 3:25 No. 8 Allegretto
Var. 1 - swaying LH accompaniment Var. 2 very similar Var. 3 larger leaps in accompaniment Tiny monophonic swaying coda Intro; octave leaps in duple meter Var. 1 melody in low register Var. 2 melody in high register Var. 3 melody even higher, heavier chordal accompaniment Brief transition of octave leaps Var. 4 melody in very low register Var. 5 melody in very high register Var. 1 melody in LH Var. 2 melody in RH; swaying accompaniment Var. 3 octave leaps in accompaniment Duple meter C Mixolydian: Let all fellows and worthy deacons sing praises and rejoice! G Dorian: Upon the foot bridge, flocks of stalwarts cross leading finely harnessed horses. An old woman asks of them, Have you seen the Holy Son?[Refrain:] Oh Lord Almighty! Duple meter
No. 7 Andante
+ + =
pulsation within each measure
E Dorian: At a quiet wellspring, [Refrain:] To the Lord Almighty!
3:30
&
alternate
3:34 3:37 3:42 3:51 No. 9 Allegro 3:56 4:02
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No. 10 Pi allegro
4:07 4:17
Single statement of melody Ends with longest chord of series
Shifting meters
F Ionian: Three kings from the rising sun, with the star went journeying, to see and to know Him, and to Christ bring their devotion.
Atonality
PARALLELS WITH CUBISM
Tonal music is music with a tonic note, or resting tone, as described in Section I of this Resource Guide. Atonal music, therefore, does not have a resting tone to bring us to a sense of home. The effect of atonality can be quite disorienting, and, in that sense, the closest parallel that atonality might have in the visual arts is the style called Cubism. A Cubist painting does not feature the fixed viewpoint that had been the artistic norm for many centuries. Instead, it tries to look at an object from many perspectives simultaneously. This means that with a Cubist work, there is often little sense of an image receding into space. Perhaps to accentuate this perception, the colors of Cubist paintings are frequently muted or even monochromaticthey often feature shades of gray or brown. The term Cubism is derived from art critic Louis Vauxcelles description of the paintings of Georges Braque (18821963) in a November 1908 exhibition as geometric schemas and cubes.48 (For additional examples of Cubism, see http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/ cubism/.)
EMANCIPATION OF THE DISSONANCE
come to abandon the obligation to craft chords that performed functional relationships. A complex chord could simply be a complex chord, with no need to resolve it into a simpler one. This Emancipation of the Dissonance, as he eventually called it, was truly one of the most revolutionary ideas of twentiethcentury music.
THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL
The first standard-bearer for atonality was Arnold Schoenberg although he personally hated the term. Schoenberg felt that the label atonality tried to define the style by pointing out what it doesnt have (a tonic), rather than describing what the style does have. Schoenberg lobbied for the term pantonal, arguing that there are always relationships between pitches; using the prefix pan-, which means all, implies that all the notes matter. However, Schoenbergs label never caught on. Schoenberg was much more successful in persuading musicians to consider his reasoning that there wasnt a real distinction between extremely chromatic consonance and dissonance. The Romantic era had long been elaborating chords with more and more added tones, making them increasingly dissonant, and this trend continued into the twentieth century. At what point, Schoenberg wondered, do we no longer ascribe a function to the chord? When do we no longer need to hear a tonic? He felt that the time had
Schoenberg had started articulating his viewpoint on tonality and atonality in a 1911 harmony textbook.49 His pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern were quick to follow his ideas. In fact, it was the Viennese premiere of Bergs Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4, on March 31, 1913, that produced what is now nicknamed the Scandal Concert. As would be the case with Stravinskys The Rite of Spring two months later in Paris, the listeners at Bergs concert were highly unreceptive to his atonal setting of art songs, and they broke out into open revolt. Undaunted, all three composers continued their explorations of the new atonal style. Moreover, during the next decade, Schoenberg began crafting the parameters for another compositional technique that was an outgrowth of atonality: he introduced his principles for twelvetone serialism in the 1920s, and this controversial strategy for crafting music would challenge younger composers for the next fifty years.
Photograph of composers Alban Berg (l) and Arnold Schoenberg (r) .
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CHARACTERISTICS
The avant-garde technique of atonality is radical in terms of its abandonment of traditional scales and chordsbut in other ways, atonal music might still seem extremely conventional. Many early examples of atonality are crafted as recognizable, standard forms. Their treatment of meter and rhythm is completely straightforward, and the performance ensembles might be the kinds of groupings used for hundreds of years. But, there is no escaping the fact that the lack of a tonal center was (and can still be) quite destabilizing. Some theorists draw parallels between this musical style and the experimental literary writers of the early twentieth century who were abandoning linear narrativeauthors such as James Joyce (18821941) and T. S. Eliot (188865). These works of literature are often difficult to read and require much concentration, and the same can be said of atonal music.
As we might expect, atonality often partners quite well with other twentieth-century musical styles, such as Expressionism. In fact, Nacht from Pierrot lunaire is an atonal work, but we didnt necessarily notice that fact because Schoenberg held the song together with the persistent three-note ostinato, which he called a passacaglia. In this way, Nacht uses a structure from the past, but combines it with the Modern technique of atonality. (And, by choosing the weird, disturbing poetry, Schoenberg turned the composition into an example of Expressionism as well.) Primitivism is another twentieth-century style that can easily accommodate atonality, although not all Primitivist pieces are atonal. Stravinsky, for instance, used an octatonic scale in portions of The Rite of Spring. Still, it is feasible for atonality by itself to be the primary style of a piece, as is demonstrated by LISTENING E XAMPLE 5, the fifth piece of Weberns Six Bagatelles for String Quartet.
LIST E
NG COMPA NI
By assigning the label bagatelle to these pieces, Webern returns to the Romantic-era genre of character pieces. The definition of bagatelle is not widely known today, but a synonym is trifle: it is something of EN M IN G EXA little value or importance, or something that is insignificant. Webern clearly is trying to convey the idea that these are not weighty, monumental works; they are simply short novelties.
Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, No. 5 uerst langsam (19111913) Anton Webern
Webern was always attracted to miniatures. His entire compositional output can be contained on three compact discs. However, even in the tiny Bagatelle No. 5, he incorporates quite a few twentieth-century concepts. For instance, this bagatelle is a good illustration of Schoenbergs notion of pantonality, because Webern employs all twelve notes of the chromatic scale within the first seven measures of the piece. Composers working with atonality often refer to the chromatic scale as the aggregate the complete set of notes we use in Western musicand FIGURE 2-3 demonstrates how Webern carefully unfolds the aggregate through the first half of the bagatelle. He starts with C, C , and E in the first bar, quickly adding a D in the viola. Those four pitches leave a gap for the pitch D, and the first violin plays that note in the second measure. As FIGURE 2-3 illustrates, Webern then gradually expands outward through the aggregate, adding higher and lower notes in each bar, until all twelve notes have been presented in the course of only seven measures.
NEW FOCUS ON TIMBRE
Anyone who goes to a concert to hear a string quartet by Mozart would expect to see two violins, a viola, and a cello on the stage, and that is exactly the instrumentation that Webern uses in this bagatelle. However, Webern also asks the instruments to use new timbres through the course of the piece. They do use normal bowing at times, but two other techniques are also employed. At times, they play on the bridge, as was heard in Schoenbergs Nacht, and sometimes they pluck the string instead of bowing it; composers use the Italian verb pizzicato to request this tone color. Moreover, throughout the bagatelle, Webern asks all the instruments to use a mute a small device that limits some of the strings ability to vibrate,
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Figure 23
Measure A B B C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
The Unfolding of the Aggregate in Six Bagatelles, No. 5 (measures 1 through 7).
which softens the soundeven though Webern asks the players to perform pianissimo or even quieter during the piece. The tempo marking at the start of Bagatelle No. 5 is uerst langsam, meaning extremely slow. Therefore, the notes unfold at a very unhurried pace, often with only one instrument playing. Musicians call this very light texture pointillism the separation between notes makes them become individual points of sound. When Webern gently emphasizes the contrast between each note by occasionally changing the timbre, he creates what Schoenberg called Klangfarbenmelodie. This unwieldy German term means tonecolor melody, and it describes a piece in which the timbre of each sound matters more than the rise and fall of a conventional tune. Weberns teacher Schoenberg recognized that tone-color melodies were going to be a special challenge for listeners. He exclaimed, How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things!50 The LISTENING GUIDE provided here for Bagatelle No. 5 is divided into two halves. The first half depicts the gradual presentation of the twelve notes from the aggregate, showing which instrument plays which noteand, if the instrument uses a special timbre, that
Photograph of composer Anton Webern.
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tone color is shown as well. (Some of the twelve notes are repeated in other instruments along the way; those are shown without the bold-face font.)
L I S TE N I N G G U I D E 5 A
Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, No. 5 191113 [1:14]
ANTON WEBERN (18831945)
Unfolding of Pitch Aggregate Measure

1 2 3
Timeline
:00 :04 :09 :13 :16 :20 :23 :27 :30 :32 :36 :38
Violin I
C D (pizz) F (pizz) E (pizz) G + B E D
Violin II
Viola
C (bridge)
Cello
E (bridge)
4 5 6
B C F (bridge) A
G (bridge) [launches canon]
:40 :41
A (bridge) [continues canon]
A (pizz) [launches canon]
Anton Webern wrote, While working on [the Bagatelle] I had the feeling that once the twelve tones had run out, the piece was finished.51 However, this is not quite true; the entire piece is thirteen bars long, not seven. Webern decided to try a different technique in the second half of the bagatelle: he used the different timbres to create a type of imitative polyphony called canon. A synonym for canon is round, which is the way we learn as children to sing songs like Row, Row, Row Your Boatone group starts the melody, and then a second group starts a little later (but while the first group is still singing). In Bagatelle No. 5, it is the tone colors that overlap, as LISTENING GUIDE 5B illustrates. The cello starts the canon by playing on the bridge in measure 6. The other instruments follow with that same timbre, one after another. The cello also launches a pizzicato canon at the end of measure 7; this sharper plucked sound is easier for listeners to hear as the canon unfolds. Looking back at FIGURE 2-3, you might notice that no new pitch was added to the aggregate in measure 5. This might have been Weberns very subtle way of announcing the start of the tone color canon, which begins in measure 6. Since the aggregate is still unfolding while the canon starts, Webern creates a seamless connection between the two halves of this miniature.
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Schoenberg was delighted with Weberns achievements in the Bagatelles. He wrote a preface to the published score of the pieces, saying, Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. You can stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel.52
L I S TE N I N G G U I D E 5 B
Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, No. 5 191113 [1:14]
ANTON WEBERN (18831945)
Tone Color Canon Measure

6 7
Timeline
:30 :36 :41 :44
Cello
Bridge (G)
Violin 1
Viola
Violin 2
Bridge (A) Pizzicato (A )
Bridge (E) Bridge (E )
:46 :47 Pizzicato (F) Pizzicato (D) Pizzicato (G )
:50 :55 :56 :58 1:01 1:04 1:09
Pizzicato (B)
10 11 12 13
Pizzicato (B) Pizzicato (G )
Bridge (G) Bridge (E )
Section II Summary: Classical Music and Modernism
ous eras continues to be performed because of audiences preference for a repertory canon. In the early twentieth century, there was a tre* mendous diversity of styles in both classical and popular music (which also made the choice of a descriptive name for this era more difficult). The new technologies of radio and recording helped all these styles to flourish. Recordings were a source of tremendous prof* it to many performers, and portable gramophones allowed listeners to enjoy music virtually anywhereeven the trenches of World War I battlefields.
The history of classical music is usually divided into six broad time periods, although historians dont always agree on the precise dates: Middle Ages/Medieval (c. 8001400); Renaissance (1400 1600); Baroque (16001750; Classical (17501815); Romantic (18151900); twentieth and twenty-first centuries (1900present). Modernism is often used as a style period name for the present-day era, but modern isnt necessarily a compelling label for music that is more than 110 years old. Moreover, music from previ-
Recording devices also helped the new scholarly * discipline of ethnomusicology as efforts were
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made to preserve and study music all over the globe by means of field recordings. In classical music, most of the new compositional * styles could be considered avant-garde since they rejected aspects of the past and tried to create new kinds of music. Impressionist music resembles Impressionist art * in its vague outlines and shimmering tone colors. By adding notes to chords, using unconventional scales, and deemphasizing rhythm, composers reduced the sense of direction and drive usually heard in tonal music.
scenario, in which a maiden is sacrificed to the gods, and the use of a pounding, jarring polychord that resembles tribal drumming. Nationalism is a style that allows composers to * express their patriotism and reject the musical influence of enemy nations. This style was especially popular during the great political instability of the early twentieth century. Nationalist music may use a countrys folk music * and dances as source materials, or it may pay tribute to the countrys history, legends, geography, or notable people.
Debussys piano piece Voiles illustrates the Field recordings of Romanian folk music led * * blurriness of Impressionism simply through to the creation of Bartks Romanian Christmas its title: even though it is a character piece, it is unclear if it depicts veils or sails. Moreover, despite its use of contrasting whole-tone and pentatonic scales, the parameters of its ternary form are not distinct. Carols. He used the folk melodies as the basis for a set of piano pieces, creating new accompaniments that would help young learners master the keyboard. Some of its nationalist features are the various modes used by the carols, the flexible meters, and the drone effect that mimics the Hungarian bagpipe. Atonality was Schoenbergs radical notion that * music does not always have to settle on a tonic, allowing us to pay more attention to all the notes in a piece. This new approach shares some similarities with the multiple perspectives of an image featured in Cubist artworks. Atonality doesnt use traditional harmony, but it * still might employ conventional rhythms, forms, or ensembles. The miniature Bagatelle No. 5 by Anton Webern * uses a traditional string quartet to present the twelve notes of the aggregate. The players of this work perform varied tone colors such as pizzicato and on the bridge to highlight the pointillistic texture, in a technique that Schoenberg designated as Klangfarbenmelodie. The second half of the bagatelle uses the tone colors as a basis for a tiny canon of overlapping timbres.
Expressionism, in both visual art and in music, * conveys a sense of uneasiness. One group of composers to write in this styleSchoenberg, Berg, and Webernis known as the Second Viennese School. Schoenbergs Nacht, from his song cycle Pierrot * lunaire, uses the misadventures of a commedia dellarte character to convey an Expressionistic nightmare. It combines old techniques like wordpainting and passacaglia a type of ostinato with new sounds like Sprechstimme for the vocalist and on the bridge bowing for the string player. Primitivism strives to create primal, uncultured * effects, avoiding any techniques that would seem polished and elegant. The best-known example of musical Primitivism * is Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, which was made notorious when it provoked a riot on its opening night. Some of its barbaric qualities include the
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III N O TI SEC
EA RLY TWENTIETHCENTURY POPULA R MUSIC
Continuities from the Past

In the same way that classical music listeners continued to enjoy Romantic-era repertory into the Modern period, many styles of popular music from the nineteenth century (and earlier) still found audiences during the twentieth century.
preserve ethnic identity by passing along the knowledge and stories of a people. Sometimes folk music was a way of communicating natural history. For example, songs could help herbalists remember the properties of certain plants, and hunters and herders could review the behaviors of various animals. As immigrants moved from place to place, their folk music traveled with them, but often it would merge with some of the musical traditions of their new homeland. These fusions of musical styles led directly to some of the music that would become wildly popular in the United Statesstyles such as blues and jazz are very much a product of blended approaches to music-making. As the new phonograph encouraged the growth of commercial music recording in the early twentieth century, much traditional ethnic music also received a significant amount of renewed attention, and various folklore societies that focused on particular cultures were established, both in the United States and in Europe. Various record manufacturers, such as the Gramophone Company Ltd. (which produced the trademark known as His Masters Voice [HMV]), issued monthly catalogues of all their recordings and included essays drawing listeners attention to The Fascination of Folk-Song or New Ballad Records.53 Some of the recordings both in the early years and later on through the twentieth centurywere extremely profitable. The historian Leslie Shepard wryly observed: It is one of those ironies of civilization that the music of poor people who had little else but their music should have made fame and fortune for favored pop idols in the affluent society.54
Folk Music
Folk music is one of the most venerable styles of music, dating back centuries. Because folk performancesometimes called vernacular music has been an oral tradition, it is often harder to document than other, more contemporary styles of music. Moreover, as industrialization took hold, and as literacy and mass communication methods improved, folk traditions have been increasingly threatened, since the lifestyles and activities of the performers often shifted from rural to urban locales. As new technologies for making audio recordings were developed, preservation of folk music was an early focus for ethnomusicologists. Even earlier, many scholars had transcribed folk melodies by ear, and some collections of folk songs had been published from the eighteenth century onward. These songbooks, however, focused on vocal melodies; they seldom preserved information about the accompaniment to songs, and they usually neglected instrumental music altogether. The term functional is often applied to folk music, meaning that the music is customarily performed for a purpose beyond sheer entertainment, whether to support ritual occasions (weddings, funerals, planting or harvest festivals, and so forth) or for more general activities, such as childrens songs, work songs, or music to support merry-making or religion. Moreover, folksong often serves the function of perpetuating a cultures lore and traditions, helping to
Multiple Stage Traditions

Another long-lived form of music-making that continued to thrive in the twentieth century was theatrical music. Opera had been invented in the seventeenth
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Advertisement for a gramophone produced by the Gramophone Company, Ltd. The new phonograph encouraged the growth of commercial music recording in the early twentieth century, and much traditional ethnic music also received a significant amount of renewed attention.
century, at the dawn of the Baroque period. Operas were, in essence, plays set to music, in which characters sang their lines instead of speaking them. In 1637, an exciting novelty was introduced in the city of Venice: opera theaters began offering admission to anyone who could afford a ticket. (Earlier operas had been presented only in private aristocratic homes.) Rival theaters competed to offer the most celebrated star performers (launching the terms prima donna and the label for her male equivalent, primo uomo, into the vocabulary). The commercial possibilities quickly intrigued investors in other countries, so public opera houses soon opened throughout Europe. Concerts, too, were increasingly offered to the public, sometimes in the same buildings used by the opera productions, and eventually in custombuilt concert halls. Although operasin Italianwere the first kind of stage music to be offered in many countries out-
side Italy, it didnt take long for individual nations to cultivate their own genres of stage entertainment in their native languages. From England came both ballad operas and comic operas, Germany developed the Singspiel (literally, sung play), and France focused on opra-ballets, with a heavy emphasis on dancing. During the Classical period, Italy began dividing opera into two subtypes: seria (serious) and buffa (comic). France then crafted its own comic stage works. The first kindrestricted to the large, government-licensed theaterswas called opra-comique. In the mid-nineteenth century, France eased its licensing laws so that smaller theaters could also offer comic shows; this new genre was called opra-bouffe. The very first opra-bouffe, written by Jacques Offenbach (181980), was titled Orpheus in the Underworld (1858). It spoofed an earlier opera that was based on an ancient Greek legend in which Orpheus goes to the Underworld to rescue
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these works were crossing the boundaries between countries with increasing ease, all these region-specific productions were themselves an expression of nationalism since they were presented in each countrys vernacular language and often featured stories drawn from national interests.
MINSTREL SHOWS
The United States had been slower than most nations in developing its own equivalent to opera and operas many theatrical cousins. From colonial days onward, Americans had enjoyed stage music, but the productions were imported from overseas, especially from England. When American composers finally began writing new works, they initially restricted themselves to replicating the same genres that had been imported. The earliest home-grown musical stage productions in the United States were, therefore, ballad operas, and the first of these did not debut until 1794.56
Librettist William Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert and composer
his wife Eurydice. In Offenbachs version, Orpheus doesnt want her backand the Gods are delighted to keep her, dancing the familiar melody we now call the can-can during a riotous finale. Very quickly, other nations saw the appeal of this new French invention, so they cultivated their own versions. In both Austria and England, these shows were called operettasand the United States was eager to import the latest operetta productions from both countries. The satirical British operettas by the team of William Gilbert (18361911) and Arthur Sullivan (18421900) were immediate hits, and more than fifty productions of their H.M.S. Pinafore were mounted in the United States not long after the operettas 1878 debut. In New York, eight different productions ran within five blocks of each other. Moreover, entrepreneurs were using different hooks to try to pull in audiences, creating various themes to some of the stagings: there was an all-Black production, an all-Catholic cast, a production starring children only, and so forth. To Gilbert and Sullivans dismay, though, these were all pirated productions since the American producers were not paying royalties. Even when the first international copyright law was passed in 1887 at the Berne Convention, the United States would not be one of the fourteen countries to sign the agreement.55 So, Gilbert and Sullivan sailed to New York in 1879 to open the first authorized production of H. M. S. Pinafore. During their stay, they also used the opportunity to premiere their next operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, and were better able to protect their American sales this time around. Although many of
In 1822, an English actor named Charles Matthews visited America and was fascinated by the mannerisms of African Americans. He soon began mimicking and exaggerating these behaviors on stage while wearing black-face make-up (made from burnt cork, often applied in conjunction with exaggerated lip make-up). American entertainers were quick to follow his lead; initially they called themselves Ethiopian delineators, and they would perform skits and songs between the acts of plays. One actor, Thomas Dartmouth Rice (180860), imitated the awkward dancing of a gnarled, arthritic African American, and named his fictional version Jim Crow. The name would develop even more unpleasant associations in the twentieth century, when it was used to describe practices that discriminated against blacks in the United States. Despite the lamentable racism of these portrayals, they soon became all the rage in nineteenth-century America, and minstrel shows, as they came to be called, were presented throughout the nation by traveling performers. Certain conventions developed: there were endless jokes and riddles, specialty skills, parodies of other kinds of entertainment (especially opera), and an act-closing walk-around, in which the full cast sang and danced, giving each performer time for a short solo. Most of the songs were full of catchy rhythms and singable melodies. The skits featured a number of stock characters drawn from Southern stereotypes; in this way, minstrel shows resembled the much-older commedia dellarte tradition that had also made use of stock figures such as Pierrot. Many minstrel shows also featured a cakewalk, an entertainment drawn from the plantation-era challenge-dance. In the South, one amusement for
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MUSIC HALL
The kind of African-American mimicry developed by Charles Matthews also found an audience in England, especially in venues called music halls. As their name suggests, these theaters presented all sorts of musical entertainments, as well as some monologues. Because of British licensing laws, however, they could not offer purely dramatic performances. Music halls developed throughout the nineteenth century, and because they were an outgrowth of taverns and pubs, it was customary for audiences to sit at tables and be served drinks during the show. Audience sing-alongs were common; the caliber of their performance might vary depending on the amount of alcohol consumed! Over time, the term music hall came to refer to the kind of entertainment as well (not just the type of theater). Gradually, various entrepreneurs, such as the German Reed Family, worked hard to increase the respectability of the music halls, so that middle-class audiences would feel safe in attending. Music hall programs were constantly being revised to address current events, so these entertainments helped keep their audiences up-to-date. Music halls were also an important source for many of the popular tunes that accompanied British soldiers into World War I, including a song we will discuss in Section IV of the Resource Guide, Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary. Some music hall songs, similar to American minstrel shows, focused on ethnic portrayals, such as the Cockney song My Old Dutch (1892). This tune mimicked the hardto-understand rhyming slang of East Londoners; for instance, the songs title refers to the singers wife, or Dutch platea phrase that rhymes with mate. A pop singing group of the 1960s, Hermans Hermits, made a number-one hit recording by reviving another old Cockney-inspired tune, Im Henery the Eighth, I Am. (Hermans Hermits updated the spelling to Henry.) Many listeners today also recognize Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, a song from the 1890s that became popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
VAUDEVILLE ( VARIETY )
Minstrel shows presented a wide range of entertainment, from satires of life in the South to opera selections.
slaves was to mimic their owners. Couples would strut around, showing off their fancy steps and highsociety manners. The winning couple was awarded a cake as a prize, leading to the phrase to take the cake. Although the earliest minstrels were white performers wearing blackface make-up, in the second half of the century, some African Americans began touring the United States as well. (A black troupe led by Charles Hicks is said to have originated the well-known joke, Why did the chicken cross the road?57 ) Minstrel shows were as popular then as television is today, and their musical repertory has had a lasting impact. Pieces written by Stephen Foster (182664) Americas finest composer for minstrel showsstill serve as the state songs for Kentucky (My Old Kentucky Home) and Florida (Old Folks at Home, often better known by the name Swanee River). Americans continue to sing many other songs from the minstrel era, such as Oh! Susannah, I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, Jimmy Crack Corn, Turkey in the Straw, Camptown Races, as well as Dixie, a song that can still provoke strong reactions as some find its lyrics, which express nostalgia for the Old South, offensive.
In the United States, Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay had been sung in varietyor vaudevilletheaters. The variety show developed somewhat later than music halls and minstrel shows and contained features of both of these entertainments, plus characteristics of its own. Scholars disagree as to when the newer term vaudeville was first introduced, but one theater owner, John W. Ransome, was using the label in the 1880s. (Another owner, Tony Pastor, detested the new name, calling it a sissy label for what he regarded as the correct term, variety.58) Regardless of the designation, the premise was the same: a vaudeville show consisted of a long series of acts, or
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Cover to the sheet music, composed by George Diamond, for the Mutt and Jeff March and Two-Step with a photograph of vaudeville performers Drane and Alexander. Prohibitionist Carrie Nation simulated her destruction of saloons for the entertainment of vaudeville audiences.
Prohibitionist Carrie Nation simulated her destruction of saloons for the entertainment of vaudeville audiences (then passed out souvenir axes).59 Instrumentalists were needed to accompany vaudeville singers, and even spoken entertainments would often incorporate music to enhance the atmosphere. However, the featured performers did not travel with their own accompanists; instead, they would rely on resident musicians in each theater to assist them. Vocalists, of course, could provide sheet music, but spoken drama was more of a challenge, since little or no time was available for rehearsal. The theater musicians maintained collections of stock music suitable for particular moods or situationsstorms, battles, love scenes, and so forthand the visiting performer would hand the instrumentalists a cue sheet that indicated the kind of music desired at each cue in the spoken dialogue or stage action. FIGURE 3-1 depicts a typical cue-sheet from the 1870s and 1880s. Like other early twentieth-century entertainments, there are various bits that have survived long past the vaudeville era. Many people have encountered the Slowly I turnedstep by stepinch by inch dialogue from a popular vaudeville skit. The nicknames
turns, by a diverse array of entertainers. Theater owners banded together into circuits, similar to theater chains today. If an entertainer was hired by a circuit, he would move from theater to theater, playing at each for one or two weeks at a time. The list of turns was known as the bill, and the term top billing derived from the custom of naming the most prominent performer first. These turns regularly included a myriad of song-and-dance performers, but also might consist of arias from grand opera, banjo players, novelty musical acts, and piano teams. All sorts of dance styles were presented, from serious ballet to comic eccentricities. Many non-musical entertainers were standard features of vaudeville: ventriloquists, circus acts (with acrobats, aerialists, or wire walkers), blackface comedians, magicians, rope-spinners, whip-snappers, jugglers, trick cyclists, monologists, sister teams, and dog acts. Moreover, people in the news would make the rounds of vaudeville theaters in the same way that celebrities visit talk-shows today. Both Babe Ruth and Helen Keller appeared in vaudeville, and the
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Figure 31
At rise of curtain Cue It is good Squire Beasley Cue (When comic falls down) Cue I feel like dancing Cue The villagers are coming Cue (Old man sits down suddenly) Cue While the villagers make merry Cue I spurn you Cue I am poor, and alone Cue Try to forget my troubles Cue It contains dynamite Cue (When burglars enter) Cue (For knife combat) Cue Will tell my sad story Cue (For change of scene) Cue It is the cavalry Cue The mill is on fire Cue We must save her Cue Saved Orchestra (lively music) (jolly music for squires entrance) (Drum crash) (Specialty) (Lively 6-8 time) (Clarinet squeal) (Country dance) (Chord in D) (plaintive music) (hornpipe by soubrette) (G chordfortissimo) (Sneaky music) (Allegro) (Adagio with muted violin) (Waltz) (Bugle call) (Hurry music) (Frenzied music) (Joyous music until curtain)
Vaudeville Cue Sheet60
of Mutt and Jeff, used by the comedy team of Drane and Alexander, popularized two characters from a comic strip of the same title. Hundreds of entertainers who would dominate film, radio, and television in the rest of the century gained early experience on the vaudeville stage: the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, and the Three Stooges are some of the best known. Just as with minstrel shows, there were aspects to vaudeville that might make viewers uncomfortable today. Many ethnic groups were satirized by dialect comedians who often perpetuated (and may have created) some stereotypes about ethnic behavior. Gender roles were equally narrow and predictable. Nevertheless, it was the vaudeville production team of Harrigan and Hart that was the first to break a theatrical color barrier in 1883, employing African Americans to perform in a theater that had previously been limited exclusively to whites.61 Vaudeville continued to be a dominant form of American entertainment through the years of World War I; it was only the coming of film that eventually supplanted the vaudeville tradition.
Bands
The label band has been applied for many centuries to many types of instrumental groupings, but by the nineteenth century, it most often meant an ensemble consisting either solely of brass and percussion instruments (called a brass band) or a mixture of brass, woodwinds, and percussion (often labeled a wind band). Bands were used in wideranging circumstances: as military ensembles, both to help regulate marching and to support military routines, and as community, school, and professional groups, which served a variety of civic and pedagogical purposes. Military bands were one of the oldest and most widespread traditions. The magazine Harpers Weekly estimated that in 1889, the United States hosted more than ten thousand military bands.62 Many army regiments were very proud of the musicians linked to their unitor lamented the absence of a regimental band if they didnt have one. During World War I, some bands were formed in France, as was the case with the 5th Lancashire Fusiliers. This battalions
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Photograph of Lieutenant James Reese Europe with his regiment, the 369 th Infantry.
captain was Percy E. Tickler, son of a wealthy manufacturer, and he described the battalions strategy: They were very cheeky! They came and said, Do you think we could have a band? The one we had was left behind! Theyd got a catalogue and everything from Boosey and Hawkes [a prominent London music dealer]. With the instruments marked on it, and all the extras too! So I wrote to Father and sent the catalogue and asked him. Less than a week later I got a wire from Father which said Bought band and it is on its way. As quick as that! Well it came while we were out of the line. The first morning the men wed picked to play went off and practised in [the] woods somewhere, so that we wouldnt hear them until they were ready. Then we got going. We used to play for the whole Brigade and for parades when they were presenting decorations, and field days and so onand, my word, what a difference it makes! Its lovely. It puts a swing into you. They did enjoy it, of course. They loved it! They used to swagger through villages and all the French
and Belgian people came out to watch them. After Passchendaele it did a lot for the morale of the Battalion.63 In America, James Reese Europe was asked to form an African-American band to support the 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment during the Great War. He and his band were sent on a wide-ranging concert tour to build morale overseas; we will discuss their activities in more detail in Section IV of the Resource Guide. Europe was not the only person to lead an AfricanAmerican ensembleothers included Tim Brymm, William H. Tyers, and Ford Dabney. These and other bands played an important role in the early training of numerous African-American instrumentalists. For instance, W.C. Handy (18731958), whose St. Louis Blues appears in this Resource Guide as LISTENING E XAMPLE 7, played with several brass bands, some of which he had organized himself. Moreover, a brass band was life-changingand perhaps life-saving for Louis Armstrong (190171). He had been arrested for delinquency at age eleven and was sent to the
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John Philip Sousa and the newly formed Sousa Band, St. Louis Exposition, 1893.
Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans. This institution hosted a band, which Armstrong wanted to join. A staff member in the home gave Armstrong music lessons, thereby launching his legendary career as a jazz cornet- and trumpet-player. Participation in bands was not just for menbut only women who played violin or harp (or were soprano vocalists) could participate in the professional (male) ensembles. (Singers were featured in opera arrangements.) Gradually, women began to form bands of their own; one of the most successful was Helen May Butlers Ladies Brass Band. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1891, Butler led various all-female ensembles in giving hundreds of concerts under the slogan: Music for the American people, by American composers, played by American girls.64 Butlers success led to her nickname Miss Sousa Jr., which was a tribute to Americas most famous bandleader, John Philip Sousa (18541932). Sousa had gone band-mad after childhood training on several instruments at a small music conservatory and was planning to run away to join a circus band, so his father apprenticed him to the U.S. Marine Band. Sousa left the Marines at age twenty,
continuing to perform in vaudeville and other theatrical entertainments. In 1880, he returned to the Marine Band, having been appointed its fourteenth conductor at age twenty-six. Over the next twelve years, under his leadership, it grew to be the finest military band in the United States. Sousa then decided to form his own civilian band, and his national and international tours over the next forty years made him a household name. For the Marine Band and his own troupe, Sousa composed more than a hundred marches, leading to his designation as The March King. (For images of sheet music and MIDI recordings of many Sousa marches, see http://www.dws.org/sousa/works/ marches.) A march by its very nameis a genre appropriate for bands; it inevitably features duple meter, to set a pace for marching soldiers. In the United States, the tempo is usually about 120 beats per minute; European marches are usually played somewhat slower, often around one hundred beats per minute. The structure of the nineteenth-century march, as popularized by Sousa and others, was customarily multi-thematic form. This architecture consists of several melodies, or strains, each of
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which is usually repeated at least once. The form often begins with a short introduction, followed by two statements each of the first two strains. The third melody shifts the harmony to the subdominant key, and it might be quieter and more melodic. This third tune usually features the woodwind instruments, and it is called the trio, taking the term from dance music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If a fourth melody is used, then it tends to be bombastic (sometimes called the break strain or dogfight because of its contrasting character). If no breakstrain is used, then usually the trio melody is repeated at a louder dynamic and with additional instruments. Marches were incredibly popular with audiences, both in America and in Europe. Sousas The Stars and Stripes Forever (1896) was named the national march of the United States.65 Not only did listeners enjoy marches in concert, but they danced to them as well; the dance known as the two-step was often called the Washington Post, since Sousas 1889 march of the same name was played for the dancers so frequently. One of the favorite marches of the World War I fighting forces was Colonel Bogey, written by Kenneth J. Alford in 1914; its first strain is particularly well suited for whistling. (Alford was the pseudonym for Lieutenant Frederic J. Ricketts, a British army bandmaster.) The effects of band music were wide-ranging. For instance, the formal structure of ragtime, which we will discuss later in the Resource Guide, draws directly from multi-thematic form. In New Orleans, marching bands would play somberly as they escorted funeral processions to the cemetery; they would then break into an exuberant version of their music on the way back, performing a style of music that was important in the development of jazz. More and more classical composers also began to compose for the band as an indoor ensemble. Two of the bestknown early pieces for concert band were the First Suite in E (1909) and the Second Suite in F (1911), both by British composer Gustav Holst.
Psalm-singing was such an important part of American colonial life that a new edition of psalm texts, the Bay Psalm Book, was the very first book of any sort printed in the northern colonies (1640).
Gospel
Gospel was another popular style of music with roots in the distant past. Congregational singing of sacred hymns and psalms has a very long tradition and was especially prevalent in the United States. In the colonial era, the very first publication printed in the New England colonies was The Bay Psalm Book (1640), which contained new rhyming versions of some of the Biblical Psalms. In the eighteenth century, singing schools developed, partly as an excuse for social gatherings, but also to improve the musical literacy of Americans. New religious tunes, such as William Billings Chester (1778), were written as exercises for the schools, yet became popular melo-
dies on their own. These newer songs were sacred, but they werent based directly on Bible verses. A host of other religious hymns soon followed, and different denominations often assembled their own hymnals. As the nineteenth century wore on, the style of hymns gradually changed, often absorbing some of the features of other popular music of the time. Some hymn melodies started to resemble march themes; other tunes were closer in style to the songs that could be heard in minstrel shows or early vaudeville. The designation gospel hymn started to be applied to these hybrid settings, and in the later nineteenth century, two new hymnals introduced the term gospel in print: Gospel Songs (1874) and Gospel Hymns
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and Sacred Songs (1875). Thousands more gospel songs soon followed. The popular appeal of this music assisted with religious evangelism, so many revival efforts used a great deal of gospel-singing to help bring in worshippers. Some solo singers began to specialize in this repertory, as did gospel quartets. In 1910, the Vaughan Music Publishing Company founded a professional quartet to help market their gospel songbooks. Across American society, these songs were known and sung, and soldiers often carried the tunes with them into their military service. Among the troops in the early twentieth century, some of the most popular gospel songs were His Eye is On the Sparrow and The Old Rugged Cross. The widespread familiarity of gospel hymns was illustrated on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed a passenger vessel, the Lusitania. Almost 1,200 people lost their lives, including many Americans. The composer Charles Ives described a spontaneous incident of gospel-singing that occurred on a New York subway platform that day, as stunned Americans absorbed the news of the attack. Ives recalled: Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began to whistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain. A workman with a shovel over his shoulder came on the platform and joined the chorus, and the next man, a Wall Street banker with white spats and a cane, joined in it, and finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune, and they didnt seem to be singing in fun, but as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long. Now what was the tune? It wasnt a Broadway hit, it wasnt a musical comedy air, it wasnt a waltz tune or a dance tune or an opera tune or a classical tuneIt was (only) the refrain of an old Gospel Hymn that had stirred many people of past generations. It was nothing but In the Sweet Bye and Bye.66
its anthem, called the Kaiserhymne (The Kaisers Hymn), although with the formation of the Austrian Republic at the end of World War I, a new (unpopular) anthem was adopted instead. Germany co-opted the Kaiserhymne in 1922; prior to this, somewhat confusingly, Germany used the melody of Englands God Save the King, which it had done from the time that the German empire was established in 1871. Austria re-adopted the Kaiserhymne melody as its anthem in 1929, and thus Austria and Germany shared the tune until the end of World War II, when Austria adopted yet a different anthem in 1947. Most nations did not have anthems in the year 1800, however. Nevertheless, the number of anthems increased dramatically through much of the Romantic era; this growth was partly a response to the same sort of increased patriotism that had supported musical nationalism. At the start of the twentieth century, the United States was one of the many countries that still had not declared an official anthem. Although Francis Scott Key had written the poetry to The Star-Spangled Banner in 1814, with the tune of the English drinking song To Anacreon in Heavn in his mind, other composers had tried their hands at new melodies (using Keys text) during the nineteenth century. None of these other attempts caught on as well as did the Anacreon tune, and thus the Anacreon melody became linked most clearly in peoples minds with Keys poem. The Star-Spangled Banner was only one competitor for an American patriotic anthem, however. Many people supported America (My country, tis of thee) as the better, more singable choice. At the same time, some citizens didnt like the fact that its melody was the same tune used by Great Britain for its national anthem, God Save the King (which was serving as the tune for Germanys anthem as well). A group called the National Song Society endorsed a piece called A New National Anthem ; their campaign of support ran from 1909 to 1915, but when that effort failed, they started backing a song called My Own United States instead. In 1916, however, President Woodrow Wilson named The Star-Spangled Banner as the national air for all military use; 67 by default, therefore, most Americans began treating the tune as if it were the official anthem for the nation as a whole. In one shocking incident in 1919, a man was shot in the back three times because he failed to stand up when The Star-Spangled Banner was being played at a Victory Loan pageant in Washington, D.C.and after his shooting, the assembled crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.68 Nevertheless, it was not until 1931 that Congress formally confirmed The Star-Spangled Banner as the national anthem of the United States.
Politicized Music
NATIONAL ANTHEMS
At the start of the nineteenth century, only a few countries had formally adopted national anthems. The oldest tune, God Save the King (or Queen, depending on the current monarchs gender), had been performed in the British Isles since the mideighteenth century, while France adopted the stirring La Marseillaise as its anthem in 1795. Carlos III of Spain chose an anonymous instrumental tune as the Royal March in 1770, and ever since, this melody has served as the nations anthem except during the years of the Spanish Republic (19316). Austria used a 1797 melody by Joseph Haydn (17321809) as
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MUSIC FOR CAUSES
In the same way that there was a growing appreciation for musics power in creating national identity and in stirring patriotic fervor, groups that were lobbying to achieve various political or social goals also began to use music to enhance their activities. For instance, the temperance movement used songs to support its efforts to restrict the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Similarly, labor unions found that workers rallied very quickly behind rousing airs, and the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW)founded in 1905published its first songbook in 1909. Now known as The Little Red Songbook, it was originally titled Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the ShopsSongs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. Solidarity Forever became one of its most popular numbers; it was sung to an old folk melody John Browns Body, but was given new words by Ralph Chaplin. In the century since its first publication, many editions of the songbook have been issued; the most recent was printed in 2010. The union members, known as the Wobblies, also adapted a 1901 gospel hymn Ill Overcome Someday, turning it into We Shall Overcomea song that later became an anthem for African Americans lobbying for civil rights in the 1960s. Music also added energy to the campaigns that were dedicated to obtaining the right for women to vote. A number of female composers seized this opportunity to serve the cause of womens suffrage. In Amsterdam, Catharina van Rennes wrote a largescale choral work that she conducted herself in 1908 at the opening of the Fourth International Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Even better known was Dame Ethel Smyth. She met the renowned English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in 1910 and then devoted herself to the suffrage movement for the next two years. Smyth soon completed a work for chorus and orchestra called Songs of Sunrise, which premiered in 1911. Its rousing finale was titled The March of the Women, and this quickly became an anthem for suffragettes in Great Britain. Smyth spent two months in Englands Holloway Jail for smashing a cabinet members window, and she led a celebrated performance of The March of the Women while in prison: her fellow inmates marched around the prison courtyard, singing a spirited rendition of the anthem, while Smyth conducted them from a window with her toothbrush.69 By 1918, Smyth and her fellow protestors attained part of their goal: women who were at least thirty were given the right to vote in England, and in 1928, the voting age was dropped to twenty-one. Women in the United States won their battle for suffrage in 1920a date that is still within the lifetime of some of Americas oldest citizens.
English composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyths The March of the Women became an anthem for suffragettes in Great Britain.
Many New Styles and Genres

European composers had been the leaders in developing most of the new styles that appeared in classical music. The United States, however, was the source of several popular styles that soon swept the globe.
Ragtime
In the 1920s, various American writers started looking back with nostalgia at the final decade of the nineteenth century and christened itin retrospectthe Gay Nineties. Not everything about that decade had been upbeat: a railroad investment collapse known as the Panic of 1893 produced a multi-year economic depression. Still, the Worlds Columbian Exposition, hosted in Chicago in 1893, introduced the approximately twenty million fairgoers to an exciting new musical sensation, ragtime. One piece known to date from the fair was Jesse Picketts The Dream. This new musical style was associated primarily with African Americans because its standout characteristic was its catchy syncopation, or ragged
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Figure 32
Ragtime rhythms.
timea rhythmic feature that had been heard ever since minstrel shows had begun touring the United States.
SYNTHESIS
their groupings of short and sustained notes, they all incorporate ragged syncopations.
COMPOSERS
The style called ragtime also incorporated traits from brass band marches and dances, European piano music, and perhaps even Latin- and South American elements, blending them with the syncopated energy that characterizes much African music. The new style was initially applied mainly to piano pieces, which were called rags. Pianos themselves were of course associated with European classical music traditions, but many pianists loved to play popular music, and a great deal of the march music composed by Sousa and his peers had been transcribed for keyboard. From there, it was a small step to playing the march arrangements with ad-libbed syncopationsbut this change in rhythm launched an enormous craze, and created the new style of ragtime. Certain characteristics are found in nearly all rags: the bass line usually maintains a steady eighth- or quarter-note pulse, often described as an oom-pah rhythm because it resembles the sound of tubas in a typical march. The melody lineusually the pianos right handplays syncopated patterns against that bass line. Some of the most common ragtime patterns are shown graphically in FIGURE 3-2. Although these patterns vary quite a bit from each other in
Since the earliest instances of ragtime were improvised, it is difficult to know when the style actually developed, but it seems to have begun appearing in the American South during the 1880s. The cakewalks that had been such popular features in minstrel show programs were often subjected to ragging during the 1890s, but they werent published with those new rhythmic patterns until the very last years of the century. However, the earliest rags made fuller use of the piano keyboard than the typical cakewalk. The first black composer to publish a rag, Tom Turpin (18711922), demonstrated this increased sophistication in his Harlem Rag of 1897. Turpin was a St. Louis saloonkeeper who hosted a number of the early ragtime players, and Scott Joplin (18671917)the King of Ragtimededicated his 1905 Rosebud March to Turpin. Although Scott Joplins family was exceedingly poor, Joplins father scraped together enough cash to buy a square piano for his son. The boys talent caught the attention of the white community by the time he was eleven, and an old German musician began to give him lessons, and, it seems, helped Joplin develop artistic aspirations as well. As a young man, Joplin studied music at George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, and one of his ongoing efforts was to translate the tricky syncopated rhythms of ragtime into
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readable musical notation. He performed rags at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia and was befriended by John Stark, who published about a third of Joplins compositions. Joplin published his first rag, Oriental Rag, in 1899. Like most composers of his day, he had sold the rights for a flat fee, estimated to have been $25. Joplin talked to a lawyer before publishing again, and with his second publication, The Maple Leaf Rag, he negotiated a royalty payment of a penny per copy. The $4 he earned the first year from the approximately four hundred copies sold didnt seem like much, but gradually the popularity of the work grew and grew, and it had sold half a million copies by 1909. Joplins increasing success over that decade encouraged a number of younger composers to treat their ragtime music more seriously as well. One of Joplins Missouri associates, James Scott (18851938), also began publishing in the first decade of the twentieth century. When Joplin moved to New York in 1907 (to pursue his ambition of writing stage music), he also befriended Joseph Lamb (18871960), who became the first successful white composer of rags. All of these men are now regarded as core members of the classic school of ragtime composers, producing works with high artistic standards.
The son of a former slave, Scott Joplin became King of the Ragtime Writers and was one of the first composers to negotiate for royalties rather than a flat fee for his music.
LIST E
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One of the recording technologies employed before the first acoustic recordings was that of piano rolls. A pianist would play a keyboard punching machine that created perforations in a long scroll of paper. A player piano contained rollers that would drive the perforated EN M IN G EXA scroll against a tracking device, which operated the pianos hammers (instead of fingers on a keyboard), thereby reproducing what the pianist had originally played. These piano rolls are not perfect; they dont replicate the original performers dynamics or articulations, for instance, and they have other shortcomings as well. But, they give us an otherwise unavailable glimpse into the artistry of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century performers. Joplins 1916 piano roll recording of the Maple Leaf Rag is therefore a rare chance to hear a performer who has been dead for almost a century. In fact, there are a few awkward moments in this recording; Joplin was beginning to lose his motor ability because of the syphilis that would take his life the following year. At the same time, there are some beautifully fluid passages that reflect his great keyboard talent, plus an occasional embellishment that enhances the score even more. The sheet music for the Maple Leaf Rag also reveals a great deal about Joplins views concerning ragtime. The very first indication in the score is Tempo di marcia (march tempo), clarifying the rags association with the band genre. It is easy, though, for pianists to play this type of music quite a bit faster than would be feasible for marchingand performers did start to race along, quicker and quicker, as more rags were published. Joplin hated this trend,
Maple Leaf Rag (1899) Scott Joplin
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By the time Scott Joplin published Euphonic Sounds (1909) a decade after The Maple Leaf Raghe needed to warn players not to perform ragtime music too quickly.
and started to put admonitions against the practice in his later pieces. In the sheet music for Euphonic Sounds (1909), he insisted, It is never right to play Ragtime fast, signing himself, Composer. Another indication of ragtimes debt to marches is evident in the form, as seen in LISTENING GUIDE 6. Maple Leaf Rag follows a clear-cut multi-thematic form of AABBACCDD. Each of the four strains makes use of different ragtime rhythms (see FIGURE 3-2). The A and B melodies are fairly similar, but Joplin distinguishes the beginning of B by setting it in a higher register. The C strain is labeled Trio in the sheet music, and (like its march forebears) it shifts from the tonic key of A major to the subdominant key of D major. Unlike a typical march, though, C sounds a little heavier than the previous two melodies; the right hand often plays four notes at a time rather than just one or two, creating a fuller texture. The D strain, returning to the tonic key, might surprise listeners by having no syncopation at all in the first measure, but it does start to incorporate ragtime rhythms by measure 2. The march ancestry is clear in the Maple Leaf Rag, but the classical piano world is also represented at points. One of the most obvious moments occurs shortly after the beginning of each A strain, when the piano plays a beautiful series of upward sweeps through non-syncopated notes. The steady left-hand pulsation stops, making the texture briefly monophonic. It is an elegant gesture that reminds us that artistic rags are far removed from honky-tonk saloon music.
Maple Leaf Rag 1899 (piano roll made by Joplin in 1916) [3:13]
SCOTT JOPLIN (c.18671917)
Formal Segment
Timeline
:00
Musical Features
Ragtime Rhythms A & B in right hand (RH); steady pulse in left hand (LH); key of A Brief monophonic sweep upward LH pulsation resumes. Ragtime Rhythms A & B in RH; steady pulse in LH Brief monophonic sweep upward LH pulsation resumes.
:10 :12 :23
:31 :33
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B B
:44 1:05 1:26
Ragtime Rhythms A & C in higher register; marked staccato Repeat Ragtime Rhythms A & C in RH; steady pulse in LH Brief monophonic sweep upward LH pulsation resumes. Ragtime Rhythm D; fuller chords in RH; in subdominant key (D ) Repeat Steady 8th notes & Ragtime Rhythm G; return to tonic key Repeat
1:34 1:37
C Trio C D D
1:47 2:08 2:30 2:51
DESCENDENTS OF RAGTIME
Characteristics of the new style of ragtime were also applied to the music of small ensembles. It would be impossible to trace all the kinds of music that are derived from ragtime, but a huge outpouring of new dance styles owed a great deal to the innovations of Joplin and his peers. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, couple dancingespecially in triple-meter waltz stylehad dominated social ballrooms. With the new century, though, came new individual dancesand many of these adopted the duple-meter syncopations of ragtime. A new fad for animal dances developed (turkey trot, bunny hug, grizzly bear), with dancers imitating animal shapes or motions. In the turkey trot, for instance, dancers pumped their arms and shrugged their shoulders.70 In the second decade of the twentieth century, other dances began to seize the limelight, and both the tango and the foxtrot re-popularized couple dancing. The intimacy of the tango caused quite a bit of consternation among many conservative viewers, and Pope Benedict XV declared in a 1913 papal letter that the tango was an immoral dance; it was thus prohibited to Catholics.71 (The ban had little effect on the dances popularity.) The foxtrot style was not limited to instrumental pieces. A number of foxtrots were written with words, so they would appeal not only to dance bands, but to singers as well. An interesting case is the foxtrot Poor Butterfly (1916). Composed by Raymond Hubbell (18791954), this song was presented in a 1916 Broadway production called The Big Show, and it clearly reflected an awareness of the Great War raging across the Atlantica war that did not yet involve the United States. The song alludes
to the premise of the 1904 opera by Puccini, Madama Butterfly, in which a Japanese geisha waits in vain for her American lover to reclaim her. In the 1916 foxtrot, the text was interpreted as an elegy to a young man most likely killed in the war.72 (To hear a 1917 wax cylinder recording of a dance band performing Poor Butterfly, visit http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ r?ammem/papr:@ filreq%28 @ field%28NUMBER+@ ba nd%28edrs+ 50428r%29 %29 + @ field%28COLLID+edison%29%29.) Although ragtime rhythms are occasionally present in Poor Butterfly and other foxtrots, another rhythm had also begun to make its presence felt: that of swing. Swing is a performance style that lengthens the first note in a pair, subtracting a corresponding amount of time from the second notes value. Although it has a bit of a sing-song effect, it adds a different kind of liveliness to pieces, and foxtrots made full use of swing rhythms. And, just as early piano rags had taken march-style pieces and syncopated them to create the new ragtime style, some pianists took ragtime pieces and added swing to themproducing what became known as stride piano. In stride piano, the left hand still presents a steady foundation, but often performs large leaps, leading to the stride nickname. Also, the left hand is often heavy, playing chords rather than just single notes. The right hand uses the swing rhythms and a much more improvised approach than ragtime, and stride pianists did not limit themselves to multithematic forms. The pianist and composer James P. Johnson (18941955) became known as the Father of Stride Piano, and although stride piano began to develop in 1905, Johnsons best-known tune is The Charleston, composed in 1923.
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Sheet music for Raymond Hubbells Poor Butterfly (1916), a song which clearly reflected an awareness of the Great War raging across the Atlantic.
RAGTIME IN EUROPE
It did not take long for the new style of ragtime to be introduced to Europeans, and while it was welcomed as a new popular style, it also inspired various classical composers as well. Claude Debussy concluded his piano suite Childrens Corner (1908) with Golliwogs Cakewalk, a number that made cheerful use of ragtime rhythms and also spoofed a well-known work by Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde. A decade later, Igor Stravinsky produced a pair of very different pieces that each alluded to the new American ragtime style. The first composition was A Soldiers Tale, involving a magical violin, a soldier, the devil who wants the soldiers soul, and an enchanted princess. During the course of his adventures, the soldier is able to restore the princess to health by means of a trio of dances: a tango (that forbidden dance!), a waltz, and finally a ragtime. Stravinsky later discussed the impact that American jazz had had on him; like a lot of Europeans, he didnt initially grasp the distinctions that are usually drawn between ragtime and jazz.73 In that same year, 1918, Stravinsky completed his Ragtime for Eleven Instruments. On his copy of the
French composer Claude Debussy. Debussy concluded his piano suite Childrens Corner (1908) with Golliwogs Cakewalk, a number that made cheerful use of ragtime rhythms
score, dated November 10, he wrote, Jour de la deliverance. Messieurs les Allemands ont capitul. (Day of deliverance. The Germans have surrendered.) It has been suggested that Stravinskyaware of the American armys role in tilting the balance toward Allied victorymay have chosen the ragtime style as a tribute to American participation in the war.74 Regardless of Stravinskys motivation, though, his use of the style was an acknowledgment that ragtime had achieved international standing.
Blues
Although the first instances of ragtime were improvised, using syncopated African tribal rhythms, ragtime could still be considered a fairly sophisticated style of music: it was initially played on the piano, an instrument long associated with art music, and its performers usually had a significant amount of keyboard training. The blues, on the other hand, had very different origins.
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ORIGINS
African slaves had brought more than just syncopated rhythms with them. A great deal of African music involves group singing, often in a call-andresponse pattern in which a solo leader presents a motif and the chorus responds, either by echoing the motif or with a contrasting answer. Their use of pitches differs from that in Western music, since they are not strictly tied to the standard chromatic scale used in classical music. The vocal music of many African cultures was influenced by the Muslim call to prayer and the embellished manner of reciting the Quran. This embellishment technique is melismatic, meaning that one syllable of the poetry is set to multiple pitches in the melody. (An example of a melisma appears in the Christmas carol Angels We Have Heard on High. In the refrain, Gloria in excelsis, the syllable Glo- flexes its way over a long, descending series of notes, which comprise the melisma.) All of these characteristics found their way into the various types of music that the slaves began singing in the New World, especially in the style now called the blues.
THE BLUE DEVILS
African-American singing. It was an undocumented tradition in its earliest days, and so it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origins, but many of the first blues singers seem to have resided in the Mississippi Delta region. Over time, certain features of their songs became standardized. For instance, Section I of this Resource Guide discussed the twelve-bar blues form, showing its basic progression in FIGURE 1-31. Three core chords are usedthe tonic (I), dominant (V), and subdominant (IV)in a predictable twelve-measure pattern. The systematic use of this consistent harmonic foundation meant that illiterate blues performers could play together without needing sheet music to guide them. The twelve-bar blues are set in duple meter, butimportantlythey also use the looser rhythmic approach of swing. During those twelve measures, a blues singer sings three phrases of poetry (each spanning four measures). The custom is to repeat the first line of text, usually with embellishments, before moving on to a new rhyming phrase. The diagram of this poetic pattern is therefore A A B, and this convention was spoofed by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (b.1948) in his musical Starlight Express (1987). The character Poppa sings, in a song titled Poppas Blues: Oh, the first line of a blues is always sung a second time. I said the first line of a blues is always sung a second time. So by the time you get to the third line, youve had time to think of a rhyme. In his second verse, Poppa makes another valid point about blues poetry: Oh, there aint no law that says third line got to be different at all. I said there aint no law that says third line got to be different at all. No, there aint no law that says third line got to be different at all. Blues singers everywhere would recognize the truth of Poppas assessment. Section I of this Resource Guide also discussed the blues scale, which inflects the third and seventh steps so that they are no longer in tune with either major scales or minor scales. These blue notes are a lingering reflection of the African approach to scale tones, and they make the resulting harmony seem ambivalent: are we in the major mode or the minor? Sometimes, when people refer to blues-singing, they simply mean that these blues inflections are being employed. As the scholar Frank Tirro points out, the word blues has developed to have many meanings: it is the music of people, a style of music, a type
Feeling blue is not a new phenomenon, and the color blue has been associated with melancholy for hundreds of years. In the sixteenth century, the blue devils was a common synonym for depression.75 The primary purpose of the blues, therefore, is to purge the performer of those disconsolate emotions; it is a form of catharsis to sing the blues. It takes no imagination to realize that the enslaved Africans had much to feel blue about in their new land although it is not fully clear when blues-singing first developed. Some features of the blues can be seen in other kinds of music traditionally sung by African Americans. Spirituals often were heartfelt expressions of grief, usually with a religious message, but they sometimes had a more hopeful, optimistic spirit, and could be sung (and danced) energetically by a group of people in shouts. Slaves would also express their emotions through work songs and field hollers. Both of these improvised genres helped workers perform their tasks, but they differed in style. Work songs tended to be sung at a steady pace, often in a call-and-response pattern, or with alternating lines between groups of laborers; sometimes the topic was humorous rather than sorrowful. Field hollers tended to be longer, flexible lamentations by an individual singer, with a getting-it-off-his-chest spirit. Traits of many of these songs found their way into the blues as well.
BUILDING THE BLUES
At some point in the nineteenth century, blues songs began to develop into a recognizable subtype of
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Publicity shot of Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), one of country blues greatest musicians.
of performance, a despondent state of mind, and a musical form.76

COUNTRY BLUES
free, and sometimes there isnt strict attention to the usual twelve-bar pattern. Like most folk music, the country blues are all improvised, and many performances predate the advent of commercial recording. The earliest blues singer to be preserved on disk was Papa Charlie Jackson (c.18851938), who started recording in 1924; he was followed by Blind Lemon Jefferson (18931929) and Huddie Ledbetter (c.18891949; better known as Lead Belly).77 Robert Johnson (19111938) achieved quite a following, due in part to a mythology concerning a sudden improvement in his ability to play guitar after a six-month absencehad he sold his soul to the Devil? Johnsons recordings were made in the mid-1930s, a little past the first heyday of the country blues.
CLASSIC BLUES
The oldest format for blues-singing has been given several labels by historians to distinguish it from some of the other approaches that developed later on. The most common designation for this earliest style is Country Blues, but it has also been called folk blues, Southern blues, Delta blues, or down-home blues. Regardless of the label, the characteristics are the same: the singer is usually male, and he often sings alone, perhaps accompanying himself with a guitar or a harmonica. He sings in informal situationspicnics, parties, roadhouses, brothelsand his payment is sometimes not cash but alcohol. Sometimes he sings about love gone sour, but he also might choose more political topics, complaining about poverty or mistreatment by the government. (Country blues are therefore seen as one ancestor of the protest songs that arose later in the twentieth century.) The rhythm is usually quite
The country blues were, at heart, a folk tradition, whereas their younger cousin, the Classic Blues, displayed more urban characteristics (leading to the
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occasional designation as urban blues, city blues, or vaudeville blues). Classic blues were more theatrical; customarily, they were sung in situations in which the audience sat and listened, instead of the party atmosphere of most country-blues performances. Many of the vocalists were women, and they were supported by fuller accompaniments, provided by either a piano or sometimes a small ensemble of players, called a combo. Their song textslike those of country blues singerswere frequently autobiographical, but their focus more often was on love and romantic relationships. Because of the customary participation of two or more performers, the rhythm was less free than in country blues, and often the song was carefully planned beforehand. When sheet music started to appear for blues songs, it usually represented the classic blues approach rather than the country blues. The singer Gertrude Ma Rainey (18861939) earned the nickname Mother of the Blues. One of the vaudeville circuits, the Theatre Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.), ran sixty-seven theaters across the South and Midwest. T.O.B.A. booked Rainey and other classic blues singers into their theaters, and audience enthusiasm led to a demand for recordings, allowing many of these performances to be preserved, and Rainey toured widely.78 One of Raineys first recordings was Southern Blues (1923), and it offered some pragmatic advice: If your house catches on fire and there aint no water around, If your house catches on fire and there aint no water around, Throw your trunk out the window and let that shack burn down. Ma Rainey was a strong influence on the slightly younger performer Bessie Smith (18941937), who had a tremendous voice, fully capable of filling a theater in the days before microphones. Posterity has dubbed her the Empress of the Blues, not only for her cast-iron voice, but also for the many, many recordings she made. Her performances lived on through this means to affect many of the great mid-century jazz singers, including Ella Fitzgerald (191796) and Billie Holiday (191559). The rock singer Janis Joplin (194370) later helped pay for a headstone to be placed over Smiths grave; it read, The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.79 William Christopher Handybetter known as W.C. Handyplayed an important role in spreading and popularizing the blues: he was one of the first (but not the first) to produce sheet music that used the classic blues style. Because of his activities, he declared himself to be the Father of the Blues, and although that designation might be a slight exaggeration, Handys 1914 publication St. Louis Blues (LISTENING E XAMPLE 7) was extremely successful, and has been widely recorded and performed. Handy had learned to play cornet as a boy, which led him to join a minstrel troupe (much to the dismay of his father, a staunch Methodist).80 In time, though, Handy rose to be a noted bandleader, and a film was made of his life in 1958 (titled St. Louis Blues). One of the first blues to appear in print was Dallas Blues (1912), by Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett. W.C. Handy issued Memphis Blues a few weeks later, and Baby Seals Blues might have come even a bit earlier.81 However, before the advent of recordings to illustrate the blues flexible, improvisatory style of singing and playing, sheet music could not fully convey the blues approach to purchasers. For this reason, the blues did not spread to Europe quite as quickly as did ragtime, although it eventually would have a tremendous impact. And, in the United States, the blues would be an essential ingredient in the broad spectrum of styles we now call jazz.
Portrait of The Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, by photographer Carl Van Vechten.
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Blues musician and composer W.C. Handy with his Memphis Orchestra, c. 1918. Handy is in the center rear; he has a moustache and is holding his trumpet.
LIST E
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Eleven years after W.C. Handy published the sheet music for St. Louis Blues, it was recorded by a trio consisting of Bessie Smith, a young cornet player named Louis Armstrong (190171), and Fred Longshaw, EN M playing a small reed-pipe organ. LISTENING GUIDE 7 demonstrates the IN G EXA blend of styles that can be found in Handys St. Louis Blues. Instead of being solely a series of twelve-measure A strains, which would be typical of most blues songs, Handy interrupts the pattern after two statements and inserts a new melody, labeled B. The B strain is only eight measures long, not twelve; it is repeated once. When Handy returns to the twelve-bar-blues structure, he does not bring back the A melody, but introduces a new tune, labeled C in the Listening Guide. The C melody is not repeated in this performance, but several verses are included in the sheet music; it is likely that the time limit of the 1925 recording technology led Smith to sing only one statement of C. (Notice that there are no repeated lines in the poetry of the C melody.) By using three different melodies, only two of which follow the twelve-bar-blues chord pattern, Handy blends characteristics of the classic blues with the multi-thematic form heard in most ragtime pieces. Moreover, the B strain switches to the minor mode, giving St. Louis Blues the harmonic contrast usually found in ragtime. (In quite a few performances of St. Louis Blues, the performers would integrate yet another stylethe tangointo this B section.)
St. Louis Blues (1914) W.C. Handy
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This recording certainly demonstrates many of the characteristics of classic blues, however. The small ensemble is one typical feature, and the skillful interaction between Smith and Armstrong is another; they present an almost seamless call-and-response interweaving. They both incorporate a number of blue notes; listen for Smiths underlined words for examples. She also creates short melismas on selected syllables; these are shown in boldface font in LISTENING GUIDE 7. Longshaw adds to the atmosphere by mimicking the sound of a country church organ, especially in his opening chord.82 The cumulative effect of the three performers is mournful and highly personal.
St. Louis Blues 1914 [3:12] (1925 recording by Bessie Smith)
W.C. HANDY (18731958)
Formal Segment
Intro
Structure
Fermata
Timeline
:00 :05 :14
Text and Musical Features

Church-like chord in organ I hate to see the evening sun go down [major mode] [cornet response] I hate to see the evening sun go down [cornet response] It makes me think of how my life go round. [cornet response] Feeling tomorrow like I feel today [cornet response] Feeling tomorrow like I feel today [cornet response] Ill pack my grip and make my getaway. [cornet response] St. Louis woman, with her diamond ring [minor mode; faster tempo] [cornet response] Pulls that man around by her apron string [cornet response]
12-bar blues
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12-bar blues
1:05 1:13 1:19 1:27 1:34
8 bars
1:42 1:47 1:56
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2:03 B 8 bars 2:10 2:16 2:28 12-bar blues (new melody) 2:38 2:44 2:51 2:57 Coda Fermata 3:08
Twasnt for powder and the store-bought hair, [cornet response] The man I love wouldnt go nowhere, nowhere. I got them St. Louis blues, just as blue as I can be, [major mode] [cornet response] Hes got a heart like a rock cast in the sea, [cornet response] Or else he would not go so far from me. [cornet and organ sustain brief fermata]
Jazz
Jazz resembles classical music in many ways. It is a broad term that encompasses a great many substyles, and the music often requires considerable understanding to be fully appreciated. However, the earliest approaches to jazzNew Orleans Jazz, Dixieland, and Chicago Jazzare the styles that have been the most accessible to audiences, exceeded only by the popularity of Swing, a style that developed not long before World War II.
THE CRADLE OF JAZZ
ment. Two main types of performers were employed: 1) solo piano and 2) combo. Usually drawing from many of the timbres found in marching bands, the combo might feature a cornet, trombone, and/or clarinet, accompanied by a piano (or banjo or guitar), a bass or tuba, and drums. Like the brothels themselves, the performers were in competition with each other, which spurred them onward to be more and more inventive.
A RECIPE FOR JAZZ
Jazz, like virtually all the popular styles of music in the early twentieth century, is the product of blended techniques of music-making, and its origins can be found in many places. However, the earliest hub of activity was centered in the city of New Orleans, which gives its name to the earliest style of music to be regarded as jazz. New Orleans hosted a particularly concentrated red-light district, where nearly all the citys bars and brothels were situated. This tight proximity was the brainchild of a city alderman, Sidney Story, who had drafted legislation in 1897 that limited prostitution to one particular part of town, some eight blocks wide and eleven blocks long. When the housing code went into effect in 1898, it didnt take long for the district to be nicknamed Storyville. (In actuality, even this was divided; there was a black Storyville and a white Storyville, operating on different sides of Canal Street.) 83 The houses of prostitution, now clustered closely together, had to compete vigorously for customers, and musical entertainment was seen as one entice-
Whether the music was played by one person or by a group, it was intended to please the customersand this meant that it was inevitably quick and lively. Although some pianists played ragtime, more often stride piano was performed, with its faster tempo, swung rhythms, and increased improvisation. Piano players would also imitate the ambiguous blue notes heard in country and classic blues by playing dissonances. The combos did all the same things as the pianists, but the multiple instruments meant that even more effects were possible: they employed call-and-response techniques, or they let players improvise simultaneously to create heterophony. The layered effect of this collective improvisation resembled the terraced percussion of both Latin American and African traditions. It is clear that this new music drew from many, many sources for inspirationand this blend of techniques became known as New Orleans Jazz. The earliest performers of this new style were all African American, and they were largely self-taught musicians with little (or no) formal training. Bettertrained musicians knew a good thing when they heard it, however, and the style was quickly imitated.
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This 1908 postcard shows the rail lines on Basin Street that carried visitors into the heart of Storyville, New Orleans vice district, which was a hub of musical activity.
Groups of white musicians were among those who emulated this energetic music, but since these players often had more expertise with proper playing, this meant that sometimes they didnt convey quite the same raw exuberance in their performances as their African-American counterparts. The white musicians were often better able to read music, which meant that their performances sometimes incorporated less improvisation and more pre-planning. Although the differences are subtle, the sound of their music is slightly altered from that of the African-American combos, so many jazz historians reserve the style label of Dixieland for the music of these white ensembles. A group known as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first known jazz recording, Livery Stable Blues, in 1917. The African-American ensembles did not start to record for several more years.
THE END OF STORYVILLE
five miles of an army training camp. His views reflected the influence of a morality campaign that had been mounted by the American Social Hygiene Organization. Secretary Baker said, These boys are going to France. I want them adequately armed and clothed by their government; but I want them to have an invisible armor to take with thema moral and intellectual armor for their protection overseas.84 New Orleans was quick to comply. Although the closure of Storyville did not completely curtail all prostitution in New Orleans, it certainly eliminated the raucous zone of energy that had characterized the former red-light district. Without the employment provided by the brothels, the closure was financially devastating to a sizable number of musicians. Certainly, jazz was played elsewhere in New Orleans, in cafes, dance halls, and hotels, but the loss of Storyville was still profoundly felt.
HEADING NORTH
Much of the musical activity in Storyville came to an abrupt halt in 1917, the year that the United States entered World War I. Secretary of War Newton W. Baker demanded the districts closure because he wanted no open prostitution to take place within
A great many of the unemployed musicians began to travel north to cities that were more welcoming, especially Chicago. They carried the conventions of New Orleans Jazz with them, although the style continued to evolve, sometimes rapidly. Therefore,
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when the first African-American jazz recordings were made in Chicago in the early 1920s, some of New Orleans Jazzs original features had already been lost. One of the first effects of the move north was increased sophistication: the players were growing more expert on their instruments, as audiences (and their own) expectations increased. Musical literacy was improving, which meant that more music was being arranged and notated before it was performed, reducing the amount of improvisa-
tion. In New Orleans Jazz, heterophony was the predominant texture. Because the instrumentalists werent always very adept, solo breaks in which one person is showcasedwere brief and not too frequent. In Chicago, the solos grew longer, usually lasting for an entire chorus (a synonym for strain), and the amount of collective improvisation was much smaller. The musical changes from the South to the North mounted up, and scholars call the result Chicago Jazz.
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One of the musicians whose recordings seem to stand right on the cusp between the older New Orleans Jazz and the newer Chicago style was Joe King Oliver (18851938). Oliver, a cornet player, had gotten his start in New Orleans, and eventually organized his own EN M IN G EXA band, King Olivers Creole Jazz Band. (King was a nickname assigned to the lead cornet player in many New Orleans combos.) In Chicago, most of his fellow musicians were also former New Orleans residents, and several of them are featured in the recordings that Oliver started making in April 1923. The recording process itself had its frustrations. The Gennett studio was in Richmond, Indiana, requiring a four-hour bus ride from Chicagowith a return trip the same day since no Richmond hotels would accommodate African Americans. The long, narrow studio had walls filled with sawdust and covered by heavy draperies in an attempt to muffle the nearby train tracks; the result was an oppressively hot, sound-dead room, wherein the rumblings of passing trains could be heard, but musicians standing a few feet apart could barely hear each other.85 To collect the sound, there were two megaphone-shaped cardboard horns hung from the wall, and a Gennett session always began with the near-hopeless search for a balanced sound . The performers had to move themselves about the room, standing in various groupings at various distances from the immobile sound-catchers, until test pressings yielded some[thing] tolerable . For the Creole Jazz Band, all of whom were new to studio work, the process was tiresome and confusing.86 Despite the difficulties, the band recorded lively performances that have been enjoyed for almost a century. Olivers April 1923 recording of Dippermouth Blues (LISTENING E XAMPLE 8) employed a typical New Orleans Jazz-style combo. Oliver played cornet, as did Louis Armstrong, whom Oliver had hired in July 1922. In fact, Dippermouth was a teasing reference to Armstrong, whose mouth was claimed to be as big as a dipper. Similarly, Armstrongs better-known nickname, Satchmo, was a corruption of Satchel Mouth.87 Although Oliver, as bandleader, played the solos during Choruses 6 and 7, Armstrong was allowed to play lead cornet during Chorus 5. Honor Dutry played trombone, and Johnny Dodds was the clarinetist. Baby Dodds (Johnnys younger brother Warren) played drums (although on this recording he played woodblock, since the primitive recording technology did not pick up the sound of drums very clearly). The banjo player and (briefly) vocalist was Bill Johnson, and the pianist was Lillian Hardinsoon to become Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis second wife. Hardin was not from New Orleans, and she had received considerable formal training on piano, but her ability to create lively jazz improvisations (to her mothers horror) led to her nickname as the Jazz Wonder Child. Hardin is credited with improving Armstrongs ability to read and write music, and she also reportedly helped influence him to break away from Oliver and become his own band leader.88
Dippermouth Blues (1923) Joe King Oliver
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King Olivers Creole Jazz Band, 1921. The band recorded lively performances that have been enjoyed for almost a century.
An examination of LISTENING GUIDE 8 reveals the mixture of New Orleans and Chicago styles used in Dippermouth Blues. The Chicago effect can be heard in the cleanly executed introduction, with its homophonic texture, since that required preplanning. Similarly, the stop-time choruses could not happen spontaneouslyduring these sections, the group played a short, staccato chord on each downbeat, and then let Johnny Dodds play the rest of the measure by himself. Moreover, the four choruses that feature an extended solo (Choruses 3, 4, 6, and 7) are all more characteristic of Chicago than of New Orleans. But, the energetic heterophony of Choruses 1, 2, 5, 8, and 9 gives us an inkling of what New Orleans jazz might have sounded like during its peak, and the consistent use of a twelve-bar blues structure for all of the choruses is a reminder of jazzs hybrid origins. No matter which style predominates at a particular moment, the use of swing rhythm is a hallmark of the jazz style throughout Dippermouth Blues. Another sound that became closely linked with many of jazzs substyles is the wah-wah mute, which Oliver employs in Choruses 6 and 7. This alteration to the cornets normal timbre is created by flexing the rubber plunger of a plumbers helper in front of the bell of the cornet; it produces a tone that can sound remarkably human at times. Olivers flowing cornet solo in this piece became a celebrated icon of early jazz, and a host of later jazz trumpeters have studied and imitated the artistry he displayed during those two choruses.89
Louis Armstrong (left) and Joe King Oliver, Chicago, c. 1923.

Courtesy of the Frank Driggs Collection.
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Dippermouth Blues 1923 [2:29]
JOE KING OLIVER (18851938)
Formal Segment
Intro Chorus 1 Chorus 2 Chorus 3 Chorus 4 Chorus 5 Chorus 6 Chorus 7
Structure
4 bars 12-bar blues 12-bar blues 12-bar blues 12-bar blues 12-bar blues 12-bar blues 12-bar blues
Performer(s)
Ensemble Ensemble Ensemble Clarinet Clarinet Ensemble Cornet Cornet Ensemble
Timeline
:00 :05 :21 :37 :53 1:08 1:23 1:38 1:54 2:07 2:09 2:25
Musical Features
Homophony (composed) unison rhythm Collective Improvisation (heterophony) Collective Improvisation Stop-Tme Stop-Time Collective Improvisation (Armstrong plays lead) Famous solo with wah-wah mute (blue notes added) Famous solo (rhythmic stretches, ms. 3 & 4) Collective Improvisation Shout of Oh, play that thing! at the end of the chorus Collective Improvisation Homophony (composed), but more complex than intro
Chorus 8 Chorus 9 Tag ending
12-bar blues 12-bar blues 2 bars
Voice Ensemble Ensemble
CLASSICAL/JAZZ HYBRIDS
As with the blues, it was impossible for sheet music to capture all the improvised nuances of these new jazz approaches; recordings (or live performances) were needed to illustrate jazzs energy and verve. Although the red-light origins of the style prejudiced some people against jazzsometimes for decadesthe appeal of jazz won over many listeners immediately. And, as had been the case with ragtime, various classical composers found ways to interweave the new style of jazz with art music. Darius Milhaud (18921974) (a member of Les Six, the group of nationalistic young composers who sought to create French, not Germanic, music) incorporated the swing rhythms of jazz into a chamber piece called The Creation of the World (1923).
Even more famously, George Gershwin (18981937) blended swing, blue notes, and a classical orchestra to produce his Rhapsody in Blue of 1924a work that did much to legitimize jazz in the view of many listeners. On occasion, jazz has continued to mix with classical music up to the present day, and it has often found its way into various other popular styles as well.
Theatrical Music
OPERETTA
As had been the case since the earliest colonial days, the United States tended to import much of its stage music. As discussed earlier, Americans were quick to latch onto the nineteenth-century operettas being composed overseas, and this trend continued into
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MUSICAL COMEDY
A sharply contrasting theatrical genre began to develop, both in England and in the United States, and the label Musical Comedy was soon applied to these new productions. In England, George Edwardes (18551915) had been experimenting with this new approach in the last years of the nineteenth century. His shows featured believable characters in contemporary clothing, with clever, funny dialogue and music that drew from the latest popular stylesfar different from the operettas that dominated the theaters. The modern, realistic energy of musical comedies appealed to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and very quickly writers in the United States turned their pens to creating their own versions.
SPEED! SPEED!
Composer Victor Hebert wrote the scores of highly successful musicals such as Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910) .
the twentieth century. Americans went wild over a 1905 Viennese operetta, The Merry Widow.90 After the operetta made its triumphant New York premiere in 1907, all that a retailer needed to do was to add the phrase Merry Widow to his merchandise and his sales would skyrocket. Not only was the main theme from the operetta (The Merry Widow Waltz) played in every ballroom, but women wore Merry Widow hats, corsets, gowns, and perfume, and men joined them in drinking Merry Widow liqueurs, eating Merry Widow chocolates, and smoking Merry Widow cigarettes. Merchandizing had gotten an iron grip, and its impact can be felt to the present day. At the same time, by the early twentieth century, some operettas were created in America, and, in turn, were being exported back to Europe. The Wizard of Oz (1903) and Babes in Toyland (1903) were both fantasies ostensibly for children but crafted with an eye to adult ticket sales as well. Victor Herbert (18591924) had been hired to write the score for Babes in Toyland, which ensured that the music was of a very high caliber. Other shows employed America-based storylines as part of their appeal, such as Naughty Marietta (1910), set in New Orleans. Naughty Marietta, which also had music by Herbert, introduced the hit song Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life. All operettas, whether in Europe or the U.S., tended to glorify the trained voice, told far-fetched, romantic stories, and included flowing waltz tunes that could be marketed to dance orchestras. These productions had a loyal followingbut there were many in the audience who were ready for change.
One of the earliest Americans to succeed with this new genre was George M. Cohan (18781942). His parentsboth vaudevillianshad carried him onstage as a baby, so Cohan liked to say hed been performing all his life. As a young man, he worried about his parents since the constant traveling required by the vaudeville circuit was very taxing, so he started writing musical comedies; this genre allowed them to remain in New York. Something of the spirit of musical comedies can be gathered from Cohans admonition to his cast on the opening night of his first show: Dont wait for laughs. Side-step encores. Crash right through this show to-night. Speed! Speed! and lots of itPerpetual motion. Laugh your heads off; have a good time; keep happy. Remember now, happy, happy, happy.91 Cohans third musical comedy, Little Johnny Jones (1904), opened with a rousing song, Yankee Doodle Dandy. This song is saturated with quotations from patriotic and folk tunes such as Yankee Doodle and Dixie, and it also includes a bit of The StarSpangled Banner, which of course was not yet the national anthem. The song is sung by Jones, a jockey who is boasting about his American prowess. Cohan had learned after the Spanish-American War (1898) that this sort of jingoisma boisterous, almost belligerent patriotismwas very popular with American audiences, and he wrote a number of songs in this style, including Over There, which we will discuss later.
AFRICAN-AMERICANS ON BROADWAYAND BEYOND
Cohans patriotic fervor helped his shows do very nicely on Broadway (the main theater district of New York). His shows did not fare so well overseas, however, where viewers were sometimes put off by the strong American bias. One American musical comedy that was a hit both on Broadway and in the West End (Londons equivalent to Broadway) was In Dahomey (1902), composed by Will Marion Cook
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(l. to r.) George Walker, Aida Overton Walker, and Bert Williams kick up their heels in the musical comedy In Dahomey (1903).
(18691944)and this was a significant achievement, for it had been written by (and starred) African Americans. In the same way that Lillian Hardins mother had been dismayed when her classically trained daughter turned her keyboard ability to playing jazz, Cooks mother also wrung her hands when her son refused to compose symphonies and sonatas, but instead wasted his talent on popular songs. Undaunted, Cook teamed up with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) to showcase the talents of two minstrel show and vaudeville stars, Bert Williams (1874 1922) and George Walker (c.18731911). Jesse Shipp assisted Cook and Dunbar with the script, which featured a group of urbanized African Americans who journey to Africa but find the rustic conditions unsettling. A celebratory cakewalk was presented in the climactic portion of the show, and the cakewalk received prominent billing in the posters for In Dahomey. Although some commentators worried before In Dahomey opened on Broadwaythat there would be racial incidents, those fears did not come
to pass. Moreover, the critics felt that the show was an infectious, comic presentation.92 Cook was sufficiently encouraged by the positive reviews that he took a gamble and transported the cast to Londonand In Dahomey ran five times as long as it had on Broadway. The musical comedy was even presented in a command performance at Buckingham Palace. Williams and Walker were both gratified by the warm reception they were given in England, and appreciated that their talent was applauded without regard for their racean experience very different from their lives back in the United States. Williams commented some years later, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenientin America.93
A STAR-TURN FOR A STAR
Although the show was crafted around the abilities of Walker and Williams, both men were married to talented actresses who were cast in the show; Cooks wife Abbie Mitchell also played a role. Before In Dahomey transferred to London, it was decided
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that Aida Overton Walker did not have enough spotlight time, so she was given a new star-turn (a term borrowed from vaudevilles vocabulary). Her new numbercalled an interpolation because it was added after the show had begun its Broadway run was titled I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) (LISTENING
E XAMPLE 9). It was not composed by Cook and Dunbar, but rather by Harry von Tilzer and Vincent Bryan. Von Tilzer had published the sheet music for fifteen of the songs from In Dahomey ; it is possible he was given the opportunity to create the interpolation in thanks for that support.
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In the cast of In Dahomey, Aida Overton Walkers character is named Rosetta Lightfoot, and in this interpolation, Rosetta is mimicking the Broadway aspirations of Carrie Brown. Just as George M. Cohan wove EN M IN G EXA popular songs into Yankee Doodle Boy to Americanize it, Bryan saturates Rosettas lyrics with a host of contemporary references and theatrical catchphrases to emphasize Carries love of Broadway: Miss Carter was a well-known, red-haired actress; Laura Jean Libb[e]y wrote heartthrob romances (which occasionally served as plots for Broadway shows); the Maidens Prayer was a sentimental poem by Edith Nesbit; and the phrases Troskeena Wellington and Ha! the childs in London were both climactic lines from contemporary plays. (At times, Rosetta uses non-standard English to simulate African-American dialect.) When In Dahomey transferred to England, some of the topical references were changed to sayings that would be more familiar to British audiences.94 Von Tilzer uses many conventional features of popular songs in the form of I Wants to Be, as shown in LISTENING GUIDE 9. The piece begins with an instrumental introduction, followed by a vamp, which is a short motif that can be repeated at will until the performer is in position and ready to sing. Rosetta then launches into a verse-chorus form, in which narrative verses (labeled a) alternate with a refrain, or chorus (B), which uses the same poetry each time it recurs. (The lower-case labeling for the verses reflects the fact that the melodic line repeats, but that the words are different each time.) The B chorus is markedly quicker than the verses and probably featured some dance steps while Rosetta was singing (since Aida Overton Walker was a talented singer and dancer). There is a short vamp after the first chorus, presumably to allow Rosetta to catch her breath. Moreover, just as the words make contemporary allusions, von Tilzer uses ragtime rhythms in the chorus to help it sound fresh and modern for 1902. For instance, Rosettas first measure in the chorus is set to Ragtime Rhythm H (see FIGURE 3-2), and the line star in a play, up on Broadway employs Ragtime Rhythm B two times in a row. The use of topical references and up-to-date music helped In Dahomey make its successful splash both at home and overseas.
I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady), from In Dahomey (1902) Harry von Tilzer and Vincent Bryan
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In Dahomey, I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) 1902 [2:22]
WILL MARION COOK (18691944) AND PAUL DUNBAR (18721906)
Interpolation by Harry von Tilzer (18721946) and Vincent Bryan (18831937) Structure
Intro
Timeline
:00 [piano]
Text
Musical Features
Ragtime Rhythm H in Moderato tempo
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Vamp
:14 Crazy for the stage was Carrie Brown, She workd in a dry-goods store uptown. Evry time a play opened on Broadway, In the gallry Carrie could be found. Carrie could recite the Maidens Prayer; She could sing most any ragtime air. Each day just after lunch She would entertain the bunch, And when theyd all applaud her shed declare: I wants to be a actor lady, Star in the play, up on Broadway, Spotlight for me, no back-row shady, Im the real thing, I dance and sing. Miss Carter she may play Du Barry, But she cant sing Good Morning, Carrie. I wants to be a actor lady, too, indeed I do! [piano] Carrie said that Shakespeare was a shine, Clyde Fitch may be good, but not for mine. There is Laura Jean Libby, shes a queen; If she wrote a play Id act it fine. Ha! the childs in London, then you say; Thems the kind of parts I wants to play. Troskeena Wellington, You cant square what you have done! With lines like these Id knock them on Broadway. I wants to be a actor lady, Star in the play, up on Broadway, Spotlight for me, no back-row shady, Im the real thing, I dance and sing. Miss Carter she may play Du Barry, But she cant sing Good Morning, Carrie. I wants to be a actor lady, too, indeed I do!
A bit of chromaticism; marked slower Tempo is marked very slow; conjunct melody Fermatas (underlined) add a little suspense Moderato tempo; disjunct melody in Ragtime Rhythms H and B
:18 a
:42
B (chorus)
:54
Vamp
1:16
slower
1:21 a
Return to very slow tempo
1:45
Additional fermatas
B (chorus)
1:57
Return to Moderato; sharp chord at very end
Revue
A FRENCH EXPORT
Although operettas, with their beautiful singing, and musical comedies, with their zany energy, competed vigorously for audiences, a third type of theatrical entertainment could also be found in theaters in America and in Europe. The term for this genre was revue, and its French spelling reflects its Parisian
origins. All through the nineteenth century, French audiences had enjoyed annual performances that satirized the main events of the preceding year. These reviews contained independent scenes without a continuous plot; their common denominator was that they depicted things that had happened the previous year. A revue differed from vaudeville and other skit-based entertainments because the same actors were used in every scene, instead of new entertainers in each segment.
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the United States during the American Revolution. Americas participation in the Great War was seen in part as a way of repaying that debt, and during ceremonies that marked General Pershings arrival in Paris, Pershings aide Colonel Charles E. Stanton ended his remarks with the exclamation: Lafayette, we are here!96 Thus, quite a few new war-themed songs made reference to Lafayette, such as Reinald Werrenraths tune Lafayette (We Hear You Calling). Sometimes, the topicality of songs could backfire. In The Cohan Revue of 1918, Cohan had included a song titled The Man Who Put the Germ in Germany, but the pun seemed more sinister when a massive influenza epidemic swept the globe that year, killing more people in six months than had died in the wars four years of fighting.97 But, it was characteristic of popular songs that they often met misfortune with surprising bravado; publishers soon were printing Spanish Flu Blues and Oh, You Flu! (a ragtime number).
Tin Pan Alley

A PLACE AND A STYLE Florenz Ziegfeld, a Broadway impresario, staged twenty-one Follies over the years and worked to include good music for his entertainers to sing.
England began imitating the French genre around 1825, but Americans did not embrace the notion of revues until 1894, when The Passing Show became a hit. Competitors soon flooded the stage, and the most famous revues in the United States were the annual Ziegfeld Follies, which impresario Florenz Ziegfeld began producing in 1907. He staged twentyone Follies over the years, and by glamorizing his dancers, created the lasting image of show girls. Although the visual appeal of revues was important, Ziegfeld worked to include good music for his entertainers to singand his second Follies, in 1908, was the first American revue to produce a hit song: Shine On, Harvest Moon, written and premiered by a popular vaudeville team, Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.
KEEPING IT FRESH
By the start of the twentieth century, every nation had its music publishing houses, and in the United States, the leading publishers were all clustered along 28th Street in New York City. They all had pianos in their front offices so that prospective buyers could try out sheet music before their purchase. A journalist, Monroe Rosenfelt, visited the offices of Harry von Tilzer, and the racket from all the neighboring businesses was deafening. Rosenfelt commented that the pianos sounded like a bunch of tin pans being clanged together, and thus the Alley got its nickname.98 Tin Pan Alley does not refer to just the street, however; it quickly became the general term for the kind of music that these businesses publishedthe catchy hits that dominated American popular music from the 1880s to the 1950s. The output of these publishers ran to the millions. For instance, during the years from August 1914 to August 1919, the Library of Congress produced its annual Catalogue of Copyright Entries, and some 111,973 songs were filed for copyright protection during that time. (Of those songs, some 35,600 were devoted to patriotism and the war effort. Not all were actually published, but at least 7,300 war-themed titles are known to have been printed.) 99
PLUGGERS AND BARBERSHOPPERS
Because revues did not have a plot, it was easy to keep them very fresh with interpolations. Therefore, The Passing Show of 1917 was quick to add a song titled Goodbye Broadway, Hello France when General Pershing led American troops overseas; the song become an overnight success.95 Many Americans were aware of the nations longtime debt to France, since French assistance, led by General Lafayette, had tipped the balance in favor of
The market for sheet music consisted of average American citizens, and their thirst for Tin Pan Alley songs was enhanced by the increasing number of pianos finding their way into American homes. In 1900, some 130 piano factories were based in New
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Alley songs were reinterpreted in this style. (To learn more about the history of barbershop, visit http:// www.barbershop.org/.)
THE BIRTH OF ASCAP
As simple an act as eating a restaurant meal can lead to enormous change, as was the case when the Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini was visiting the United States in 1910. While dining out, he heard restaurant orchestras playing themes from his operas, such as Madama Butterfly (the opera that would later inspire the foxtrot Poor Butterfly) but Puccini was annoyed rather than flattered since the United States did not protect composers rights, and thus he reaped no financial benefit from those performances. The situation was much better for composers in Europe, where copyright law was much more advanced. One person who took Puccinis criticism to heart was Raymond Hubbell (who later would write Poor Butterfly). Although Hubbell was not a widely known composer, he did persuade the celebrated Victor Herbert to join him in doing battle over this issue. Herbert had already been a powerful voice when he testified before Congress in 1909 about the justifications for composers to receive royalties from the fledgling business of sound recordings, leading to the first major copyright law in the United States. However, live performances were not protected under this law, so a group of nine composers, including Hubbell and Herbert, gathered to form the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1914. ASCAP was designed to collect fees when music was performed publicly, but many people openly flouted the rule. Therefore, when Herbert heard tunes from his operetta Sweethearts (1913) being played at Shanleys Restaurant in New York, he suedand lost. He appealedand lost. Herbert continued to appeal until his case reached the Supreme Court. On January 22, 1917, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled in Herberts favor, and thereafter all hotels, theaters, dance halls, cabarets, and restaurants needed to purchase licenses from ASCAP to perform music by ASCAP members. Although a second licensing agency now exists, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), the principle behind the decision and its subsequent protections continue to live on to this day.102 The establishment of these agencies was an important enhancement to the power of the growing publishing and recording industries.
THE THIRD MOST FREQUENTLY SUNG SONG IN AMERICA
A photograph of 28 th Street in New York conveys little sense of the constant racket from the sheet-music publishers pianos, leading to the streets nickname Tin Pan Alley.
York alone.100 To promote the new music that was coming out each year, publishers hired song-pluggers, who used a variety of means to market the songs. They would pound the piano in the publishers offices to demonstrate new music to customers. They paid singers to showcase the songs in nightclubs or in vaudeville. They persuaded producers to interpolate songs into musical comedies and revues. In later years, performers would feature new songs in their radio programs. Many composers, such as Irving Berlin (18881989) or George Gershwin, got their start in popular music by working as songpluggers. (Gershwin was hired by Jerome H. Remick & Company at age fourteen, but was aggravated that they would not publish any of his music; his manager told him, Youre here as a pianist, not a writer.101) Customers bought Tin Pan Alley songs for home entertainment, but the music could also serve a social purpose. Barbershop singing was a new craze that used four voices to support a melody in tight harmony, with no instrumental accompaniment. Intervals of a tritone are common in barbershop, as are seventh chords. The popularity of recordings by professional barbershop quartets encouraged many citizens to try this at home, so quite a few Tin Pan
The energetic publishing industry of Tin Pan Alley, the growth of recordings, and the increasing marketing strategies to promote this music, meant that
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popular music enjoyed a huge crest of success during the early twentieth century. Still, some pieces stood out even more than others, and one of those was Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1908). The lyricist of the song was Jack Norworth (vaudeville partner and husband of Nora Bayes, with whom he would write Shine On, Harvest Moon that same year). The composer was Albert von Tilzer, one of Harry von Tilzers four brothers. Ironically, neither man was a baseball fan, and there is a fair amount of evidence that neither of them had ever been to a game before writing the song. In any event, Norworthwho wasnt an entirely reliable sourcesaid he was inspired to write the song while riding the subway and saw a poster advertising a game.103 Whatever the inspiration, the song didnt reach the ballpark right away; instead, it achieved much of its initial popularity in nickelodeons and other early movie houses. During the time it took the projectionist to change reels (in the days before most theaters had a second projector), theater owners would display magic-lantern shows to fill the gap. Songpluggers recognized magic-lantern shows as a prime marketing opportunity and would get the house musicians to play a new song while projecting the lyrics or other images on the screen. The York Music Company, which published Albert von Tilzers music, hired models and made a series of slides depicting the story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game (rather like a slide-show version of an MTV video). They took their photographs in a real baseball stadium of the day, New Yorks Polo Grounds. This song play was so different from the normal, sentimental magic-lantern show that it immediately caught the publics attention, and sheet music sales soared.104 Recordings soon followed, and these, too, enjoyed brisk sales. However, it was a long time before baseball crowds started singing the song during the games traditional seventh-inning stretch (the stretch itself predates the song by many years).105 The American and National Leagues adopted the tune as their official song in 1933, but the first reports of crowds singing the song during the stretch date from 1945.106
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1908) has been one of the most enduring of Tin Pan Alleys songs.
Despite that later start as a baseball anthem, Take Me Out to the Ball Game has achieved some astonishing statistics: over 160 arrangements of the song exist; it has been heard in more than 1,200 movies and television shows; it has sold over six million copies of sheet music and eight million recordings;107 and ranks as the third-most-recognizable tune in America (following the national anthem and Happy Birthday to You).108 The 1908 performance by Ed Meeker on your CD is one of the very first recordings of this long-lived piece.
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Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1908) Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer
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A comparison of LISTENING GUIDE 10 with LISTENING GUIDE 9 for I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) reveals some immediate similarity in their forms. Both songs contain an introduction and a prefatory vamp, and both are structured as verse-chorus forms; each has a short vamp before the second verse begins. This architecture is an extremely common feature of
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Tin Pan Alley songs of this era, which is one reason it was easy to swap out songs in Broadway shows and replace them with new interpolations. The melody written for Take Me Out to the Ball Game differs in several ways from I Wants to Be, however. As indicated on the sheet music, it is to be played in Tempo di Valse (waltz tempo). This triple-meter dance has a very different effect than the ragtime rhythms heard in I Wants to Be. The waltz rhythm reflects the long-standing dominance of operettas, all of which introduced new waltz melodies to ballrooms (and to the marketplace). Continuing the tradition, many early Tin Pan Alley songs used a waltz rhythm. Still, for a baseball-themed song, it may seem a surprising stylistic choicebut it is possible that Von Tilzer and Bryan were trying to appeal to female listeners as well as male. The treatment of the melody varies quite a bit in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The opening phrase of the song is a very stepwise, conjunct tune, and the second line of the verse repeats that same melody a step higher in a technique called sequence. Most of the melody fits into fluid, four-bar phrases, so the sudden shift to short two-bar phrases midway through the verse catches our ear. In contrast, the chorus of the song is a surprisingly disjunct melody during its first two lines. But, the third line, Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, returns to a conjunct contour, and it is unexpectedly chromatic, using notes that do not belong to the overall D major key of the song. There are quite a few atypical moments in this piece, which may have been small but significant factors contributing to the songs astonishingly long-lived appeal.
L I S TE N I N G G U I D E 1 0
Take Me Out to the Ball Game 1908 [2:07]
JACK NORWORTH (18791959) AND ALBERT VON TILZER (18781956)
Structure
Intro
Timeline
:06
Text
Musical Features
Tempo di Valse
(vamp) :13 :16 :20 a :22 :26 :29 :32
[omitted in Meeker recording of song] Katie Casey was baseball mad, Had the fever and had it bad; Just to root for the home town crew, Evry sou Katie blew [a sou is a small French coin] On a Saturday, her young beau Called to see if shed like to go, To see a show but Miss Kate said no, Ill tell you what you can do:
Marked Till Ready Solo (featuring Ed Meeker); conjunct melody sequential repetition
2-bar phrases
sequential repetition
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:38 :44
Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, I dont care if I never get back, Let me root, root, root for the home team, If they dont win its a shame For its one, two, three strikes youre out, at the old ball game. instruments alone Katie Casey saw all the games, Knew the players by their first names, Told the umpire he was wrong, All along good and strong When the score was just two to two, Katie Casey knew what to do, Just to cheer up the boys she knew, She made the gang sing this song: Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, I dont care if I never get back, Let me root, root, root for the home team, If they dont win its a shame For its one, two, three strikes youre out, At the old ball game. instruments alone
disjunct melody chromaticism
B (chorus)
:47
(fill)
1:02 1:09 1:12 1:15
uses first phrase of chorus conjunct melody sequential repetition
1:18 1:21 1:24 1:27 1:34 1:39
2-bar phrases
sequential repetition
disjunct melody chromaticism
B (chorus)
1:42
Coda
1:57
CRACKER JACK AND ASCAP
The same 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago that introduced much of the nation to the syncopated energy of ragtime also hosted the public debut of the new food treat called Cracker Jack. This concoction of popcorn mixed with peanuts and molasses began to be packaged in boxes in 1899, and it was first marketed at a major league ballpark in 1907the year before Take Me Out to the Ball Game was composed. (The prize novelty wasnt
added until 1912.) The songs rapid popularity also made the treat a household name, and Cracker Jack sales soon skyrocketed.109 In the end, the quickly scribbled Tin Pan Alley song that fared so well was able to return the favor to Tin Pan Alley: in his will, Jack Norworth donated his royalties from this and his other songs to the ASCAP Foundation, thus benefitting many generations of song-writers.110 Music and merchandizing would be an increasingly powerful force throughout the twentieth century.
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Film
MUSIC OVER NOISE
CUSTOM (ORIGINAL) SCORES
The year 1895 was a significant moment in film history as it witnessed the first public film showings. With this new cinematic experience came a new need for musical supporta need that continues to be the livelihood for thousands of musicians today. On November 1 in Berlin, the German filmmaker Max Skladanowsky showed films to a paying public, and he hired an orchestra to play light classical works during the presentations. Almost two months later, on December 28 in Paris, the Lumire brothers used their projector, called a Cinmatographe, to display films to audiences. They employed a pianist to mask the sound of their noisy projector (he was said to have improvised on popular tunes).111 From that point forward, it was always expected that music would accompany film showings.
THE VAUDEVILLE LEGACY AND NICKELODEONS
The immediate answer to this new expectation was already at hand. Since many vaudeville theaters were the first venues to screen movies, the same house pianists and orchestras that had supplied music to traveling vaudeville stars were fully capable of performing the same function for early films. And, the stock music cues that they had already been using in vaudeville were, again, completely suitable for movies. Along with their films, filmmakers would often distribute cue-sheets that resembled the list seen in FIGURE 3-1. However, since the music was the only sound that was heard (unlike vaudeville, where live actors often spoke while the instruments played), there was increased demand for even better music. The first anthology of music cues intended specifically for movies was published in 1909. It was titled Motion Picture Piano Music: Descriptive Music to Fit the Action, Character, or Scene of Moving Pictures ; it soon had several rivals on the market. Although the first commercial film showings took place in vaudeville theaters and music halls, more specialized venues called nickelodeons soon began to appear. The earliest nickelodeon opened its doors in Pittsburgh in 1905; two years later, there were already more than three thousand nickelodeons in operation in the United States.112 Many people today are surprised to learn that nickelodeons were small movie theaterswith rows of seats and a screen that everyone viewed togetherbecause a 1949 popular song called Music! Music! Music! included lyrics (Put another nickel inin the nickelodeon) that made it seem as if a nickelodeon was a coindriven machine, perhaps resembling Edisons old Kinetophone.
One drawback to the practice of using vaudeville musicians to accompany early films was that there was tremendous inconsistency between theaters as to what would be played at any given time. In fact, musicians could unwittingly (or deliberately) destroy the impact of a scene by playing the wrong kind of music at a critical moment, so the audiences experience might be very different from place to place. Film directors were understandably unhappy with the rather haphazard musical results when their movies were screened, so the solution was to send out sheet music to the performers with the specific music to be played. Initially, the distributed music consisted of arrangements of preexisting classical works, but in 1903, the filmmaker Georges Mlis (featured in the 2011 movie Hugo) included a newly composed film score with his film Kingdom of the Fairies.113 Scores of this sort were called custom or original, and between 1910 and 1914, over a hundred custom scores were produced. Most of these scores were written for piano since a solo piano didnt require the rehearsal time that an orchestra would need, but the French composer Camille Saint-Sans (18351921) wrote the first original orchestral film score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908. In the United States, Victor Herbertof operetta and ASCAP fameis credited with the first fully original score for an American movie: the film was titled The Fall of a Nation (1916).114
THE BIRTH OF A NATION AND BREILS SCORE
The name of Herberts film was a clear reference to the blockbuster hit of the preceding year, The Birth of a Nation. That 1915 film had been a tour-de-force of filmmaking by director D.W. Griffith, although its significant instances of racism make it a complicated film for posterity to embrace. From a cinematic perspective, Griffiths achievement was unmatched, and film historians note that the massive battle scene that Griffith chose to portray was the battle of Petersburgthe one battle of the Civil War that most closely resembled the kind of trench warfare that was underway in Europe at that time. The parallels between the screen images and the current events overseas would not have been lost on viewers.115 Like earlier filmmakers, Griffith had a film score prepared for The Birth of a Nation, and his composer was Joseph Carl Breil (18701926). Part of Breils score was original music, but Breil also used two kinds of preexisting elements: classical music and popular songs. The classical examples included pieces by Beethoven and Wagner (especially Wagners Ride of the Valkyries, used to accompany scenes of the galloping Ku-Klux-Klan). Many of the songs were pieces such as Dixie, Old Folks at Home, and other minstrel show favorites. Breil also included The Battle
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to the problem of how to synchronize and amplify recorded sound so that it could be a regulated, controllable dimension of cinema. By the time of World War I, progress had been made both in sound-on-disc and sound-on-film technologies, but experimentation stalled during the war. When efforts resumed after the war, and the vacuum tube helped solve the amplification problems, the film industry was finally ready to start making talkies. After several years of discussions, the major film studios settled on the sound-on-film approach in 1928; thousands of theaters began acquiring the necessary equipment to project these new sound films. In just a few short months, live players were no longer needed in the theaters, and in short order, over 100,000 musicians lost their jobs. For these outof-work performers, it did not help that the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression lay just ahead.
Section III Summary: Early Twentieth-Century Music

Folk, or vernacular, music was a repertory at * risk with increased urbanization in society, but the advent of recording technology made it feasible for ethnomusicologists and enthusiasts to preserve and sustain much of this music. Opera, an Italian invention of the Baroque era, * was imitated in many other countries. Each country added its own twists, and more and more nations developed comic genres of stage music.
Theatrical poster for the film The Birth of a Nation.
The first home-grown stage entertainments in * the United States were nineteenth-century touring minstrel shows, which presented a great deal of appealing new music (including the cakewalk) but also perpetuated many unfortunate racial stereotypes. One of Americas foremost composers for these shows was Stephen Foster. English audiencesand, later, British soldiers * laughed at (and sang along with) the large repertory of new music introduced in music halls. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaude* ville supplanted minstrel shows as the leading national stage entertainment in the United States. Vaudeville theaters were a significant source of employment for musicians, who provided background music (cues) to support the acts of the touring performers. Bands were a popular dimension of entertain* ment in society and among soldiers; they fostered the careers of many young musicians, and the multi-thematic form of bands best-known repertory, marches, influenced many subsequent styles of music. The popularity of gospel songs, descended from * psalms and hymns, illustrated the continuing
Hymn of the Republic as well as The Star-Spangled Banner. When the film became the biggest hit ever seen in the industry, that popularity increased the widespread recognition of The Star-Spangled Banner, helping to tilt the balance when Congress at last chose an anthem for the United States. Within the original music for the film, Breil had written a melody to accompany the budding romance of two characters. He published the sheet music separately for that tune, under the title The Perfect Song, and that publication became the first hit song to come from a movie. However, even at this point, directors did not always control the musical dimension of their films; when The Birth of a Nation screened at the Cluny Theater in Los Angeles, the theater owner rejected Breils score and replaced it with music created by his theaters musical staff.116
LIVE VS. RECORDED SOUND
The sometimes erratic musical performances within the movie theaters were a constant headache. Therefore, many inventors turned their energies
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importance of sacred music to many people in society.
more polished approach developed by groups of white musicians is now called Dixieland.
The demand for national anthems increased draThe closure of Storyville drove many musicians * * matically over the nineteenth century, although to Chicago, where jazz began to evolve into new the United States did not formalize its anthem until 1931. Music became an increasingly recognized tool in * the lobbying efforts of labor unions, the temperance movement, and womens suffrage. Ragtime, which blended European piano music * with the multi-thematic form of marches and African syncopated rhythms, became a wildly popular instrumental style at the start of the twentieth century. Scott Joplins Maple Leaf Rag is a celebrated example. sub-styles such as Chicago jazz. Jazz also excited listeners around the world and inspired new hybrid styles of music-making. Operettas were a popular stage entertainment * in Europe and America, and they showcased elegant singing and the graceful waltz. Musical comedy was in many ways a rebuttal to * the values of operetta, so it emphasized energetic entertainment and popular music styles, as heard in I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) from In Dahomey.
The energy of ragtime found its way into many Revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies were a third * * dances and into classical music as well; when the type of widespread theatrical entertainment. syncopation was modified into a swing rhythm, the style of stride piano developed. The blues are the music of people, a style of The music-publishing hub in the United States * * music, a type of performance, a despondent state was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, which referred to of mind, and a musical form.117 They presented independent, often very topical popular songs without a connecting storyline.
The legacy of African music may be heard in many of the blues characteristics, such as calland-response exchanges, melismatic text-setting, and blue notes.
the kind of popular songs that it issued as well. This music was actively promoted by song-pluggers and could be heard in many entertainment venues. Tin Pan Alley songs often featured a verse-chorus * form, as heard in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and they were sometimes sung in barbershop style. ASCAP formed in 1914 to protect the rights of * composers, authors, and publishers, so they would receive financial benefit when their music was performed. The early film industry made use of the same * music-accompanying methods that had supported vaudeville, with stock cues played by live musicians. Gradually, custom/original film scores began to be written to support an increasing number of films, but these were still played by live musicians within the theaters. The technology for synchronizing recorded music with movies was not perfected until after World War I.
A country blues song customarily features a male * singer in social situations, playing guitar, improvising his text, using great rhythmic flexibility, and often taking payment in the form of liquor.
A classic blues performance would most likely showcase a female singer accompanied by a piano or combo in a more theatrical venue, as heard in Bessie Smiths performance of W.C. Handys St. Louis Blues.
The style now called jazz coalesced in the * Storyville district of New Orleans at the start of the twentieth century. The earliest subtype, New Orleans Jazz, used swing rhythms, band instrumentation, blues form, and African layering, as heard in the recording of Dippermouth Blues by King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. The slightly
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V NI O I T SEC
MUSICAL RESPONSES TO THE GREAT WA R
War affects people in many waysboth personally and professionally. Musicians during World War I were no different; some people set aside their art to serve their country, and some used their art as a means to serve their country.
To Serve or Not to Serve

For male musicians whose countries were among the combatant nations, the war posed an immediate question: whether or not to join the fighting.
Eager to Go
In France, thirty-nine-year-old composer Maurice Ravel was one of the most prominent musicians to take part in the war, although he hurriedly finished a piano trio before volunteering for service. He told his brother, As I felt I was going to go crazy, I took the wisest course: Im going to enlist.118 He was eager to serve as a pilot, but was turned down because he was slightly underweight. He moaned to a friend, Oh God! When I think that they just destroyed Rheims cathedral!And that my physical condition will prevent me from experiencing the most splendid moments of this holy war, and taking part in the most grandiose, the noblest action which has ever been seen in the history of humanity (even including the French Revolution)!119 Ravel tried applying to the air force several more times, to no avail. Finally, in March 1916, he became a driver for the motor transport corps (he dubbed his truck Adlade after a ballet he had recently completed). Sadly, though, Ravel had to be hospitalized that fall because of dysentery, and his morale was devastated when his mother died quite suddenly during his recuperation.120 Ravels eagerness and views resembled the feelings of his military opponent, Anton Webern, the
Austrian composer of LISTENING E XAMPLE 5. Webern, like Ravel, was initially turned down for service, rejected because his poor eyesight made him unfit to bear arms. He lamented to Schoenberg, I am so depressed at the thought I cannot join in.121 As more troops were needed, Weberns eligibility was reevaluated, and in September 1914 he told Schoenberg, I can hardly wait any longer to be called up. Day and night the wish haunts me: to be able to fight for this great, sublime cause . It is the struggle between the angels with the devils. For everything that has revealed itself about the enemy nations during the course of these weeks really demonstrates only one thing: that they are liars and swindlers.122 The straw mattresses and general grime during basic training
Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams served England as an ambulance driver, even though he was forty-three years old in 1915 when this photo was taken.
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diminished Weberns enthusiasm to some degree, but he enjoyed much of his subsequent work in preparing new recruits for service.123 But in December 1916at the same time that Ravel was convalescing far away in ParisWeberns eyesight was evaluated as deficient yet again, and he was given a permanent discharge. Bla Bartk, Hungarian composer of LISTENING E XAMPLE 4, had been spending his summer holidays in France during July 1914, so the outbreak of war came somewhat as a surprise. Russia quickly began attacking Hungarys eastern provinces, so Bartks folksongcollecting efforts ground to a halt. Bartk underwent several medical examinations, but the result was the same each time: he was physically unfit to serve. In lieu of military service, Bartk and his countryman Zoltn Kodly were assigned the task of collecting folksongs from soldiers. These materials led to a patriotic concert in January 1918, which Hungarys Princess Zita attended.124 Like Bartk and Kodly, the composer George Butterworth (18851916) had been demonstrating his nationalism by collecting folksongs in his own country, England, since the early part of the century; he was also an active member of the English Folk Dance Society. When hostilities began in Europe, Butterworth enlisted as a private during the first month, but was commissioned as an officer of the 13th Durham Light Infantry. His company went to France in August 1915, and in the following July, during the Somme action, Butterworth earned the Military Cross for his valiant leadership. The Butterworth Trench, named in his honor, was also the site of his death: he was killed by sniper fire in August 1916, leaving behind a small but influential group of compositions.125 One of Butterworths mentors in England had been Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was one of the foremost folksong collectors in the country. Although he felt that nations should work to preserve their cultural identities, he also believed in federalism as the best hope for solving the destructive dilemmas of Europe and beyond.126 He, too, was quick to volunteer when England entered the war, even though he was nearly forty-two years old. He was assigned to be a wagon orderly, working in France and on the Salonika front in Greece. Later in the war, he became an artillery officer and returned to France, and after the Armistice, he agreed to a different kind of service, allowing himself to be named Director of Music for the First Army of the British Expeditionary Force. As such, he oversaw amateur music-making among the troops.127 Although Vaughan Williams best friend Gustav Holst (18741934) was two years younger, he did not pass the physical exam when he tried to enlist.
Eventually, Holst took a years leave of absence from his teaching job and went overseas to serve as a music organizer for the YMCAs army education scheme, working with demobilized troops in Salonika and Constantinople. (It was at this point of his career, however, that he felt it wisest to drop the von of his family name, having been christened Gustavus von Holst; he feared the von sounded too Germanic.128) He trained soldiers in music skills; they, in turn, helped raise morale by giving concerts for other soldiers. In World War I, women were almost never combatants, but they served the war effort in many other ways. Some worked as nurses near the front lines, but they also kept factories running, harvested the crops, and filled many of the traditionally male occupations. (In the United States, a popular song addressed the changing roles of women by warning, Youd Better Be Nice to Them Now.129) Some women musicians found other ways to contribute. For instance, Lili Boulanger had been in Italy at the outbreak of the war (she was reaping the benefit of the Prix de Rome, which she had been the first woman to win), so she cut her studies short and returned to Paris. There, she founded the FrancoAmerican Committee of the National Conservatory; it was designed to offer both monetary and moral support to musicians fighting in the war.130 After the United States entered the war, various women instrumentalists filled gaps in hotel orchestras and other ensembles (and were paid union wagesa privilege that would be lost to them at the wars end).131
Longing to Stay
Many musicians had no choice about their service, and some of them served quite reluctantly. In general, they were discreet about their true feelings in public, but they revealed themselves more honestly in their correspondence to family and trusted friends. For instance, Alban Berga composition pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, along with Anton Webernwas called up for service in the Austrian Army in June 1915, even though he was asthmatic. Basic training proved too much for him, so eventually he was assigned an office job in the war ministry in Vienna. He later completed his Expressionist opera Wozzeck, which depicted a soldier who was driven to murder and later suicide by an inhumane army captain and a sadistic army doctor. The opera was based on a nineteenth-century play that had been inspired by a real-life tragedy. Berg had started work on the opera before his army service, but he clearly discovered parallels between Wozzecks sad story and his own military experiences. Berg later told his wife Helene, There is something of me in this Wozzeckand he made it clear that he was recalling his stay in the army training camp.132
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every country could sit down and deliberate on a peace settlement. Within a week we could pass it on to the world and with it a thousand ideas which would suffice for half eternity, for a half-eternal peace134 In the United States, one of the foremost Tin Pan Alley composers, Irving Berlin (18881989), was a Russian migr who had decided to pursue citizenshipbut one of the first consequences of his new status as an American was that he was subject to the draft. During basic training, he found himself peeling potatoes, washing dishes, andworst of all for a chronic night-owlbeing subjected to five A.M. reveille. It wasnt long before he had penned Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning (1918), and the song quickly made the rounds among his fellow soldiers, many of whom shared his blood-thirsty wish to murder the bugler. However, when most of his brigade had shipped out to France, Berlin was kept behind, promoted to sergeant, and asked to write a show that could raise money for a new community house (to house friends and families of the soldiers during visits). Berlin responded with a revue titled Yip, Yip, Yaphank (1918), and although the show was a success (and would be revived during World War II as This is the Army), the Great War ended before the community house was ever built.135
Photograph of Irving Berlin, one of the foremost Tin Pan Alley composers, in his World War I uniform.
To Play or Not to Play Performing the Enemys Music, Letting the Enemy Perform
When nations are at war, citizens often rally behind the domestic products of their own country and reject items that are imports. Music was no exception, so after the outbreak of World War I, there were immediate and widespread reactions against foreign music and musicians. At the same time, though, there was some awareness that music might possess a certain degree of neutrality, and that artistry might transcend national allegiance.
NATIONAL ATTITUDES (AND RESISTANCE )
Bergs teacher Schoenberg was an equally unhappy serviceman. He was called up in 1915, but was discharged because of poor health in October 1916. He told a friend, I am suffering terribly from this war. How many close relationships with the finest people has it severed: how it has corroded half my mind away and shown me that I can no better survive with the remainder than with the corroded portion . I was a soldier for ten months; now I have been exempted, because in the end I was unfit for service at the front. Of course I have been through a great deal! Consider: an apprentice soldier at forty-two years of agesuddenly to become a trainee and to have to take orders from idiots!133 After his discharge, Schoenberg continued to be less than supportive of Austrias war effort. Inspired by President Woodrow Wilson, Schoenberg developed his own fifteen-point peace planbut he was cautious about sharing his ideas; he wanted to publish his scheme in a neutral paper under a pen name. In the end, he never printed his ideas, and he lamented to his friend, the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (18661924), If only we two and the likes of us in
Some of the treatment of music by outsiders was determined by clearly stated policies of various organizations. For instance, the Berlin Philharmonic decided that works by composers from enemy nations could be performed, as long as the composer had died before 1914.136 In Russia, no opera house performed works by Wagner, a German composer, for the duration of the war.137 The Pittsburgh Symphony banned all German music from its programs, although its rival, the Chicago Symphony, continued to showcase German repertory clear up through 1917.138 Arnold Schoenberg was supposed to conduct a performance of his cantata Gurrelieder in New York, but he told Busoni that he was unable
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fellow musicians Vincent dIndy and Maurice Ravel. Ravel, of course, was serving the war effort in France as vigorously as he could, but clearly he found it hard to permanently reject all the musical artistry that had come from other countries. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, Viva la France! But, above all, down with Germany and Austria! or at least what those two nations represent at the present time.143 The problem of national loyalties extended not only to music, but also to musicians. In the increasingly cosmopolitan twentieth-century world, many players made music in countries far from the land of their birth. The solution for some performers was to change their names. Thus, in England, Basil Hindenburg took the name Basil Cameron in 1914, and Gus Scholz became Gus Barret.144 England had always hosted many international players, so the problem of war-driven xenophobia was not as acute there as it was in other lands. But, some nations made it virtually impossible for foreign musicians to continue making music.
HYPHEN-AMERICANS
Composer Arnold Schoenberg, among others, regretted the artistic loss that resulted from the bans and restrictions on certain composers and works during the First World War.
to travel to the performance because the English are letting nobody through.139 He added, Isnt that terrible: the English. 30 months ago I spoke with pride of my English, French, and Russian friends, and now these are my enemies? Do you believe that? I must say that, for me, no national value has ceased to exist, not even in the first few weeks. But it is terrible that most people have long since abandoned them!140 Schoenberg was not alone in his dismay; there were others who regretted the artistic loss resulting from these bans and restrictions. The French artist Jean Cocteau stopped using a German brand of toothpaste, but he felt that a world without the music of Beethoven or Schubert would be unthinkable.141 By the time of World War I, Claude Debussy (the composer of LISTENING E XAMPLE 1) was regarded as a national hero in Franceso it was an influential gesture when Debussy refused to sign a proclamation in 1916 that would ban performances of German music in France.142 Debussy was joined in that refusal by
The United States was one of the countries that exhibited quite a bit of hostility to performers who were not native-born, and this antagonism appeared even before America entered the war. Fritz Kreisler (18751962)one of the greatest violinists the world has ever knownhad joined the Austrian army when the war began, but was injured and discharged. Since he was married to an American, he then moved to the United States and resumed his performance careerexcept in Jersey City and Pittsburgh, where he was banned because of his military service.145 Kreisler decided it was wisest to curtail all performances (except for charity appearances) for the duration of the war. Feelings against foreigners had been on the rise ever since the war began, and the flames were fanned all the more by President Woodrow Wilsons State of the Union address on December 7, 1915, in which he declared that, There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue . They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.146 No one who heard Wilsons speech failed to understand that he was referring to what many people called hyphen-Americans: people who had become natu-
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night of the concert, hundreds of policemen were needed to patrol the vicinity of Carnegie Hall. And, even though Muck started the New York concert with The Star Spangled Banner, he was arrestedwithout specific chargeswhen he returned to Boston. After a prolonged incarceration in Massachusetts, he was transferred to a prison in Georgia as a dangerous enemy alien for the duration of the war.147
Transcending the Boundaries

In his bittersweet letter to Busoni, Schoenberg had already lamented the loss of friendships and artistry that had crossed international boundaries. Debussy and others had refused to endorse proposed restrictions against performances of foreign works, but there were also those who took that resistance even further by actively continuing to play music written by the enemy. For instance, in the last year of the war, the French composer Vincent dIndy (18511931) resolutely performed German music by scheduling Beethovens Missa Solemnis (Solemn Mass) at the Schola Cantorum. He persisted with the performance even though a bombardment forced them to interrupt the piece; they completed it a few days later. How poignant it was, dIndy reminisced, to direct the Dona nobis pacem [a section of the mass that asks God to Grant Us Peace], this extraordinary masterpiece, in full battle!148 Similar moments were occurring in Germany. The composer Paul Hindemith was called up to serve in the German army in 1917, and he formed a string quartet with three of his fellow soldiers. They had a superior officer who loved both music and French culture, so in 1918 he asked them to give a private performance of Debussys String Quartet (1894). They had just finished playing the slow movement when an officer interrupted the private concert, telling them that Debussys death had been announced on the radio. They could not complete the performance; Hindemith said, It was as if our playing had been robbed of the breath of life. But we realized for the first time that music is more than style, technique, and the expression of powerful feelings. Music reached beyond political boundaries, national hatred and the horrors of war. On no other occasion have I seen so clearly what direction music must take.149
Falsely accused of being a German spy, Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, spent a year imprisoned in Georgia as a dangerous enemy alien.
ralized U.S. citizens, but who still acknowledged their ancestry with terms such as German-American, Italian-American, and so forth. Particular virulence was directed against German-born Karl Muck, who had been conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1906. Much of the uproar concerning Muck had arisen over Americas continued lack of a national anthem. A group of Boston society ladies had written to the symphony offices in 1917, insisting that the orchestra should demonstrate patriotism by performing The Star-Spangled Bannertheir preferred (albeit unofficial) anthem. The founder of the orchestra, Henry Higginson, and the orchestra manager, Charles Ellis, decided to ignore the request (and Muck knew nothing about the affair). The next day, newspapers printed rumors that Muck had refused to play the work, and so Baltimorescheduled to host the Boston Symphony Orchestraannounced that Muck would not be allowed to conduct there. The situation went on to become a national issue, even reaching the New York Times. Mrs. William Jay, who was a member of the Philharmonic Society of New Yorks Board of Directors and was backed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, insisted that before Muck would be allowed to conduct a concert in New York, he must prove he had never served in the German army and that he held Swiss citizenship. The required credentials were produced; still, on the
The Christmas Truce of 1914

Music demonstrated its non-partisan power in the remarkable Christmas Truce of December 1914. A spontaneous, unsanctioned cease-fire took place across the trenches that Christmas Eve, and the voices of enemies merged together in singing carols known to both sides, such as Silent Night (Stille Nacht in German). Other shared carols were O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree) and Adeste
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German soldiers of the 134th Saxon Regiment photographed with men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in No Mans Land on the Western Front during the Christmas Truce of 1914.
Fidelis (O Come All Ye Faithful), and soldiers in both trenches listened to a German regimental band play British and German anthems. (By the time of the war, many Germans were beginning to reject their official anthem that still shared Britains tune. They preferred the Kaiserhymne melody with poetry by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben that began Deutschland, Deutschland ber alles.) The regimental band also played Henry R. Bishops sentimental Home, Sweet Home, demonstrating the international appeal of popular music. The German soldier Karl Aldag wrote in his Christmas letter home: We were relieved on the evening of the 23rd about 10 oclock. The English had been singing hymns, including a fine quartet. On our side too the beautiful old songs resounded, with only now and then a shot in between.150 The writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saluted the truce as one human episode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war.151 As musicologist Glenn Watkins observes, Some music, it was clear, belonged to the ages and to all countries.152 The enlisted men hoped that they might enjoy the experience again the following year, but orders were given in 1915 not to repeat the regrettable recurrences of last Christmas Day.153 A lieutenant in the Queens Own Cameron Highlanders, Gordon Barber, reported: We subsequently heard that the Huns had a similar order. On our right the French, after singing
carols most of the night, and the Huns replying, did go out for about three minutes, and as soon as they got back put over covey upon covey of rifle grenades. A true conception of the Christian spirit!154 By 1915, after sixteen months of war, even holiday cheer could not make the soldiers forget the grim reality of their enmity.
To Create or Not to Create Creative Blocks

It is no surprise that some composers, on both sides of the conflict, felt that their creativity had waned during wartime. Debussy wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand in 1914, describing himself as Just a poor little atom crushed in this terrible cataclysm. What I am doing seems so wretchedly small. Ive got to the state of envying Satie, who, as a corporal, is really going to defend Paris.155 In a later letter, he told Durand that for the past two months, he had not written a note nor touched a piano. I realize that it is of no importance in light of current events; but I cannot refrain from reflecting with sadnessat my age, time lost is lost forever.156 In Germany, Schoenberg was suffering in a similar way: My work in progressit is scarcely worth mentioning. During the war, before I was called up, I started work on a major project. A symphony. In four movements . I have finished the text of the
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third, that of the fourth is two-thirds completed. As long as there was any prospect of peace, I was able to work. Then my courage left me. In the army it was, of course, impossible to work. And now: it isnt much.157
Creative Inspiration
Even though many composers suffered emotionally during the war years, the crisis did prompt various kinds of creativitysometimes to support charity, sometimes to remember those who had sacrificed their lives, and sometimes to acknowledge the wartime experience in more general ways.
SUPPORTING WAR EFFORTS
After Belgiums King Albert had upheld an 1839 treaty with England by refusing to give Germany permission to march through Belgium (because of the Kaisers objective of attacking France), Germany invaded anyway, thus propelling England to enter the war in defense of its Belgian ally. Germanys occupation of Belgium was harsh, and the writer Hall Cainewith the help of the Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper, began gathering essays and other contributions in November 1914 for a charity book to be titled King Alberts Book. Some 237 writers, statesmen, and composers sent materials.158 Proceeds from sales of the collection were donated to the Belgian Fund, and in thanks, King Albert appointed Caine as an officer in the Order of Leopold of Belgium. Englands Edward Elgar (18571934) was one of several composers to write a work for King Alberts Book ; his contribution was a choral piece titled Carillon. The piece had a refrain, Sing, Belgians, Sing!, that appeared both in English and in its original French translation, so the composition enjoyed widespread popularity. The allusion to carillons, or tower bells, was especially poignant to Belgians, since many of their medieval churches had massive carillons. And, in France, Debussy broke through his writers block to compose Berceuse hroque for King Alberts Book, quoting the Belgian national anthem La brabanonne in the course of his piano work. Two years later, another novelist, Edith Wharton (18621937), embarked upon a new charity project, titled Le livre des sans-foyer (The Book of the Homeless). Whartons collection was produced to support American hostels for refugees and the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, a group laboring to assist the flood of Belgian war orphans. Among the some fifty-two essays, drawings, paintings, poems, and compositions was Igor Stravinskys Souvenir dune marche boche (Recollection of a Kraut March).159 Stravinsky seems to have had some fun with his contribution: the subtle recollection is a phrase from a symphony by Beethoven (a German) that Stravinsky wove into the texture of his piano
The English composer Edward Elgar was one of several composers to write a work for King Alberts Book, a collection whose proceeds were donated to the Belgian Fund.
march. Sales from the bookand the auctioning of the original manuscripts and sketches that had been submittedproduced what Wharton called a large sum.160
COMMEMORATING THE FALLEN
Memorial works soon began to proliferate after the war had been underway only a few months. Despite Debussys feelings of non-productivity, he was motivated to finish two works that responded to various losses. The first was En blanc et noir (In white and black), a 1915 work for two pianos, in which each movement was dedicated to a friend who had died in battle. Each movement also contained a short poetic quotation, or epigraph. The first quotation was drawn from Gounods setting of Romo et Juliette, and the poetry suggested that those who stayed at home and didnt participate in the dance were admitting to some secret disgrace. Debussys fellow Frenchmen would have understood that allusion as a scornful reference to those who avoided military service by falsely claiming medical disability.161 Debussys second war-inspired work was also the last composition he would complete before his death from cancer; it was an art song titled Nol des enfants qui nont plus de maisons (Christmas Carol of the Homeless Children), and it was published in both French and English. In England, Elgar was disconsolate that his age (fiftyseven) at the start of the war made him ineligible
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for service. Therefore, besides his contribution to King Alberts Book, he also produced The Spirit of England in 1917 for soprano, chorus, and orchestra. Each movement had a different dedicatory title: To the Fallen, To Women, and The Fourth of August (the day that Britain had declared war on Germany). In an interesting touch, Elgar scribbled the comment Aeroplanes in his score next to a section of the second movements text: Swift, swifter than those hawks of war, / those threatening wings that pulse the air. During that portion of the music, Elgar calls for ominous timpani rolls and low-pitched trembling sounds from the bassoons and violas, thus depicting the Londoners first-hand experience of aerial warfare.162 Ravel may also have had airplanes on his mind when he wrote Le Tombeau de Couperin that same year, 1917. Tombeau literally means tombstone or grave in French, but the word is often used by musicians to describe a lament. Like Debussys En blanc et noir, each movement commemorated a victim of warfare, and the finaletitled Toccatawas dedicated to Captain Joseph de Marliave, who had died in the first days of the war. Moreover, Marliave had been married to Marguerite Long, the pianist who would premiere Le Tombeau de Couperin. The word toccata has been used since the Baroque era to describe virtuosic, animated pieces that often sound improvised. It has been suggested that Ravels setting in the Toccata emulates the loops and spirals of a plane as it dodges through the air during a dogfight. Moreover, a sudden silence before the end of the piece might mimic a stall in the aircrafts engine.163
WORKS ABOUT (AND FOR) SOLDIERS
Austrian concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned pieces written for the left hand only after a war injury led to the amputation of his right arm.
line, Ah! I feel my heart growing cold . Take it also with thee.165 Another way that composers were able to acknowledge the war was by writing music for disabled veterans. The pianist Paul Wittgenstein (18871961) was a celebrated case: while serving in the Austrian army, he was shot by the Russians and had to have his right arm amputated. Determined not to give up his career, he began to commission pieces written for the left hand only, and it is somewhat bittersweet to observe that many composers who answered Wittgensteins call were once his enemies. Wittgensteins German pre-war friend and piano duet partner Richard Strauss (18641949) wrote multiple pieces for him, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev dedicated his Concerto No. 4 to Wittgenstein, and Ravels contribution was the Concerto for the Left Hand ; this beautiful piece is now the most popular of the many works written on Wittgensteins behalf.
Some classical compositions responded to the notion of war in general, without being tied to the loss of specific individuals or groups of people. For example, Stravinskys A Soldiers Tale (1918) was discussed in Section III of this Resource Guide because of its use of the new style of American ragtime. Stravinsky commented, Our soldier, in 1918, was very definitely understood to be the victim of the then world conflict, despite the neutrality of the play in other respectsHistoire du soldat [A Soldiers Tale] remains my one stage work with a contemporary reference.164 Ravel had an even subtler wartime reference in his Three Songs for Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus, completed in 1915 and published the following year. The central song is titled Three Beautiful Birds from Paradise, and each birdred, blue, and white represents the colors of the French flag. Moreover, the sad refrain of the song is My belovd is to the fighting gone. Ominously, the poem ends with the
Popular MusicFrom Tin Pan Alley to the Trenches Music for Emotions
Throughout the world, many, many songs were performed during the war years. Some of the pieces
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were sung by the combatants themselves, and others were popular among those who waited back home and thus wide-ranging emotions were expressed by this music. (For examples of sheet music from World War I, visit http://old.library.jhu.edu/collections/ specialcollections/sheetmusic/musictours/text/war. html.)
SENTIMENT AND NOSTALGIA TUGGING THE HEARTSTRINGS
Vulgar and Cheap?

The caliber of the pieces varied considerably, but the New York Evening Post in August 1918 dealt with the issue head-on. In an editorial titled New Songs of War, the writer asked, Vulgar and Cheap? No doubt [these songs] are often so. Yet the cheapest song may often seem transfigured for singers to whose deepest sentiments it somehow makes an appeal . We can afford to have the people singing many shabby, faulty songs, along with better ones, but we could never afford to have them singing none at all.166 Morale-building, therefore, was seen as the critical benefit of these vocal pieces, and anecdote after anecdote testified as to their power. Lt. K.F.B. Tower served in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; he recalled his units first journey to France: About 6 pm that evening we set sailWe sat all night in darkness with a thousand thoughts of the future crowding through our brains. In order to relieve the monotony I started a bit of a singsong in the dark and we all sang the various musical comedy songs and kept cheery that way.167 The absence of music was also sorely felt, especially in military ceremonies. In France, General Gabriel Bon noted the ineffectiveness of a citation ceremony that lacked what he called la musique militaire (military music). He wrote, There were neither trumpets to open and close the proclamation, nor a band to play the Marseillaise. The weather was grey; we left with heavy hearts.168
A great deal of music was unabashedly sentimental, and some of it was drawn from pre-war repertory. An example was the 1893 revival hymn When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (Ill Be There) by James M. Black, which sought comfort in thoughts of the hereafter. Other pieces were written in response to the wartime experiences of far too many families, such as Hello, Central, Give Me No Mans Land (1918) with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, and music by Jean Schwartz. A novelty of this heartrending songin which a young toddler asks the operator to connect her to her distant fatherwas that it incorporated the still-new technology of the telephone. Another greatly beloved song, The Rose of No Mans Land, was a tribute to the courageous Red Cross nurses who risked their lives to save the lives of soldiers. It was written by George Gordon and Robert Bruce in 1918, and nearly every concert party of the day featured a performance by a solo tenor.169 Songs that lamented the distance between the battlefield and home seemed to be especially popular among the soldiers. Theres a Long, Long Trail had been written in 1912 by two recent Yale graduates, Zo Elliott and Stoddard King, for a college reunion,170 but it became a big hit with British soldiers during the first year of the war, who adopted the rather pensive song as a battle march. Similarly, a twenty-one-yearold Royal Naval Air Service pilot named Ivor Novello introduced his song Keep the Home Fires Burning in 1915, with words by an American poet, Lena Guilbert Ford, who was then living in London. The song was one of the few to convey the melancholic fear that the war would not end quickly. Nevertheless, it became an enormous hit, and brought an unexpected benefit to Novello: Britains Home Office summoned him back to England so he could concentrate on writing even more morale-building songs for the London revues that entertained troops on leave.171
LIST E
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Even more than Theres a Long, Long Trail or Keep the Home Fires Burning, a fairly obscure 1912 music-hall tune by Jack Judge and Harry Williams was catapulted to fame when an Irish regiment sang it EN while they marched through France. George Curnock, a reporter for a M IN G EXA London newspaper, was in Boulogne when the company passed through. He reported to readers of the Daily Mail that a company of Connaught Rangers passed us singing with a note of strange pathos in their rich Irish voices, a song that I never heard before.172 The song was Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary
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Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary (1912) Jack Judge
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(LISTENING E XAMPLE 11), and it quickly became the favorite song of British forces. The sheet music was hurriedly reissued, now proclaiming the song to be The Marching Anthem on the Battlefields of Europe,173 and earning a fortune for Judge, who had previously depended on a market stall for his livelihood. Judges publishers awarded him a pension that he received clear up to his death in 1938. Ironically, Judge had never been to Ireland, but had listened to the tales of his grandparents who had lived there.174 As Curnock had noticed early on, the song had an air of longing; despite its peppy rhythmthe words conveyed an undercurrent of sorrow in their new wartime context.175 Perhaps because of this unusual formula, there seemed to be a magic about Tipperary that surpassed that of all other songs.176 French and German versions arose, Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary and with so many singing, humming, and was immensely more popular among whistling the tune, soldiers sometimes had British soldiers than it had been on enough: before the end of 1914,attempts the music hall stage. to start it were often howled and whistled down.177 All the same, the song retained its popularity throughout the war and afterward. When a crowd assembled at Buckingham Palace after the Armistice was signed, Tipperary was one of the tunes played by the royal band.178 As LISTENING GUIDE 11 shows, Tipperary employs the conventional verse-chorus form heard in so many Tin Pan Alley songs. The sheet music calls for the customary introduction and vamp, although this very popular John McCormack recording, made in late 1914, omits the vamp. Just as the song lyrics seem to blend some bravado with nostalgia, McCormacks performance blends an accompaniment that resembles a military band with back-up singers who occasionally employ barbershop harmonies. The songs duple meter was naturally suited to marching, but McCormacks performance includes the fermatas that would have been omitted by soldiers in motion.
Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary 1912 [3:17]
JACK JUDGE (18721938)
Structure
Timeline
Text
Musical Features
Combines first line of verses melody with last line of chorus
Intro
:00
[military band effect]
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[omitted in McCormack recording] Up to mighty London came an Irish man one day, As the street are paved with gold, sure evryone was gay; Singing songs of Piccadilly, Strand and Leicester Square, Till Paddy got excited, then he shouted to them there: Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! [McCormack recording inserts Rule, Britannia quotation] Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly O, Saying, Should you not receive it, write and let me know! If I make mistakes in spelling, Molly dear, said he, Remember its the pen thats bad, dont lay the blame on me. Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! [McCormack recording omits final verse and chorus] Molly wrote a neat reply to Irish Paddy O, Saying, Mike Maloney wants to marry me, and so Leave the Strand and Piccadilly, or youll be to blame, For love has fairly drove me silly hoping youre the same! Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! Its a long way to Tipperary, Its a long way to go; Its a long way to Tipperary, To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square, Its a long, long way to Tipperary, But my hearts right there! Back-up singers join in, using barbershopstyle harmonies [band concludes] Ends with fermata Back-up singers join in, using barbershopstyle harmonies Solo (featuring John McCormack); ends with fermata
a (verse)
:09
:28 B (chorus) 1:03
interlude a (verse)
1:36 1:44
2:03 B (chorus) 2:38
Coda a (verse)
3:10
B (chorus)
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Shells burst on Cathedral of Notre Dame at Rheims during the First World War. Cathdrale de Reims, sung to a popular French tune Cest si joli la femme, lamented the destruction of portions of Rheims Cathedral. WORSHIP AND LAMENTATION
A great deal of wartime music was used to convey religious faith or to express deep feelings of grief. Both the Central Powers and the Allied Powers conducted field services in which music played a role. A German Unteroffizier, Johannes Haas, described one service in a peaceful valley, noting, [The curate] preached quite a simple, excellent sermon on the divine institution of sacrifice. Then we sang some verses of Oh, Wounded Head (a Lutheran chorale).179 Rather more cynically, a British rifleman named Fred White in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps told a friend, The night before we went over the top, the hymn the Padre got us to sing was Nearer my God to Thee. Did that make you feel braver? Because it didnt us!180 Sorrow is sometimes best expressed by music, and one of the tunes that conveyed French heartbreak was Cathdrale de Reims, sung to a popular French tune Cest si joli la femme. This song lamented the destruction of portions of Rheims Cathedral by the Germans in 1914the attack that had so dismayed Ravel. Although the cathedral was a natural military target because of its ability to serve as an observation post, the demolition was called The Kaisers Crowning Infamy by Londons Daily News.181 For generations, French kings had been consecrated at its
altar with, according to legend, oil that was brought down from heaven by a dove. The songs mournful text ran, O Rheims, You, whose cathedral was the pride of the entire worldO foolish vandals O RheimsO enchanted cityThey leveled their howitzers at you, destroying pure richness!!!182 John Jacob Niles was an American soldier who had been an avid song-collector back in the Appalachian region of the United States. While serving with the American Expeditionary Force, he was resolved to collect new music that he encountered. He was disappointed at first by the tendency of most Americans simply to repeat the latest Tin Pan Alley or Broadway hits, but he was rewarded when he encountered African-American troops. Niles called them the natural-born singers, usually from rural districts, who, prompted by hunger, wounds, homesickness, and the reaction to so many generations of suppression, sang the legend of the black man to tunes and harmonies they made up as they went along . At last I had discovered something originala kind of folk music, brought up to date and adapted to the war situations.183 From them, Niles gleaned songs such as Grave-Diggers, with its mournful refrain, Ive got a grave-diggin feelin in my heart.184 Both Grave-Diggers and Cathdrale de Reims arose spontaneously during the war, but there were
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An empty ammunition box is pressed into service as a rustic cello in the French trenches.
certainly many songs written by professionals to convey grief. The Bravest Heart of All was the 1915 tribute of Arthur J. Lamb and Henry Clique to Edith Cavell. Cavell was an English nurse and a Red Cross hospital matron in Brussels who had helped some Allied prisoners to escape to the Netherlands. After her arrest by German authorities, she pled guilty and was said to have faced her firing squad as courageously as any prisoner of war.185 As the war dragged on, and the cost in human lives mounted astronomically, more songs addressed the losses that had been endured and questioned what was still to come. E. J. Pourmon, Joseph Woodruff, and Henry Andrieu penned After the War Is Over (Will There Be Any Home Sweet Home?), in which they offered one of the gloomier predictions for life in postwar Europe.186 Although a great many songs celebrated the victory when the war ended at last, there were a number of selections that reminded listeners that there still were many heavy hearts. Among them was Harry Hamilton and Ed Thomas The Boys Who Wont Come Home, Duncan J. Muirs They Sleep in Fields of Battle, Marie Richs plaintive Where Is the Boy Who Went Over the Sea?, and Nellie Deans Beneath the Battlefields of France a Boy Lies Sleeping. The most famous poem to come out of the war, In Flanders Fields, was written by a
Canadian physician John McCrae, who died in 1918 during his military service; his elegiac text was set more than twenty times in postwar America.187
LAUGHING IT OFF
For many soldiers, the best way to face the fearsome prospects of battle and death was with humor, and comic songs were one way to produce that laughter. As the poet T.P. Cameron wrote, We cared. We cared! But laughter runs / The sweetest stream a man may know / To rinse him from the taint of guns.188 Lieutenant Power recalled, We sang, we played mouth organs and penny whistles, we made endless fun of anybody we could, in fact anything to make us think of something else except the dull monotonous tramp of tired feet getting more and more sore as we went on.189 Rifleman Stanley Hopkins explained one musical torment targeted at commanding officers: On the march at night sometimes the officer leading the battalion would lose us. This often meant we would About Turn and it was the signal for us to start singing in a Cockney accent, Nar hes bin and lorst us to the tune of Oh Come all ye Faithful much to the discomfiture of the poor officer who would march down the length of the battalion to find out who was singing. As soon as he
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arrived at C Company, A or B would start up so he had no chance.190 Among French soldiers and citizens, the humorous tune heard most often was Quand Madelon (When Madelon), a song by Camille Robert with words by Louis Bousquet. Quand Madelon had debuted in a Parisian music hall in the spring of 1914, before the war had started. Sometimes called La Madelon, the duple-meter song grew to be as popular a marching tune with the French as Tipperary was with the British, or as Over There would become with the Americans.191 Madelon was a flirtatious waitress in a tavern who cheers the soldiers up enormously; when a corporal asks for her hand in marriage, she declines, asking why she should settle for one man when I love the whole Regiment? Besides, she adds, look at his friends: she needs her hand to pour them all a drink!and off she goes. The cheerful irreverence of the song seems to have raised spirits; it also sparked a host of rewritten (and often unprintable) lyrics.192 A huge number of other songs were produced by taking old tunes and devising new words, the grimmer, the better. The hymn When the Roll is Called Up Yonder was retooled as When the Guns are Rolling Yonder (Youll be lying in the rain with the shrapnel in your brain and youll never see your sweetheart any more).193 Even more macabre was The Hearse Song, with its lyrics still sung by some schoolchildren at Halloween: The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out)194 Sentimental tunes seemed to be prime targets for rewriting, and thus Sing Me to Sleep became Far, Far from Wipers [Ypres] (I long to be / where German snipers / Cant get at me).195 Similarly, Kind Thoughts Can Never Die was reborn as one of the wars most popular songs, Old Soldiers Never Die. Many years later, during the Korean War, the song was still being quoted by General Douglas MacArthur (although musicologist Glenn Watkins points out that General MacArthur may have been forgetting the second stanzas text: Old soldiers never die / Young ones wish they would).196 Professional songwriters also managed to find humor in some aspects of the war, leading to numbers such as How Ya Gonna Keep Em Down on the Farm (After Theyve Seen Paree)? Besides his biggest heartfelt hit Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning, Irving Berlin also contributed numbers such as They Were All Out of Step But Jim. It was not just vocal music that raised the troops spirits. Besides the official regimental bands, soldiers pursued other types of instrumental music-making. Some instruments were scavenged from the wreckage of villages; one French soldier recalled attending a concert near a destroyed farm with vocals, regi-
Irving Berlin was the unexpected composer of the quirky pacifist song Stay Down Here Where You Belong (1915), sung by the Devil to his son.
mental instruments, a flute, [and] reed pipes.197 Small instruments, such as pocket-bugles, harmonicas, and violins, made their way to the front. One article in a French newspaper described a makeshift orchestra, for which members built their instruments in the trenches, and some learned how to read music.198 According to the correspondent, their repertory included works by composers Christoph Willibald Gluck (171487), Frdric Chopin, Jules Massenet (18421912), Charles-Marie Widor (1844 1937), and Camille Saint-Sans.199
Music to Persuade
During the Third Reich, Germanys propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, The nature of propaganda lies essentially in its simplicity and repetition. Only the man who is able to reduce the problems to the simplest terms and has the courage to repeat them indefinitely in this simplified form, despite the objection of the intellectuals, will in the long run achieve fundamental success in influencing public opinion.200 In a way, Goebbels characterization describes the power of music, because it lends itself to such constant repetition. All during the war years, composers used that power to argue for various points of view.
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PACIFISMTHE PARENTS SPEAK
When the war first broke out, the United States remained neutral for a host of reasons, not the least of which was the considerable family ties that many Americans had with people in the Central Powers. Pacifist songs urged America to sustain its isolation; several of the most popular were written from the viewpoints of parents, who asked governments not to take their sons, or begged those sons not to go. Dont Take My Darling Boy Away, published in 1915, had lyrics by Will Dillon and music by Albert von Tilzer, composer of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. In this song, the mother pleads, Dont send him off to war / You took his father and brothers three / Now you come back for more, adding, But my dutys
done / So for Gods sake leave one / And dont take my darling boy away.201 In 1914, Irving Berlin contributed a very curious entry to the pacifist repertory, under the title Stay Down Here Where You Belong. The cover of the sheet music clarified the scenario: down here was Hell, where the Devil orders his son not to enter the war waging up above, saying, Stay down here where you belong / The folks who live above you dont know right from wrong. / To please a king, theyve all gone out to war / And not a one of them knows what hes fighting for. / Way up above they say that Im a Devil and Im bad. / Kings up there are bigger devils than your Dad. / Theyre breaking the hearts of mothers / Making butchers out of brothers, / Youll find more hell up there than there is down below.202
LIST E
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Of all the pacifist songs, however, none caught the popular imagination more than LISTENING E XAMPLE 12, I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier (with its extensive subtitle, A Mothers Plea for Peace, respectfully EN M IN G EXA dedicated to every Mothereverywhere). This composition, published in 1915, had lyrics by Alfred Bryan and music by Al Piantadosi. The sheet music indicates that the tempo is marziale (march-like), suggesting that the song is a type of recruiting tune for parents. Certainly the close of the refrain makes a forceful claim that all mothers could rally around: Thered be no war today / If mothers all would say, / I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier! The publisher Leo Feist claimed that more than 700,000 copies were sold in the first two months that the song was on the market.203 Although the music enjoyed brisk sales, it stirred other kinds of reactions as well. The New York Tribune published a story on May 7, 1915, reporting that a Brooklyn school principal, Alexander Fichandler, had taught the song to his students and thus had provoked the ire of the local National Guard. Major Sydney Grant of the 18th Coast Artillery filed a formal protest against what he called the schools anti-military propaganda; a defiant Fichandler retorted that he was doing all in his power to breed in the schools a wholesome horror of war.204 Nevertheless, enthusiasm for this and other pacifist tunes began to wane after the sink-
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I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier (1915) Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi
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Probably the most influential pacifist song was the plaintive I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier, which sparked almost as many spoofs as it did imitators.
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ing of the Lusitania, and the Victor Talking Machine Company withdrew the song in April 1917 when the United States entered the war.205 The first phrase of Piantadosis melody has much in common with an older Irish melody, The Moreen, a melody to which Thomas Moore set the lyrics for his song The Minstrel Boy in the nineteenth century. Unlike the older tune, though, I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier unfolds as a verse-chorus form, as seen in LISTENING GUIDE 12. Chromaticism during the verses gives the mothers pleas extra poignancy. Nevertheless, the animated performance style of this song may come as a surprise today. Although issues of suitable text expression were well understood in classical music of the early twentieth century, the taste in popular music was for upbeat performances, virtually no matter what the text addressed. In this Peerless Quartet recording, made in December 1914, the singers observe not only Piantadosis specified march tempo, but they add considerable amounts of barbershop harmony to their arrangement, giving their performance even more liveliness. Quite a few other recordings of this piece capitalized on the potential for ragtime interpretations, and the song was also a target for satires and rebuttal versions: I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Slacker, Im Going to Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier and a Credit to the U.S.A., and Im Sure I Wasnt Raised to Be a Soldier (But Ill Fight for Dear Old Red, White and Blue).206
L I S T E N I N G G U I D E 12
I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier 1915 [3:02]
ALFRED BRYAN (18711958) AND AL PIANTADOSI (18841955)
Structure
Intro
Timeline
:00 :10 :18 [Instruments only] [played twice]
Text
Musical Features
Piccolo is prominent Chromatic harmony Solo (with chromaticism) Barbershop harmony (featuring the Peerless Quartet) Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony
(vamp)
Ten million soldiers to the war have gone, Who may never return again. Ten million mothers hearts must break, For the Ones who died in vain. Head bowed down in sorrow In her lonely years I heard a mother murmur thro her tears: [echo :] her tears: I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy, [echo :] and joy, Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder, to shoot some other mothers darling boy? Let nations arbitrate their future troubles, Its time to lay the sword and gun away, Thered be no war today, If mothers all would say, I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier.
a (verse)
:30 :34 :41 :42 :46 :48
B (chorus)
:49 1:06 1:10
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1:14 1:22
[played twice] What victory can cheer a mothers heart, When she looks at her blighted home? What victory can bring her back All she Cared to call her own. Let each mother answer In the years to be, Remember that my boy belongs to me! [echo :] to me! I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy, [echo :] and joy, Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder, to shoot some other mothers darling boy? Let nations arbitrate their future troubles, Its time to lay the sword and gun away, Thered be no war today, If mothers all would say, I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier. I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy, [echo:] and joy, Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder, to shoot some other mothers darling boy? Let nations arbitrate their future troubles, Its time to lay the sword and gun away, Thered be no war today, If mothers all would say, I didnt raise my boy to be a soldier. [instruments] Solo (with chromaticism) Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Barbershop harmony Solo Barbershop harmony Repetition of Introduction
a (verse)
1:34 1:38 1:44 1:46 1:50 1:553
B (chorus)
1:54 2:10 2:14 2:19 2:23
B (repeat of chorus)
2:25 2:27 2:43 2:47
Coda
2:51
RECRUITMENT SONGS
Musical propaganda also took the form of encouragement. Songs helped recruit new soldiers and helped sustain their morale while they served. Songs also promoted general patriotism and support for the war; some even masked rather bald-faced advertising ploys. From the earliest days of the war, of course, many composers wrote songs that encouraged military
service. Paul A. Rubens (18751917) contributed Your King and Your Country Want You to Englands war effort in 1914, and it was routinely sung at British recruitment rallies. When it became clear in 1917 that America was headed toward the war as well, new recruitment tunes sprang up, some more belligerent than others. One of the most aggressive was What Kind of American Are You?; even the cover of the sheet music had an in-your-face intensity, which was sustained in its chorus: What kind of an
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the frequent performances of the French anthem: Along the track at level crossings, in the towns, crowds singing La Marseillaise gather to greet the troops.209 Later, in the professional stage shows designed to entertain French soldiers, it became the convention that a woman would open and close the program by singing La Marseillaise; it is possible that she was a living symbol for the nations view of itself as La France.210 When there were complaints about these songs, they seemed to be criticisms of how they were performed. One editorial exclaimed, Why do the caf-concerts directors insist on having the Marseillaise and the Chant du dpart sung by semi-nude women who cant sing?211 Of course, the French anthem was particularly compelling, as music critic Ernest Newman observed in his evaluation of national anthems for The Musical Times in 1914. Englands own anthem, God Save the King, was not suitable as a marching tune, since it was in triple meter. Newman lamented the fact that, instead, British soldiers go marching to the most wretched of music-hall songs (and he ended his survey by remarking, Its a long, long way from Tipperary to La Marseillaise).212 The Star-Spangled Banner, also in triple meter, had the same limitation for marching as God Save the King, but it was still played during the war with increasing regularity. Soldiers from other countries also turned to their national songs in times of rejoicing, especially when leaving the front, since this meant they had survived another round of fighting.
MUSIC FOR MARKETING
Sheet music was a popular way to ask blunt questions, as seen in What Kind of an American Are You? (1917)
American are you? / Its time to show what you intend to do. / If they trample on Old Glory, will you think that they are right? / Or will you stand behind your land and fight with all your might? / What kind of an American are you? / Thats the question youll have to answer to. / If the Star Spangled Banner dont make you stand and cheer, / Then what are you doing over here? 207 Many other songs conveyed similar messages. Despite his earlier pacifist tune, Irving Berlin contributed For Your Country and My Country in 1917, with The Official Recruiting Song printed on the sheet music cover; Berlin also helped write Lets All Be Americans Now.
ANTHEMS AND PATRIOTIC SONGS
National anthems and familiar patriotic songs were a constant boost to the fighting soldiers spirit, and the troops never seemed to weary of those tunes. France, for instance, had two melodies dating from the French Revolution that continued to rally its citizens more than a century later: Chant du dpart and the countrys anthem, La Marseillaise. The novelist Edith Wharton was in Paris the night before mobilization was to begin, and she recounted how throngs surged through the streets, singing Chant du dpart over and over again.208 In the earliest days of the war, a French lieutenant, Henri Desagneaux, remarked at
The war was not just about battles, of course; various shortages of consumer goods and restrictions on materials resulted from the need to keep the armies supplied. Formal rationing schemes were limited during the First World War, but there were efforts to persuade civilians to conserve where they could, and music helped serve this purpose as well. Keep Cool! The Countrys Saving Fuel (And I Had to Come Home in the Dark) (1918) emphasized the patriotism of walking rather than driving, despite the weather or personal inconvenience. Similarly, the promotion of belt-tightening was clear that same year in Ill Do Without Meat and Ill Do Without Wheat But I Cant Do Without Love. Another marketing campaign used music to help convey its message. According to The Makins [Makings] of the U.S.A. (A Plea in Song for Tobacco for the Boys Over There), Italian smokes are strong enough to cause a mule to sneeze, / The smokes they capture from the Huns / Are like limburger cheese; / You have to wear a gas mask using smokes made by the French, / And English cigarettes / Will clear out any German trench. (Makings was a slang term for the paper and tobacco used in hand-rolled ciga-
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The front of this postcard reads: Highlanders pipe themselves back from the trenches; the reverse side explains, Our gallant Highlanders, who love to charge the enemy to the skirl of the pipes, are fond of playing their national music in lighter mood as seen in the picture. These infantry soldiers served in The Highlanders, 4th Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland (4 SCOTS).
rettes.) The solution to this problem was for each American civilian to Send on the old Bull Durham to his Yankee soldier, And then hell know youre for him.213 (Bull Durham was a popular brand marketed by the American Tobacco Company.) The writers of this 1917 song were Vincent Bryan and Harry von Tilzer, the same team who had produced I Wants to Be (A Actor Lady) (LISTENING E XAMPLE 9); they had already created another commercial product tie-in with In My Merry Oldsmobile (1905). It was true, though, that the doughboys preferred American cigarettes. One colonel wrote to the New York Sun newspaper in August 1917, saying, Thank you for the generous quantity of cigarettes which you so kindly sent to us here in France where they are so much needed; for, although there is French tobacco to be had, it is not at all to our liking.214
RAISING THE PATRIOTIC SPIRIT
was distributed by leaflet to soldiers in the ranks and to children in their classrooms.215 John Philip Sousa, the March King, wrote new works that contributed to Americas esprit de corps, such as Sabre and Spears and Solid Men to the Front. He also arranged an old tune (Over Hill, Over Dale) to serve as the U.S. Field Artillery March, which became one of the most familiar and enduring musical emblems of the war.216 Theatrical entertainments also were organized near the encampments to build up morale. These tended to resemble the revues seen in commercial theaters, with a mixed bag of singing, dancing, and comic skits. In Russia, these estradas were introduced in public theaters, but soon were presented in hospitals and even near the front.217 Germany crafted stage musicals that addressed German justifications for pursuing the war (especially the violation of Belgiums neutrality), arguing that the Flemish people were actually a Germanic race that deserved either independence from Belgium or incorporation into the Reich. The theme was represented [in the plots of the musicals] by behind-the-front romances between Flemish lasses and German boys-in-arms.218 In France, stars performing for troopsoccurred on
National patriotism was promoted via many preexisting songs and anthems, but new music, too, helped rally citizens and soldiers to their nations cause. In Germany, for example, a private in the army, Ernst Lissauer, wrote a piece titled Hassgesang gegen England (Hymn of Hate against England). The Kaiser awarded Lissauer a medal, and the work
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a random basis, which made some in the high command nervous, so the organizers agreed to certain rules: the troupe could not exceed six performers, a tour would last no more than two to three days, and all performances would take place within the army zone in areas located behind the line of fire.219 Despite the constraints, the French shows were very successful, and even the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt (18441923) participatedand when she had to have a leg amputated in 1915, and joked with the soldiers about surviving mutilation, she won them over completely.220 British entertainments initially took place only in England, at the training camps and in hospitals, and the performances were all run by volunteers. Eventually, the most tenacious concert organizers persuaded the government to let them present some of the concerts and shows in France. They started in the port town of Le Havre in 1915, but moved closer and closer to the front as the months went by. Their repertory was wide ranging, from opera selections to concertos to old English folksongs to ragtime. As one writer noted, Could you but hear these music-starved men shouting out these songs with full lung power, you would come to the conclusion that rag-time seems to quicken the pulse of the soldier in the most extraordinary way.221 Some of the performances took place in pretty rough conditions: The platform was lighted by two acetylene lamps, and in the straw of the barn was crowded the audiencelines upon lines of faces looming out of the dim light . There were also rats, and they were obviously musical rats, for they came out and ran along the beams and seemed to enjoy the concert in a most whole-hearted way.222 A British nurse, Dorothy Nicol, described the impact of one hospital concert: Tommies came from all the base units for miles around. Apart from two rows in front reserved for nurses, there wasnt a square inch of the rest of the hall that wasnt khaki [the fabric used for British military uniforms]. They sat on shelves,
they stood on window-ledges. When there were no chairs left, they sat on the floor. The atmosphere was unbelievably excited as the audience waited, and then absolute silence when the concert itself began. They roared with laughter at every allusion, they joined in every chorus and brought down the house with thunderous applause. One little man came on and sang Old King Cole in the manner of an ordinary soldier, then various ranks (The Colonel has a very fine swear, and very fine swear has he, and he blankety blanks, and blankety blanks, and calls for his subalterns three) In between the turns there were always choruses of popular songs and everyone joined in. It was terribly moving to hear these hundreds of men singing in unison, and sometimes it cut you to the heart. There was such tension, such emotion, such nostalgia. The pianist started to play The Long, Long Trail.I looked out the window and saw a stream of ambulances going very slowly along the dusty road. At the same time, through the other window overlooking the railway line, I could see a train full of men with horses and guns going up the line. It wasnt the first train of the eveningit was just before Passchendaele, and theyd been rumbling past all through the concertbut that one going by, just when they were singing that song, overwhelmed me. It was too much, seeing the ambulances coming in and the train going up at the same timetoo much to think of all the pain and hurt and suffering.223 Back in the United States, far from the European battlefields, a new surge of patriotic American songs was rushed into print after the sinking of the Lusitania in April 1915; these included numbers such as When the Lusitania Went Down and the Lusitania Memorial Hymn. These songs were a rebuttal to the pacifist songs appearing at the same time, and momentum supporting American participation in the war began to build. Still, it was two more years before Woodrow Wilson led the United States Congress to declare war.
LIST E
NG COMPA NI
The formal declaration of war against Germany was announced by the United States on Friday, April 6, 1917, and George M. Cohan thought about the implications the rest of that day and all through Saturday. His daughter Mary reported that on Sunday, her father EN M proclaimed to his assembled family that he had just completed a new IN G EXA song. Cohan placed a kitchen pan on his head and began marking time, holding a broom for a gun; he then sang Over There (LISTENING E XAMPLE 13). Mary remembered, We kids had heard, of course, that the United States was at war, and now
13
Over There (1917) George M. Cohan
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here was Dad acting just like a soldier. So I began to sob, and I threw myself down, hanging for dear life to his legs as he marched, begging him, pleading with him not to go away to the war. I kept clinging to him until he stopped.224 Mary Cohans response was not the customary reaction; most Americans regarded Over There as the ultimate patriotic tune. Glenn Watkins believes that Cohan had captured something of the American spirit of the moment and had summed up the euphoria and confidence that Americans would need to sustain themselves for the remainder of the war.225 With a memorable cover image painted by Norman Rockwell, the popularity of the song was unstoppable. Cohan was (uncharacteristically) modest about his achievement, later saying that all hed done was to dramatize a bugle call.226 The opening phrase of the chorus melody is, in essence, a second-inversion triad, leaping
No song rallied the American fighting spirit more than George M. Cohans Over There.
Although Nora Bayes had recorded one of the most popular versions of the pacifist anthem I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier, she was quick to perform George M. Cohans rousing anthem Over There once America entered the war.
from its third (D) down to its fifth (F) and back up to its root (B )and this simple harmony does indeed suit a brass instruments capabilities quite well. A bugles association with the military life adds another layer of subtext to the motif. While it is true that Cohan was not a skilled composer (he made up most of his tunes using the four major and minor chords that can be produced by the pianos black keys), his years in vaudeville and musical comedy had given him a keen sense of what listeners wanted to hear. He certainly knew his shortcomings, once joking, I can write better plays than any living dancer, and dance better than any living playwright.227 Cohan donated his royalties from the song to war charities, and in 1936 he was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for his national support. In the same manner as in his stage works, Cohan peppered Over There with patriotic references: Son of Liberty, Yankee Doodle, and the old red-white-and-blue.
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He fully understood the value of a short, catchy phrase, repeated multiple times. The poetic lines also make considerable use of internal rhyme, which helps to propel the song forward. Structurally, the song conforms to the standard verse-chorus form, andas soldiers quickly realizedits brisk duple meter made it perfectly suited for marching. (The more cynical doughboys changed the final line of the chorus slightly, singing, And we wont come back, well be buried over there.228) Dozens of singers quickly made recordings of the new tune, including this 1917 performance by the vaudeville star Nora Bayes (18801928). It was conventional for sheet music to be reissued whenever it was adopted by various star performers; in Bayes version of Over There, she was depicted wearing a Revolutionary-era coat, frilled shirt, and cockaded hat. Her embrace of this new, aggressive song was an ironic change, for her rendition of the pacifist anthem I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier was one of that songs most successful recordings.229 But Bayes, like many performers, knew which way the wind was blowing, and from 1917 onward, Over There became a standard feature of her public appearances. Enrico Caruso also recorded the song, with drums to mimic machine-gun fire and some small text adjustments to give the song more international appeal.230 (To hear Carusos version, visit: http:// www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/6728.) Despite the blockbuster success of Over There in the United Statesand its subsequent publication with French lyricsthere were those who werent as overwhelmed by the song. Some of the Allies resented the length of time it took for America to join the war in the first place, and the bombastic nature of the poetry was a little off-putting. Scornful British troops often made a small adjustment to the last two lines of the chorus; their version went, Theyre coming over, theyre coming over, / And they wont get there til its over, over there.231
Over There 1917 [2:57]
GEORGE M. COHAN (18781942)
Structure
Intro
Timeline
:00 [instruments]
Text
Musical Features
Moderato allegro; instruments play last two phrases of the Refrain Solo (featuring Nora Bayes) Sequential repetition
:08 :12
Johnnie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, on the run. Hear them calling you and me, Hurry right away, no delay, go today. Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad. Tell your sweetheart not to pine, To be proud her boys in line. Every [one for] Liberty Hurry right away, no delay, [start] today. Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad. Tell your sweetheart not to pine, To be proud her boys in line.
a (verse)
:17
:20 :24
Cohan wrote Son of Cohan wrote go
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:39 :50 B (Refrain) :52
Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming The drums rum-tumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, Send the word, send the word to beware Well be over, were coming over, And we wont come back till its over, over there. [instruments] Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Johnny, show the Hun youre a son-of-a-gun. Hoist the flag and let her fly Yankee Doodle do or die. Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit. Yankee to the ranks from the towns and the tanks. Make your Mother proud of you And the old red-white-and-blue. Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there That the [Sammies] are coming, the [Sammies] are coming Sammie was a British nickname for American soldiers; Bayes changed Cohans word Yanks Drums echo the phrase First phrase of the Verse Sequential repetition Drums echo the phrase
:55
Interlude
1:11
a (verse)
1:15
Solo
1:46
1:54 B (Refrain) 1:58
The drums rum-tumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, Send the word, send the word to beware Well be over, were coming over, And we wont come back till its over, over there. Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there That the [Sammies] are coming, the [Sammies] are coming The drums rum-tumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, Send the word, send the word to beware Well be over, were coming over, And we wont come back till its over, over there. [instruments]
2:02
2:17 B (Refrain)
2:29
Drums echo the phrase
2:33
Coda
2:49
Repetition of the Introduction
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Many Americans were still ambivalent about the thought of African Americans serving as soldiers; songs like The Ragtime Volunteers Are Off to War treated the notion in a light-hearted way.
Groundbreaking Music (Bit by Bit)

Most popular music publications during World War I reflected the traditions of Tin Pan Alley, music hall, and vaudeville. In a small way, though, a few songs and recordings began to travel new paths.
SOLDIERS OF COLOR
Bert Williams (of the Walker and Williams minstrel team) presented a sincere tribute to the patriotism of African-American soldiers in the song Youll Find Old Dixieland in France.
Many Americans had a great deal of ambivalence about the role of non-white combatants in the United States armed forces, despite the longstanding historical deployment of soldiers of color ever since the American Revolutionary War. Some people hoped that the valiant service of the 10th Cavalry one of the Buffalo Soldier regimentsduring the Spanish-American War would elevate the national regard for African-American soldiers, but prejudice still pervaded many aspects of the military as well as civilian life. A particularly dismaying incident occurred during World War I, when Colonel Linard of the American Expeditionary Force sent a surreptitious document to the French military leadership; it was titled Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops. Linard explained that the French
must be very careful in how they interacted with black soldiers, since Treating blacks as equals was considered to have the most sinister implications for the future, when the black soldiers went home to the states . The approximately 15 million Negroes in the United States presented a threat of race mongrelization unless blacks and whites were kept strictly separated. [Therefore,] the French should not eat with them nor shake hands with them, nor visit or converse except as required by military matters.232 Fortunately, Linards warnings fell mostly on deaf ears, and the experiences of many black performers resembled minstrel performer Bert Williams favorable treatment in London. Lieutenant James Reese Europe, bandleader for the all-black 369th United States Infantry Hellfighters, wrote about the French: Their broad minds are far and free from prejudice, anddespite the desperate efforts of some people, the French simply cannot be taught to
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comprehend that despicable thing called prejudice Viva la France should be the song of every black American over here and over there.233 Since Tin Pan Alley had always been a forum for expressing nearly every possible viewpoint, some songs started appearing that showcased the courage and patriotism of various minority soldiers. A century later, many of these songs may appear astonishingly patronizing and stereotype-filled, such as The Ragtime Volunteers Are Off to War (1917) or Theyll Be Mighty Proud in Dixie of Their Old Black Joe (1918). A much less condescending treatment, When the Lord Makes a Record of a Heros Deeds, He Draws No Color Line, appeared in 1918 (although the song focused on African-American heroism during the Civil and Spanish-American Wars).234 The most genuine tribute was written by Grant Clarke and George W. Meyer in 1918; called Youll Find Old Dixieland in France, it was introduced by Bert Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. The service of Native Americans did not receive as much attention from songwriters, and the one notable example, Indianola (1918), seems painfully condescending today.
MUSICAL REALISM
One of the most unexpected war-inspired disks to come out of a recording studio was On Patrol in No Mans Land (LISTENING E XAMPLE 14), a number written by James Reese Europe with the help of Noble Sissle (18891975) and Eubie Blake (18871983). Europe had been born in Alabama but, as a child, had moved to Washington, D.C., living just a few doors away from John Philip Sousa. Members of Sousas Marine Band gave music lessons to African-American children with musical promise, so Europe studied piano and violin. With this solid foundation, Europe went on to lead a professional orchestra in New York, and he helped found the Clef Club, a union for black musicians. He conducted the clubs orchestra and chorus in a Symphony of Negro Music at Carnegie Hall in 1912, the first time a black orchestra had ever appeared on that stage. When Victor Records signed them in 1913, they became the first black orchestra to have a recording contract with a major label. Europe also served as the music director for the celebrated dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle; the Castles are credited with developing the popularity of the foxtrot.235 When a new all-black 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard began forming in 1916, Europe enlisted as a private because he felt it would bring together all classes of men for a common good.236 His commanding officer, knowing of Europes background and impending promotion to lieutenant, asked him to organize and develop the finest band in the U.S. Army.237 In response, Europe
James Reese Europe conducts the 369 th Hellfighters Band outside an American Red Cross hospital in Paris, c. 1918.
asked for a much larger budget and instrumentation than the army usually allowed. With the help of outside support from the U.S. Steel Corporation and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Europes conditions were met. The band was a quick success, but the regiment encountered significant racism while undergoing basic training, so the army sent them overseas. However, Americas segregation laws limited their active role in combat alongside white American soldiersso they were offered the chance to transfer to the French Army as American reinforcements.238 They thus became the 369th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, and their nickname was the Hellfighters. Even though the regiments band entertained widely in France, and their jazzy interpretations were all the rage among their French audiences, they were still members of a fighting unit. Lt. Europe became the first African-American officer to lead his troops into combat during World War Iand these battles gave him direct experience with No Mans Land. Moreover, he was injured in early 1918 in a gas attack, and Noble Sissle went with a friend to visit him in the hospital. As Sissle recalled, they could hear him coughing one of those dry-hacking painful coughs, but when they came around the partition they found Europe sitting upright and writing in a notebook propped against his knees. When he looked up through his big, shell-rimmed glasses and
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saw it was us, a big broad smile swept over his face, and instead of him telling us how seriously he was gassed, as we had expected, or how his physical condition was, the first thing that he spoke up and said
was: Gee, I am glad to see you boys! Sissle, heres a wonderful idea for a song that just came to me, in fact, it was [from the] experience I had last night during the bombardment that nearly knocked me out.239
LIST E
NG COMPA NI
The song that had blossomed from James Reese Europes frightening experience was On Patrol in No Mans Land. In its sheet music form, it looks like a conventional Tin Pan Alley song, with an introduction, EN M IN G EXA vamp, verse, and a repeated refrain (a refrain is a synonym for the repetitive chorus in a verse-chorus form). However, the sheet music does not convey all the nuances that the Hellfighter Band added during their performances. Fortunately for posterity, the band recorded the song in 1919 after their return to the United States. During the first twelve seconds of the recording, it would be easy to imagine a vaudeville star tap-dancing his way onto the stage to syncopated ragtime-style rhythmsbut even during the vamp, odd things begin to happen. Members of the band start using their voices and instruments to simulate the sound of an incoming mortar attack, with drums mimicking the explosions. Despite these intimidating noises, the songs bright tempo continues unabated, perhaps underscoring a life goes on message. When the singer Noble Sissle starts the verse, it soon becomes clear that his lyrics are no ordinary Tin Pan Alley love song or comedy; instead, he is a commanding officer, instructing his soldiers in the way to follow him safely over the top into the dangerous territory of No Mans Land. He peppers his dialogue with contemporary sayings, perhaps to ease some of his mens anxiety; Very Good Eddy, for instance, was a reference to a popular 1915 musical comedy. The first time through the refrain, the intensity of the attack increases. Here, the lyrics include genuine military terms, such as Minnenwerfer. Sometimes nicknamed a sausage gun, this was a short-range trench mortar that had been used heavily in the Somme where the trenches were less than thirty yards aparttoo close for normal gunfire.240 A Vary light (more often spelled Very) was a flare gun, used to launch illuminating flares into the air that could reveal the position of hidden soldiers. Boche was the French slang term for the Germans, equivalent to the English Hun or Kraut. It is during the repetition of the refrain, however, that the real surprise comes. After the men have dropped to the ground and
14
On Patrol in No Mans Land (1918) Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and James Reese Europe
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James Reese Europes On Patrol in No Mans Land (1918) described the wartime experience in an unexpectedly vivid way.
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begun to crawl, the accompanying instruments suddenly stopand listeners are exposed to sounds and shouts that might occur during an actual attack. The soldiers are ordered to ram their opponents with their bayonets, and soon the Germans are heard plaintively crying, Comradecomrade as they plead for mercy. And then, the music abruptly resumes, in the same cheerful way it had begun; the realism has ended. Tin Pan Alley had heard nothing quite like this song. In a way, it resembles the Expressionistic settings encountered in classical music. Somewhat surprisingly, though, it became one of the bands most popular pieces.241 Although it gave listeners a small glimpse of an actual wartime experience, it tempered that intensity with its lively cakewalk-style energy. Despite the innovation and novelty of Europes creation, his name is little known to many listeners today. This lack of fame may be because he died far too young, due to a very sad incident that occurred in May 1919. Europe was taking the Hellfighters Band on a post-Armistice concert tour in the United States, but one of his drummers, Herbert Wright, proved to be mentally imbalanced. Wright felt he was unappreciated, and although Europe tried to reason with him, Wright pulled a knife and stabbed Europe to death. Europes passing was met with widespread grief, and New York City officials agreed to make his funeral publicthe first one ever so granted to a black American in the citys history.242
On Patrol in No Mans Land 1918 [2:21]
JAMES REESE EUROPE (18801919)
Structure
Intro
Timeline
:00 :10 :12 [instruments] [Vamp is played 4 times]
Text
Musical Features
Brightly (not fast)
[wooshing and whining sounds in background] [bang!] [vamp continues] Whats the time? Nine? All in line Alright, boys, now take it slow Are you ready? Steady! Very good, Eddy. Over the top, lets go Quiet, sly it, else youll start a riot, Keep your proper distance, follow long Cover, smother, when you see me hover Obey my orders and you wont go wrong Theres a Minnenwerfer coming Look out! [whine in background] [bang!]
vamp :15 :16
Whines of incoming mortar Drum mimics explosion
a (verse)
:20
Solo (featuring Noble Sissle)
:43 B (Refrain) :45 :46
Drum mimics explosion
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:46 :47 :47 :48 :49 :56 :57 :58 1:00 1:04 1:05 B (Refrain cont.)
Hear that roar! [bang!] Theres one more [bang!] Stand fast, theres a Vary light Dont gasp or theyll find you all right Dont start to bombing With those hand grenades [rat-a-tat-tat-tat in background] Theres a machine gun Holy Spades! [cow bell in background] Alert, gas! Put on your mask Adjust it correctly and hurry up fast [whine in background] Drop! [bang! in background] Theres a rocket from the Boche barrage Down, [bang! in background] Hug the ground, close as you can, dont stand Creep and crawl, follow me, thats all What do you hear? Nothing near Dont fear, all is clear, Thats the life of a stroll When you take a patrol Out in No Mans Land! Aint it grand? Out in No Mans Land. Theres a Minnenwerfer coming Look out! [siren in background] [bang!] Hear that roar! [bang!] Theres one more Stand fast, theres a Vary light Dont gasp or theyll find you all right Dont start to bombing With those hand grenades [rat-a-tat-tat-tat in background] Drum mimics machine gun Drum mimics explosion Incoming mortar Drum mimics explosion Incoming mortar Drum mimics explosion Bell signals gas alert Drum mimics explosion [flare] Drum mimics machine gun Drum mimics explosion
1:08
1:23 1:25 1:26 1:27 1:27
1:28
1:35
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1:37 1:38 1:39 1:44 1:45 B (Refrain cont.) 1:52
Theres a machine gun Holy Spades! [cow bell in background] Alert, gas! Put on your mask Adjust it correctly and hurry up fast [whine in background] Drop! Theres a rocket from the Boche barrage Down, hug the ground, close as you can, dont stand Creep and crawl, follow me, thats all [Shouted commands: Doughboys! Go to it! Battle cries of soldiers; more commands: Get the bloody boys! Get em! Stick em with the bayonet, boys. Ram it to em! Soon, moaning Germans are heard: Kameradkamerad (comrade)] What do you hear? Nothing near Dont fear, all is clear, Thats the life of a stroll When you take a patrol Out in No Mans Land! Aint it grand? Out in No Mans Land. Incoming mortar Bell signals gas alert
All music stops
2:07
Accompaniment resumes
Section IV Summary: Musical Responses to The Great War
Some musicians refused to exhibit musical prej* udice and thus would not support repertory restrictions and continued to perform music of any nationality. In the spontaneous cease-fire in 1914, known as * the Christmas Truce, the combatants listened to each other perform music and even joined together in singing some widely known carols. Some composers felt their creativity was crippled * by the horror of war, but they sometimes found inspiration in trying to fill a philanthropic need, such as by contributing to charity book anthologies. Two of the best-known collections were King Alberts Book and The Book of the Homeless. Many prominent composers produced works that * commemorated those who had made tremendous sacrifices in the war. These pieces included Debussys En blanc et noir, Elgars The Spirit of England, and Ravels Le Tombeau de Couperin. Other classical composers wrote works that * addressed the war in a more general way, such as Stravinskys A Soldiers Tale or Ravels Three Beautiful Birds from Paradise. Some composers also devised pieces that could be played despite physical handicaps, such as the numerous piano
Many musicians were eager to fight for their countries, even though many of them were not in the peak of health. Men who could not serve in the armed forces tried to support their nations in various morale-boosting efforts. Women participated in those efforts and filled many of the vacant jobs in civilian society.
Some musicians served much less eagerly, and * usually unhappily; sometimes their experiences influenced the music they wrote, as in Bergs Wozzeck or Berlins Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning. The question of whether or not to play music that * had been composed by someone from an enemy nation was an immediate issue for most performers and listeners. Many people felt, though, that music transcended national loyalty at times. Musicians from enemy nations often faced sus* picion, restrictions, and even arrest, as the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Karl Muck, discovered.
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works composed for Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm.
ed soldiers why they were fighting. Songs also helped civilians cope with wartime shortages.
Music contributed to many morale-building Not all the music composed in reaction to the war * * efforts during the war. New songs and marches was artistic, but it was widely believed that even unrefined music was better for morale than no music at all.
A great deal of the popular music that enjoyed The volume of pro-war songs increased dramati* widespread success was sentimental. Some piec* cally after the Lusitania sank, and once the United es, such as Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary, even found new life as marching songs for the soldiers.
supported national views, and revue-like shows and concerts entertained the enlisted men in their camps and hospitals.
Music helped express religious sentiment or Racism continued to play a role in American soci* the deep feelings of grief that occur so often in * ety, and some military leaders tried to extend wartime.
States entered the war, new patriotic tunes flourished. The most popular of them all was Cohans Over There.
Music that made people laugh was also essential to the well-being of the troops and those back home. Some of the songs that were performed were funny to begin with; other melodies were given new words, which were often scandalous or macabre in nature.
that attitude across the Atlantic. Fortunately for minority soldiers, Europeans were generally less concerned with their skin color than with their ability to fight.
A different type of propaganda appeared in some * songs that focused on the contributions of soldiers of color, although the caliber of the pieces varied enormously. One of the best examples was Youll Find Old Dixieland in France.
Soldiers also devised ways to make instrumental * music, even to the extent of building instruments from whatever materials they could find. Popular songs could be used as propaganda, and * they lobbied on behalf of many points of view regarding participation in the war. A number of pacifist songs appeared in 1915, including Berlins Stay Down Here Where You Belong. An especially popular tune was I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. Other propaganda songs were used for recruit* ment, while anthems and national airs remind-
Lt. James Reese Europe achieved a number of * milestones for African-American musicians in
New York, and continued to accomplish even more breakthroughs during his leadership of the 369th Infantry Hellfighters Band in France.
One of the Hellfighters most unexpected record* ings was On Patrol in No Mans Land. It used a
cheery, ragtime-like background while describing a nighttime foray and attack in No Mans Land, including sound effects of weaponry and the noises of hand-to-hand combat.
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CONCLUSION
By 1920, access to music in the Western world had expanded significantly. Just forty years earlier, the only way to hear music was to be in its immediate vicinity while it was being performed. Technology broke through those barriers completely; the era of mass communication was underway. In the fields of both classical and popular music, various changes were taking place. For over two hundred years, common-practice tonality had been the only harmonic system in use; however, at the turn of the twentieth century, many classical composers began to challenge that standard. Some of their experimentation incorporated new scales and chords that didnt resolve as expected; other pieces abandoned consonant chords and tonics altogether. Compositions before 1900 were almost always in duple, triple, or quadruple meter; in contrast, Modernist music often employed shifting meters or other asymmetrical patterns. A clear-cut melody was not always present; the focus might instead be on repetitive ostinato patterns or changes in timbre. All the while, of course, there were composers who maintained their allegiance to traditional tonality, as did audiences. Many works of yesteryearsome from long before the twentieth centurystarted to comprise a canon of classics, played over and over again, clear to the present day. Popular music, in contrast, stood midway between the classical canon and the Modernist experimentation. It resolutely retained common-practice tonality; the only real harmonic inroads took place in the blues and jazz, where blue notes manipulated some
pitches of the scale. However, most individual popular compositions didnt expect to achieve longevity. They were created for the moment, and fresh material was routinely produced. That is not to say that popular classics did not ariseworks such as The Stars and Stripes Forever, St. Louis Blues, and Take Me Out to the Ball Game have lived onbut most pieces were written with the expectation that they would soon be superseded. What composers did hope was that their music would enjoy good sales. Most popular music, therefore, sought to appeal to listeners by expressing the attitudes of those listeners: patriotic songs, anthems, gospel, blues, pacifist numbers, jazz pieces, operettas, and musical comedies all spoke to different audiences. Dancers, too, could find various musical styles that appealed to their particular tastes. As World War I progressed, popular music continued to meet the wants of listeners, and, in a way, so did many classical works, either by serving cathartic functions or by offering an escape from the presentday horrors. When audiences listened to nationalist pieces and songs, they were reminded of what they cherished about their country. Commemorative works allowed listeners to grieve for those who were lost to them. Some songs raised spirits by making people laugh; others made listeners think. And, overall, fundamental and lasting technological changes gave audiences new power: people could listen to what they wanted, when they wanted, and as often as they wanted.
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GLOSsA RY
Aggregate the set containing the twelve different pitches used in Western music, analogous to all the pitches of the chromatic scale Avant-garde a French term for military vanguard; it has been adapted as a description of cutting-edge artistry that seems ahead of its time. Barbershop a style of singing, wildly popular between 1895 and 1930, which employs four voices to harmonize melodies with frequent tritones and seventh chords Blue note a pitch that is deliberately sung out of tune; it is a device commonly used by jazz and blues musicians, especially on steps 3 and 7 of the scale. Broadway the primary theater district of New York Cakewalk a plantation-era entertainment that was mimicked in minstrel shows; originally it was a challenge-dance in which slave couplescompeting for a caketried to do the best parody of their owners high-society manners. Call-and-response a performance technique in which a soloist or small group presents a short motif and a larger group echoes or answers with contrasting material Canon (1) a body of works that have achieved long-standing admiration and/or popularity; (2) a technique in which a single melody is performed by multiple musicians, but at staggered, overlapping intervals, thus producing imitative polyphony; a synonym is round, and an example is the customary performance technique of the childhood tune Row, Row, Row Your Boat Character piece an instrumental genre that developed in the Romantic era; it is usually a short work that attempts to express the mood or imagery suggested by its particular title (Waltz, Nocturne, etc.) Chorus In jazz, this describes one complete statement of the main melody or strain (or of the chords that support that melody). Circuit an association of vaudeville theater owners; they hired entertainers who would then travel from theater to theater within the circuit. Combo a small jazz or blues ensemble
Commedia dellarte an Italian entertainment of the sixteenth century featuring stock characters (Harlequin, Colombine, etc.) who would act in improvised comic skits Cue sheet a list given to musicians by a vaudeville performer; it indicates the types of music needed at particular moments in the performers act (the term is now applied to the music that is planned for a movie). Custom score (also, original score) music that is newly composed for a particular film (or television event) Drone a sustained, unchanging note; the open pipes on a bagpipe are called drones, so their sound is sometimes mimicked in art music by the use of long notes, usually in lower-pitched instruments Ethnomusicology a field of study that focuses on music and its cultural aspects within local and global contexts Fermata an indication for musicians to sustain a note (or a rest) longer than its customary value, briefly stopping the forward momentum of the piece Field holler a long, loud, improvised solo call that expresses emotion Field recording a machine-made audio (or video) recording of music performed in its natural environment (as opposed to a studio recording) Film score a new genre of the twentieth century; it is the music written to accompany the showing of a film. Glissando a rapid sweeping motion up or down a scale, resembling the strum-like playing technique used by harpists Humanism a system of thought or worldview which attaches primary importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters Impresario a term for the person who controls the finances for an opera or ballet company, and thus is the final authority when hiring composers, performers, etc.; the term producer is an equivalent in the film industry. Interpolation a number that is added to a show after opening night
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Klangfarbenmelodie (tone color melody) a twentieth-century compositional technique that puts the emphasis on a series of timbres (tone colors) rather than a singable melody March an instrumental genre, usually intended for bands, that features repetitive music patterns and a steady beat (since it originated as a way to keep military groups in step) Melismatic describes a method of setting poetic text in which a single syllable is flexed over a series of different pitches Miniature a short composition, often a synonym for character piece; usually focused on expressing a central image or mood as suggested by its title Modal refers to one of the older scales used in the Medieval and Renaissance period; major (Ionian) and minor (Aeolian) are only two of the several modal scales that were formerly employed. Multi-thematic form a musical architecture used in most marches; it consists of at least three melodies (also called strains), with each strain repeated before moving on to the next (e.g., AABBCC). Mute a device that quiets or muffles an instruments sound in some way On the bridge a performance indication for string players, telling them to bow directly over the bridge, which produces a glassy, thin sound (German: am Steg ; Italian: sul ponticello) Opera a genre of stage entertainment developed in Italy at the start of the Baroque era; the characters sing their lines rather than speaking them as they would in a play. Original score (also, custom score) music that is newly composed for a particular film (or television event) Ostinato a short musical pattern that repeats many times; it can be a melodic fragment, or even just a rhythmic motif. Passacaglia a musical form consisting of a repeating bass line underneath a series of varied melodies Pizzicato the technique of plucking a string on an instrument that normally is bowed (violin, viola, cello, bass) Pointillism an extremely sparse texture in music, where notes often are sounded or sung with no accompaniment, sometimes with rests before or afterward, so that each pitch sounds isolated Polychord a complex chord whose pitches can be subdivided into two or more distinct, independent harmonies Post-Romanticism a style of twentieth-century composition that retains many of the features of Romanticism, with its emphasis on expressiveness, sometimes in combination with newer devices or with techniques from the more distant past
Prima donna Italian for first lady, this term refers to the starring female role in an opera. Primo uomo Italian for first man, this term indicates the starring male role in an opera. Rag a popular genre, primarily for piano, that uses the style of ragtime; it blends syncopated rhythms with a multi-thematic form. Refrain a synonym for the repetitive chorus in a verse-chorus form Scenario the plot or storyline of a ballet Second Viennese School the Vienna-based composers Arnold Schoenberg and his most prominent pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern; the First Viennese School had been the Classical/Romantic group consisting of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Shout a term for African-American group singing and dancing, sometimes called ring shout; the words often had a religious message. Solo break a passage in a jazz piece in which the majority of performers stop playing in order to feature one soloist Song cycle a set of songs unified by some shared characteristic in the music and/or poetry Song-plugger a person who promotes sheet music for a publishing company Spiritual a vocal genre developed by African Americans; it usually has a simple, flexible melody and conveys a religious message. Sprechstimme a twentieth-century vocal technique in which the singer half-sings, half-speaks each note Star-turn a number that features the special talents of a performer Stop-time a jazz playing technique in which an ensemble plays a single note together on the first beat of a bar, and then stops playing until the next measure; it is a special effect sometimes used to accompany a soloist. Storyville a district in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century that is viewed as the axis of the earliest development of jazz Strain a synonym for melody Stride piano a keyboard style that blends the steady left-hand pulsations of ragtime with a right hand that plays swing rhythms; it is usually faster and played more forcefully than ragtime. Swing a rhythmic device particularly prevalent in jazz; it creates a compound-meter effect by lengthening the first eighth note in a pair and subtracting that time from the second note. Text expression the technique of choosing musical elements that suit the meaning of the poetry, such as employing an allegro tempo in a song in which the narrator is excited
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Toccata a musical genre, usually for keyboard, that is fast, virtuosic, and has an impromptu character Tombeau a musical lament Tone cluster a highly dissonant chord that contains several half- or whole-step intervals Tone color the characteristic sound produced by a voice or instrument; a synonym for timbre Turn the act (entertainment) presented by each performer or group in a vaudeville (variety) show Vamp a short motif that is repeated as a filler until a performer is ready to proceed Vernacular music traditional music belonging to a culture, ethnic group, or society, usually transmitted orally among nonprofessional performers Verse-chorus form a form used in vocal music that contrasts verses (usually labeled a) with a repetitive chorus or refrain (B) in alternation; e.g., a-Ba-B (etc.)
Wah-wah mute a jazz timbre achieved by waving the rubber plunger of a plumbers helper over the bell of a trumpet or trombone; it produces a sound that can resemble a distorted human voice. Waltz a ballroom dance in triple meter West End the main theater district of London Whole-tone scale a scale that consists of only six pitches, each of which is a whole step (M2) away from the next; e.g., C-D-E-F -G -B -[C]
Word-painting a technique in vocal music in which the musical setting depicts the literal meaning of specific words, such as a melody that rises and falls while singing about a mountain Work song a vocal genre performed by laborers, either as a group or in a call-and-response pattern; it usually has a steady pulse to help regulate the work flow.
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TIMELINE OF EVENTS
1630 1640 1750
1637
The first public opera house opens in Venice.
1640
The first publication in the New England colonies, The Bay Psalm Book, is printed. God Save the King starts serving as the British national anthem. La Marseillaise is adopted as the French national anthem, and Chant du dpart is another popular French patriotic song; both later help to build morale during WWI. The Kaiserhymne by Haydn becomes Austrias national anthem (until the end of WWI). The English comedian Charles Matthews launches the fad for Ethiopian delineators, which in time leads to minstrel shows. Music halls in England start to gain a following. The first American music school, the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, is founded. Offenbachs opra-bouffe Orpheus in the Underworld premieres and inspires Viennese and English operettas. French composers found the Socit Nationale de Musique after the FrancoPrussian War. Newly unified Germany uses the melody of Englands God Save the King for its national anthem tune. Claude Monet exhibits his painting Impression: soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise). The first hymnal to use the word gospel in print (Gospel Songs) is published. Thomas Edison records the spoken poem Mary Had a Little Lamb onto tinfoil.
c. 1750
1795
1790
1797
1820
1822
c. 1850
1850
1857
1858
1871
1870
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1874
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1870
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1878 1879
The operetta H.M.S. Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan premieres in London and is widely pirated in the United States. Gilbert and Sullivans operetta The Pirates of Penzance opens in New York.
1880
John Philip Sousa takes over the leadership of the U.S. Marine Band. Vaudeville productions achieve widespread popularity in the United States. The vaudevillians Harrigan and Hart employ African-American performers for the first time in a theater previously limited to whites. The first international copyright law is passed at the Berne Convention.
1880
1883 1887
1890 1891
Audio recordings start becoming increasingly available. Edisons Kinetoscope allows one person at a time to view (silent) images. Helen May Butler begins leading the Ladies Brass Band. Edvard Munch paints his Expressionistic The Scream. A railroad investment collapse (the Panic of 1893) triggers a multi-year economic depression. The Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago introduces millions of visitors to ragtime and to Cracker Jack. James M. Black writes the revival hymn When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (Ill Be There), which will later become a favorite target for spoofing by WWI soldiers. Debussys Impressionistic orchestral piece Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun premieres. The first public film showings take place in Berlin and Paris. John Philip Sousa composes The Stars and Stripes Forever, later named the national march by an Act of Congress. Tom Turpin is the first black composer to publish a rag, Harlem Rag. Legislation passes in New Orleans that leads to the formation of the Storyville red-light district. Scott Joplin publishes his first rags, Oriental Rag and Maple Leaf Rag.
1893
1890
1894 1895 1896
1897
1899
1900
Speech is transmitted for the first time via radio. Jean Sibelius composes Finlandia, which will become an unofficial national anthem for Finland. Piano ownership is on the rise; some 130 piano factories are based in New York alone. Worldwide, fifty-five sovereign nations exist. In Dahomey becomes the first musical comedy by African Americans to succeed on Broadway. The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland become profitable Broadway operettas. French filmmaker Georges Mlis includes a custom film score with his movie Kingdom of the Fairies.
1900
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1903
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1904
Enrico Caruso begins making recordings for Victor Talking Machine Co., and his average yearly sales up to 1920 are $115,000. George M. Cohans musical comedy Little Johnny Jones promotes American patriotism. The Institute of Musical Art is founded in New York (and is renamed Juilliard in 1924). The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union is founded. The operetta The Merry Widow premieres in Vienna. The first nickelodeon opens in Pittsburgh. The Merry Widow takes New York by storm. The first Ziegfeld Follies revue premieres on Broadway. More than 3,000 nickelodeons have opened throughout the United States. A critic uses the term cubes in appraising paintings by Georges Braque, leading to the term Cubist. Debussy concludes Childrens Corner with Golliwogs Cakewalk, employing ragtime rhythms. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1908 is the first revue to popularize a hit song, Shine On, Harvest Moon. Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer write the Tin Pan Alley hit Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Camille Saint-Sans writes the first original orchestral film score for the French movie The Assassination of the Duke of Guise. Arnold Schoenberg demonstrates Expressionism in his composition Erwartung. Bla Bartk collects Christmas carols in Romania. The IWW union publishes its Little Red Songbook. The first anthology of music cues intended specifically for movies is published. Performances of New Yorks Metropolitan Opera comprise the first public radio broadcasts. Debussy publishes Prludes, Book I, including the Impressionistic Voiles. Ralph Vaughan Williams displays English nationalism in his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The Vaughan Music Publishing Company founds a professional quartet to help market their gospel songbooks. Victor Herbert composes the operetta Naughty Marietta. Bla Bartks Primitivist Allegro barbaro premieres. Diaghilevs Ballets Russes performs Stravinskys Petrushka. Webern finishes his atonal string quartet Six Bagatelles, Op. 9. Ethel Smyth supports womens suffrage in England with her March of the Women. The United States passes the Radio Act of 1912, requiring 1) all seagoing vessels to monitor distress frequencies continuously and 2) licenses for all U.S. radio stations. Schoenberg finishes his Expressionist song cycle Pierrot lunaire. Henry Cowells The Tides of Manaunaun makes use of tone clusters. The first Blues sheet music begins to appear (Dallas Blues, Memphis Blues). Two Yale College graduates write Theres a Long, Long Trail for a college reunion; it later becomes a popular anthem among British troops. Jack Judge writes his music-hall song Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary, which later becomes a favorite among all WWI soldiers and citizens. Carnegie Hall hosts a black orchestra and chorus for the first time; they perform a Symphony of Negro Music at Carnegie Hall in 1912. The Berlin Philharmonic records the complete Fifth Symphony by Beethoven (requiring eight discs bound as an album). The stormy premiere of Bergs Altenberg Lieder in Vienna leads to the nickname Scandal Concert. Stravinskys ballet The Rite of Spring sparks a riot among its Parisian audience. Pope Benedict XV bans Catholics from dancing the tango. The Clef Club is the first black orchestra to have a recording contract with a major label when they sign with Victor Records.
1905
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continued
1907
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1911
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1914
The march Colonel Bogey is written by Kenneth J. Alford and becomes a favorite of WWI troops. W.C. Handy publishes his St. Louis Blues, one of Americas most popular blues. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is formed to collect royalties from performances. German forces destroy part of Rheims Cathedral, sparking new songs of lamentation. Paul A. Rubens writes Your King and Your Country Want You to support recruiting efforts in England. British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams begins his many years of wartime service, starting as a wagon orderly. French composer Lili Boulanger founds the Franco-American Committee of the National Conservatory, offering both monetary and moral support to musicians fighting in the war. A spontaneous Christmas Truce takes place all along the trenches on both the Eastern and Western fronts. The charitable effort King Alberts Book is published, with contributions from some 237 writers, statesmen, and composers. The Parisian music-hall song Quand Madelon, which will become a highly popular marching song among the French, premieres. Irving Berlin writes the pacifist song Stay Down Here Where You Belong, featuring the Devil and his son. Alban Berg begins work on his Expressionistic opera Wozzeck, portraying the breakdown of a bullied soldier. Bartk publishes his Nationalist arrangements called Romanian Christmas Carols. The British ship Lusitania is sunk in April by a German torpedo; its sinking is commemorated in songs such as When the Lusitania Went Down and the Lusitania Memorial Hymn. D. W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation becomes the first blockbuster hit film (and its score includes The Star-Spangled Banner). Austrian composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg are called up for service. President Wilson warns against naturalized U.S. citizens with divided loyalties. Debussys two-piano En blanc et noir is dedicated to friends who had died in battle. Ravel alludes to the war in Three Songs for Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus ; Three Beautiful Birds from Paradise represent the colors of the French flag. English composer Ivor Novellos Keep the Home Fires Burning becomes an enormous hit. Edith Cavell, an English nurse and a Red Cross hospital matron, is shot for helping prisoners escape, and the song The Bravest Heart of All is composed in tribute. Numerous pacifist songs are published in the United States, such as Dont Take My Darling Boy Away and I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. Singing the latter song is seen as anti-military propaganda by the U.S. National Guard. British entertainers persuade the government to allow them to present morale-building concerts in France. Impressionist ideas appear in Respighis Fountains of Rome and Griffes The White Peacock (composed in 1915 but published as part of his Roman Sketches in 1916). Granados opera Goyescas premieres in New York; Granados and his wife drown when their ship is torpedoed during their return journey. President Woodrow Wilson names The StarSpangled Banner as the national air for all military use. Scott Joplin records a piano roll of the Maple Leaf Rag. Raymond Hubbells popular foxtrot Poor Butterfly addresses a geisha whose soldier is not returning to her. Victor Herbert composes the first fully original score for an American movie, The Fall of a Nation. Ravel becomes a driver for the motor transport corps. British composer George Butterworth is killed by sniper fire. Debussy refuses to sign a proclamation that would ban performances of German music in France. Novelist Edith Wharton organizes another charity publication, The Book of the Homeless, with fifty-two essays, drawings, paintings, poems, and compositions. James Reese Europe joins the new all-black 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard; he is promoted to lieutenant and is asked to form an outstanding military band.
1910
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1917
The United States enters WWI, and all U.S. radio stations are shut down. George M. Cohan writes Over There, which becomes the leading marching song among American troops. Many songs encourage Americans to enlist, such as What Kind of American Are You?, For Your Country and My Country, and Lets All Be Americans Now. The Passing Show of 1917 interpolates Goodbye Broadway, Hello France. Storyville in New Orleans is closed; many jazz musicians head to Chicago. The anti-German French composers called Les Six hold their first joint concert. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rules in Herberts (and ASCAPs) favor, leading to licensing requirements for all hotels, theaters, dance halls, cabarets, and restaurants. An uproar begins concerning Karl Mucks purported refusal to conduct the Boston Symphony in The Star-Spangled Banner, eventually leading to his arrest and incarceration. German composer Paul Hindemith is called up for service. English composer Edward Elgar writes The Spirit of England for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, and simulates the sound of aerial warfare in one of the movements. Ravel composes the piano work Le Tombeau de Couperin, with each movement dedicated to a victim of the war. The Victor Talking Machine Company withdraws I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. American composer Irving Berlin writes Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning while in training camp; he later incorporates it into a fund-raising revue Yip, Yip, Yaphank. A patriotic concert in Hungary features folksongs collected from soldiers by Bartk and Kodly. Canadian physician John McCrae dies in service; his most famous poem is In Flanders Fields. Women age thirty and older gain the right to vote in England. Stravinsky writes two pieces with ragtime associations: A Soldiers Tale and Ragtime for Eleven Instruments. The Cohan Revue of 1918 includes the song The Man Who Put the Germ in Germany. Debussys art song Christmas Carol of the Homeless Children is his last completed work. Hindemiths quartet of soldier-musicians is playing Debussys String Quartet when the radio announces news of Debussys passing. Sentimental songs such as Hello, Central, Give Me No Mans Land and The Rose of No Mans Land are published. American citizens are encouraged to make sacrifices to support the war by means of songs such as Keep Cool! The Countrys Saving Fuel (And I Had to Come Home in the Dark), Ill Do Without Meat and Ill Do Without Wheat But I Cant Do Without Love, and The Makins of the U.S.A. (A Plea in Song for Tobacco for the Boys Over There). A number of songs (of varying quality) recognize the courage displayed by soldiers of color, such as Theyll Be Mighty Proud in Dixie of Their Old Black Joe, When the Lord Makes a Record of a Heros Deeds, He Draws No Color Line, Youll Find Old Dixieland in France, and Indianola. James Reese Europe composes On Patrol in No Mans Land, with a remarkable battle foray simulation (his Hellfighters Band records the song the next year). Lt. James Reese Europe is stabbed to death by one of his percussionists. Commercial radio broadcasting begins in the United States. American women win the right to vote. Alban Berg finishes his Expressionistic opera Wozzeck. King Olivers Creole Jazz Band records Dippermouth Blues, using remnants of the New Orleans Jazz style. Darius Milhaud blends swing rhythm and classical styles in the chamber piece The Creation of the World.
1910
continued
1918
1919
1920
1920
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1920
continued
1924
George Gershwin combines jazz and classical styles to create Rhapsody in Blue. Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Fred Longshaw record Handys classic blues number, St. Louis Blues.
1925
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NOTES
1. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) 91. 2. The second bar of tonic can be replaced with four beats of IV, or the progression ii-V (two beats each). The fourth bar, with the addition of a minor seventh above the root of the chord, sometimes does double duty as a dominant 7th to the IV chord coming at the beginning of the next line. In bar ten, the harmony often stays on the dominant instead of moving down to IV. And, finally, the last tonic is often either replaced by a dominant 7th, or shortened to two beats, so a V7 can be added to help transition back into the next repetition of the entire progression. 3. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 4. Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 18671914 and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 254; also [Anonymous,] The Ideas That Made Radio Possible, Communications History. The Federal Communications Commission, 21 Nov. 2005, 16 Sept. 2012, <http:// transition.fcc.gov/omd/history/radio/ideas.html>. 5. Lee De Forest, Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950), 268. 6. Ventura Free Press [H. O. Davis, publisher], The Empire of the Air: The Story of the Exploitation of Radio for Private Profit, with a Plan for the Reorganization of Broadcasting (Ventura, CA: Ventura Free Press, 1932), 37. 7. The full text of the Act is available at [United States Government,] An Act To regulate radio communication, approved August 13, 1912, United States Early Radio History, Thomas H. White, 1996, 16 Sept. 2012, <http://earlyradiohistory.us/1912act.htm>. 8. Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century, 23640.
9. John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 398. 10. Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 64. 11. Max Arthur, When This Bloody War is Over: Soldiers Songs of the First World War (London: Piatkus, 2001), 37. 12. Lyn Macdonald, 19141918: Voices & Images of the Great War (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), 280. 13. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 95. 14. Helen Myers, Ethnomusicology: Pre-1945, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 8: 3756. 15. Roger Hickman, Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 5255. 16. Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 48 and 53. 17. Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 126. 18. Quoted by Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 18741904: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 13. 19. Jann Pasler, Impressionism, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 12: 90. 20. David Cox, Debussy Orchestral Music, BBC Music Guides (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 13. 21. William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century from Debussy through Stravinsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 25.
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22. Quoted in Victor Seroff, Debussy, Musician of France (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1956), 99. 23. Quoted by Richard Taruskin and Christopher Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music (College Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 838. 24. Kenneth MacGowan and Robert Edward Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), 31. 25. David Fanning, Expressionism, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 8: 473. 26. Fanning, Expressionism, 473. 27. Jonathan Dunsby, Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1. 28. Roger Cardinal, Primitivism, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner (New York: Groves Dictionaries, 1996), Vol. 25: 582. 29. Cardinal, Primitivism, 584. 30. Mark Evan Bonds, A History of Music in Western Culture, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010), 527. 31. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 140. 32. Taruskin and Gibbs, The Oxford History, 847. 33. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 141. 34. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 143. 35. Margaret Ingels, Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1952), 189. 36. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 143. 37. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 144. 38. Robert Fink, Rigoroso ( = 126): The Rite of Spring and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style, The Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 299. 39. [Anonymous,] List of Electoral Democracies, Electoral Democracies, World Forum on Democracy, n.d., 16 Sept. 2012, <http://www.fordemocracy.net/electoral.shtml>. 40. Paul Griffiths, Les Six, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 23: 460. 41. Taruskin and Gibbs, The Oxford History, 857.
42. Mark Larrad, Enrique Granados, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 10: 278. 43. Myers, Ethnomusicology, 374. 44. Benjamin Suchoff, Fusion of National Styles: Piano Literature, 190811, in The Bartk Companion, ed. by Malcolm Gillies (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 1256. 45. David Burge, Twentieth-Century Piano Music (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 74. 46. Quoted by Jnos Krpti, Piano Works of the War Years, in The Bartk Companion, ed. Malcolm Gillies (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 149. 47. David Yeomans, Bartk for Piano (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988), 7981; and David Yeomans, Background and Analysis of Bartks Romanian Christmas Carols for Piano (1915), in Bartk Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist, ed. by Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer, and Benjamin Suchoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 191. 48. Christopher Green, Cubism, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner (New York: Groves Dictionaries, 1996), Vol. 8: 239. 49. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony [Harmonielehre 1911], trans. by Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 411422. 50. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 422. 51. Anton Webern, The Path to New Music, ed. by Willi Reich, transl. by Leo Black (Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, 1963), 51. 52. Arnold Schoenberg, Preface to Sechs Bagatellen fr Streichquartett, Op. 9, by Anton Webern (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1924), 2. 53. Brian Rust, comp., Gramophone Records of the First World War: An HMV Catalogue 19141918 (Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles, [1974]), 811. 54. Leslie Shepard, New Introduction to Singing Soldiers by John J. Niles (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1927; Detroit: Singing Tree Press, [1968]), [ixx]. 55. Alyson McLamore, Musical Theater: An Appreciation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 323. 56. McLamore, Musical Theater, 17. 57. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1980), 58.
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58. Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), 4. 59. McLamore, Musical Theater, 456. 60. Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 323. 61. Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books [Robert M. MacGregor], 1950), 64. 62. Raoul F. Camus, Band: Mixed wind bands, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 2: 636. 63. Arthur, When This Bloody War, xvii-xviii. 64. Richard Crawford, Americas Musical Life: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 465. 65. US Code, Title 36 Chapter 10 188; see [United States Government,] United States Code, United States Code, 16 Sept. 2012, <http://www. usflag.org/us.code36.html>. 66. J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2623. 67. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 28990. 68. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 307. 69. Sir Thomas Beecham, A Mingled Chime: An Autobiography (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1943), 1389. 70. Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890 1920 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), 2425. 71. Vaticans Ban on Tango, The New York Times, November 21, 1913. 72. Frederick G. Vogel, World War I Songs: A History and Dictionary of Popular American Patriotic Tunes, with Over 300 Complete Lyrics (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995), 56. 73. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 152. 74. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 153. 75. Paul Oliver, Blues, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 3: 730. 76. Frank Tirro, Jazz: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 87. 77. Tirro, Jazz: A History, 5661. 78. Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 17. 79. Michael J. Budds, American Women in Blues and Jazz, in Women & Music: A History, 2nd
ed, ed. by Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 467. 80. Jean Ferris, Americas Musical Landscape, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 1556. 81. Tirro, Jazz: A History, 89. 82. Martin Williams, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, Digitally Remastered Edition (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1997), 36. 83. Tirro, Jazz: A History, 118. 84. Fred D. Baldwin, No Sex, Please, Were American, June 26, 2009, 1 Sept. 2012, <http://www.thehistorychannelclub.com/ articles/articletype/articleview/articleid/72/ no-sex-please-were-american>. 85. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1945. 86. Jasen and Jones, Black Bottom Stomp, 195. 87. James Dapogny, Louis Armstrong, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 2: 32. 88. Jasen and Jones, Black Bottom Stomp, 197. 89. Tirro, Jazz: A History, 85. 90. W. MacQueen-Pope and D. L. Murray, Fortunes Favourite: The Life and Times of Franz Lehr (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 219. 91. George M. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There: The True Story of a Troupers Life from the Cradle to the Closed Shop (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 1845. 92. McLamore, Musical Theater, 63. 93. Quoted by David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and Their Times (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988), 23. 94. Thomas L. Riis, ed., The Music and Scripts of In Dahomey, Recent Researches in American Music, Vol. 25, Music in the United States, Vol. 5 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1996), 188. 95. Les Cleveland, Singing Warriors: Popular Songs in Wartime, Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 3 (Winter 1994): 160. 96. Frank E. Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1977), Vol. II, 724. 97. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 255. 98. McLamore, Musical Theater, 66. 99. Vogel, World War I Songs, 45.
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100. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 268. 101. Deena Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (New York: Plume / Penguin Books, 1993), 256. 102. McLamore, Musical Theater, 59. 103. Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, and Tim Wiles, Baseballs Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game (New York: Hal Leonard, 2008), 16. 104. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 267. 105. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 389. 106. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 69 and 73. 107. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 92. 108. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 10. 109. Strasberg, Baseballs Greatest Hit, 1256. 110. [Anonymous,] Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Performing Arts Encyclopedia, The Library of Congress, 11 March 2008, 16 Sept. 2012, <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib. ihas.200153239/default.html>. 111. Hickman, Reel Music, 56. 112. Hickman, Reel Music, 59. 113. Hickman, Reel Music, 57. 114. Hickman, Reel Music, 69. 115. Hickman, Reel Music, 76. 116. Hickman, Reel Music, 78. 117. Tirro, Jazz: A History, 87. 118. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 170. 119. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 171. 120. Barbara L. Kelly, Maurice Ravel, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 20: 866. 121. Hans Moldenhauer and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 20910. 122. Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 210. 123. Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 21219. 124. Malcolm Gillies, Bla Bartk, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 2: 795. 125. Stephen Banfield, George Butterworth, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 4: 690.
126. Hugh Ottoway and Alain Frogley, Ralph Vaughan Williams, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 26: 347. 127. Ottoway and Frogley, Ralph Vaughan Williams, 346. 128. Colin Matthews, Gustav Holst, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 11: 648. 129. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 264. 130. Annagret Fauser, Lili Boulanger, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 4: 95. 131. Adrienne Fried Block, Women in American Music, 18001918, in Women & Music: A History, 2nd ed., ed. by Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 208. 132. Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 3: 316. 133. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 2201. 134. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 220. 135. Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 150163. 136. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 219. 137. Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 145. 138. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 298. 139. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 221. 140. Antony Beaumont, transl. and ed., Ferruccio Busoni: Selected Letters (London: Columbia University Press, 1987), 421422. 141. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 144. 142. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 86. 143. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 170. 144. Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 187. 145. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 298. 146. Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Address, 7 Dec. 1915, The American Presidency Project, Gerhard Peters, 16 Sept. 2012, <http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29556>.
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147. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 3003. 148. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 166. 149. Giselher Schubert, Paul Hindemith, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 11: 524. 150. Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton, Christmas Truce (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984), 56. 151. Brown, Christmas Truce, xii. 152. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 667. 153. Macdonald, 19141918, 117. 154. Macdonald, 19141918, 117. 155. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 87. 156. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 88. 157. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 221. 158. The Daily Telegraph, King Alberts Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women Throughout the World ([London]: Hodder and Stoughton, [1915]). 159. Edith Wharton, ed., The Book of the Homeless [Le livre des sans-foyer] (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1916), 49. 160. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 464. 161. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 91. 162. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 53. 163. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 188190. 164. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 102. 165. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 173. 166. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 264. 167. Macdonald, 19141918, 13. 168. Quoted by Regina M. Sweeney, Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 173. 169. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 128. 170. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 54. 171. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 17. 172. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 27. 173. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 75. 174. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 27. 175. Vogel, World War I Songs, 28. 176. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 74. 177. John Brophy and Eric Partridge, The Long Trail: What the British Soldier Sang and Said
in The Great War of 191418 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965), 213. 178. Macdonald, 19141918, 31112. 179. Macdonald, 19141918, 199. 180. Macdonald, 19141918, 200. 181. Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 82. 182. Translated from Nicole and Alain Lacombe, Les chants de bataille: La chanson patriotique de 1900 1918 (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1992), 177. 183. John J. Niles, Singing Soldiers (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968; reprint of New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1927), [xi-xii]. 184. Niles, Singing Soldiers, 132135. 185. Vogel, World War I Songs, 59. 186. Vogel, World War I Songs, 17. 187. Vogel, World War I Songs, 111. 188. Arthur, When This Bloody War, xxx. 189. Macdonald, 19141918, 22. 190. Macdonald, 19141918, 56. 191. Charles Rearick, Madelon and the Menin War and Memory, French Historical Studies 17 (Autumn 1992), 1001. 192. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 86. 193. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 76. 194. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 77. 195. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 68. 196. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 69. 197. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 208. 198. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 208. 199. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 329. 200. Quoted in Haste, Keep the Home Fires, [vi]. 201. Will Dillon, Dont Take My Darling Boy Away (New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1915), [1]. 202. Irving Berlin, Stay Down Here Where You Belong (New York: Waterson, Berlin and Snyder Co., 1914), [1]. 203. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 249. 204. [Anonymous,] Brooklyn Guardsmen and School Head Fight Over Anti-War Ditty, New York Tribune (Friday, May 7, 1915), 9. 205. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 249. 206. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 251.
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207. Chas McCarron and Lew Brown, What Kind of American Are You? (New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1917), [1]. 208. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 83. 209. Macdonald, 19141918, 6. 210. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 191. 211. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 228. 212. Ernest Newman, The Artist and the People, The Musical Times 55 (October 1, 1914), 605607. 213. Vogel, World War I Songs, 340. 214. Vogel, World War I Songs, 63. 215. Brown, Christmas Truce, 6. 216. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 268. 217. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia, 978. 218. Peter Jelavich, German Culture in the Great War, in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 19141918, ed. by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, Vol. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 334. 219. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 188. 220. Sweeney, Singing Our Way, 1889. 221. Claire Hirschfield, Musical Performance in Wartime: 19141918, The Music Review 53, no. 4 (1992), 299. 222. Hirschfield, Musical Performance in Wartime, 300. 223. Arthur, When This Bloody War, xxviiixxix. 224. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 259.
225. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 259. 226. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 259. 227. David Ewen, Complete Book of the American Musical Theater (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1958), 54. 228. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 123. 229. M. Paul Holsinger, War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 208. 230. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 259. 231. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 124. 232. Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 115. 233. Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 175. 234. Vogel, World War I Songs, 77. 235. Reid Badger, James Reese Europe, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 8: 421. 236. Badger, A Life in Ragtime, 142. 237. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 314. 238. Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 3145. 239. Badger, A Life in Ragtime, 187. 240. Arthur, When This Bloody War, 51. 241. Badger, A Life in Ragtime, 304, note 39. 242. Badger, A Life in Ragtime, 218.
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13USADMusicResourceGuide ED

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to n o i t c u d o r sic u M y r An Int u t n h- Ce t e i t n e w T Early

RHYTHMIC NOTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 TIME SIGNATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Basic Elements of Music Theory .. . . . . . . .

SIMPLE AND COMPOUND METER . . . . . . . . . . . 19

MIXED AND IRREGULAR METER . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 SYNCOPATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 POLYRHYTHM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 RHYTHM: SUMMARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Sound and Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

The Physics of Musical Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Pitch, Rhythm, and Harmony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Pitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 INTERNATIONAL INTEREST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Prludes, Book I, No. 2 Voiles (1909) Claude Debussy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Expressionism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, No. 8 Nacht (1912) Arnold Schoenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Classical Music and Modernism .. . . . . . . . . 38

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

NEW FOCUS ON TIMBRE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

LISTENING COMPANION LISTENING EXAMPLE 8:

Section II Summary: Classical Music and Modernism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 SECTION III:

Dippermouth Blues (1923) Joe King Oliver .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music. . . . . . . . . . 71

Bands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Gospel.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Politicized Music .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Many New Styles and Genres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Ragtime .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Tin Pan Alley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Maple Leaf Rag (1899) Scott Joplin .. . . . . . . 83

St. Louis Blues (1914) W.C. Handy. . . . . . . . . 90 Jazz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Section III Summary: Early Twentieth-Century Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 SECTION IV:

Musical Responses to The Great War. . . . . . . . . 109

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

PACIFISMTHE PARENTS SPEAK. . . . . . . . . . . 123

Its a Long, Long Way to Tipperary (1912) Jack Judge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Music to Persuade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

BASIC ELEMENTS OF MUSIC THEORY

Sound and Music Definitions

The Physics of Musical Sound

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

The most common Western orchestral instruments.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Pitch, Rhythm, and Harmony

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Wave and harmonics.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Diagram of overtone series on a staff and a keyboard.

EQUAL TEMPERAMENT: GENERATING THE TWELVE PITCHES BY DIVIDING THE OCTAVE

Keyboard with all chromatic pitches labeled.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

The Most Common Intervals

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Diagram of keyboard with the C scale degrees labeled 1, 2, 3, etc.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Diagram of an A major scale.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Minor scales: natural, harmonic, and melodic.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Relative major and minor. C natural (left) and E major (right).

Common tempo markings

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

St. Louis Blues rhythm.

Happy Birthdayfour measures with words over beat numbers.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

ACADEMIC DECATHLON MUSIC RESOURCE GUIDE

Swing example: Notated (left); performed (right).

ragtime, as heard in Maple Leaf Rag (LISTENING E XAMPLE 6).