Among the defining features of African American music are the mix of cultural influences from African to European, the presence of both syncopation and improvisation, and the pull between city and country, spiritual and secular. These characteristics eventually led black Americans to create what is widely believed to be America's greatest cultural achievement: jazz.
When Africans first arrived in America in 1619, they brought with them only memories.
Among those memories, the drumming, singing, and dancing of their West African homes. Although music was often forbidden to the slaves, they sometimes found ways of using it to communicate, as well as to commemorate occasions, especially deaths. Work songs and sorrow songs, or spirituals, were the first music to grow out of the African experience in America.
These songs were often performed a cappella; when instruments were used, they were largely fiddles and banjos.
Some slave owners felt that blacks should be Christianized, though this was far from universal, as many slaveholders felt that slaves should not be treated as humans or beings with souls. However, in New England in the late seventeenth century, blacks often did attend church services and learn church songs.
In the South, those slaves who were sent to church services were taught to obey their masters; good behavior would result in heavenly rewards. As life on earth was clearly without hope, many slaves found solace in this message and in the Christian hymns that accompanied it. At the same time, they built their own repertory of songs, both religious and secular.
Often the songs combined a mix of influences, including the Middle Eastern nuances of West African music, the Spanish accent in Creole music, and the anguish drawn from everyday experience. Black music has always been appreciated; there are many reports of slave entertainment on plantations and of street vendors who made up original songs to hawk their wares. In the 1820s white performers began to capitalize on the accomplishments of black performers by using their songs in minstrel shows.
Whites—and later blacks as well—performed in black face, using burnt cork to create a parody of an African. The minstrels altered their songs from the original African American versions to suit the taste of whites, a tradition that endured well into the twentieth century when white artists made covers of songs by African Americans. Between 1850 and 1870, minstrel shows reached the peak of their popularity.
The two main characters, often called "Jim Crow" and "Zip Coon," represented country and city dwellers, respectively. Minstrelsy continued its popularity long after the Civil War, until the early twentieth century.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the two major precursors of jazz came into popularity: ragtime and blues.
Scott Joplin was the premier composer of rag-time, a form that reflected the taste of the newly formed black bourgeois, who preferred pianos over banjos and fiddles. Ragtime took its name from the practice of "ragging" tunes; the left hand of the pianist added the syncopation that was provided in earlier music by foot stomping. At about the same time, American blacks were innovating the blues.
City versus country is again a factor in blues music; often a third category, "classic" blues, is used. While the best-known ragtime tunes are instrumental, memorable blues songs are meant to be sung. Country blues is widely deemed an older form and derives from folk music.
It was originally accompanied by folk instruments including strings, crockery jugs, and harmonicas and sometimes had a sound near to that of spirituals. Urban blues tends to be more complex and played by a band with a rhythm section. Chicago is the capital of urban blues.
Classic blues has a woman singer, such as Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, in front. Both ragtime and blues were created by more musically sophisticated blacks who often knew how to write music and were knowingly fusing the music of their African roots with European-influenced composition. At this time, brass bands, boogie-woogie piano bars, and dance orchestras flourished throughout the country.
African American music was not recorded until the 1920s, though it did find many proponents at the close of the nineteenth century, including the Czech composer Antonín Dvor?ák.
The New Orleans brass bands developed Dixieland jazz, with trumpeter Louis Armstrong the first to stress on-the-spot innovations while playing.
At the same time, Kansas City jazz was developing under Count Basie and his orchestra, and, perhaps the greatest American jazz composer, Duke Ellington, was conducting his swing band on the East Coast. Billie Holliday influenced music by using blues and jazz touches in popular songs and by singing with white orchestras. By the 1950s Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie were making "bebop" jazz in New York City.
The 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of rhythm-and blues (R B), a combination of both jazz and blues. By the 1950s, some black artists (T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan, Bo Diddley) had become popular with mainstream audiences—but what often happened was that white performers made a sanitized cover version of a black artist's work and sold many more records. Still, R B stars such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry had a huge influence on the then-burgeoning rock and roll.
The 1950s also brought the popularity of doo-wop, a gospel-based vocal style that emphasized harmonizing.
Gospel was the basis for soul music, which began its development in the 1950s and peaked in popularity during the Black Power movement of the 1960s. In 1959 Ray Charles combined contemporary R B with the call and response of the church in "What'd I Say.
" Aretha Franklin also drew on her gospel roots, starting with 1967's "Respect." The 1960s brought the first multimillion-dollar black-owned recording company, Motown. Detroit producer Berry Gordy Jr.
introduced the world to such crossover groups as the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, and the Jackson Five, all of whom received massive airplay on top-40 radio stations. Michael Jack-son's 1982 album "Thriller" sold forty million copies and gave Jackson a spot as the first black artist on MTV.
Both Jackson and James Brown are known for their dancing.
Brown's version of soul was funk. He used African polyrhythms to sing 1969's "Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud" and in turn influenced other socially conscious groups, as well as disco in the 1970s and rap in the 1980s.
Funk, soul, and R B mix in rap, which grew out of the hip-hop movement.
Some early rappers such as The Last Poets, Grandmaster Funk, and Public Enemy commented on racial issues. At the same time, other rappers were largely interested in the entertainment value of break dancing and producing music that was nonmelodic and almost entirely dependent on syncopation. Gangster rap spawned another subculture as artists such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur ran into real life trouble with the law and sometimes, as with Shakur who was murdered in 1994, with other gangsters.
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Ogg, Alex, with David Upshal. The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap.
New York: Fromm, 2001.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History.
New York: Norton, 1971.
Stambler, Irwin. The Encyclopedia of Rock, Pop, and Soul.
Rev. ed. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1989.
White, Newman I. American Negro Folk-Songs.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928.
Bluegrass music is a form of country music that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s from a group known as the Blue Grass Boys headed by Grand Ole Opry star Bill Monroe, who came to be known as "the father of bluegrass.
" The music in its definitive form was first heard in NASHVILLE, Tennessee. Early bluegrass was distinctively flavored by APPALACHIA, where such groups as the Stanley Brothers and their Clinch Mountain Boys, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys performed on radio station WCYB in Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border. As elsewhere in country music, white performers predominated in professional settings, but the music took its inspiration from both white and black musicians.
Several characteristics define bluegrass style. A typical band consists of four to seven players and singers who use acoustic rather than electrical instruments. Early bluegrass musicians tuned their instruments a half note above standard, a practice still used by some groups today, and bluegrass generally uses high-pitched vocals and requires more than one voice to sing something other than harmony parts.
The guitar, mandolin, banjo, string bass, and fiddle play both melody and provide rhythm and background for vocal soloists. Through recordings, television, tours, and festivals, bluegrass performers have gained a national and even international constituency. An establishment consisting of several recording companies (Country, Rebel, Rounder, Sugar Hill, and others), clubs, and magazines, such as Bluegrass Unlimited, developed as the bluegrass festival movement spread in the 1960s.
In the 1970s performances departed from the traditional form with "new grass," using rock repertoire and techniques. The formation of the International Bluegrass Association in 1985 and the creation of the Americana Record chart in 1995 carved out radio time for late twentieth-century bluegrass musicians and expanded the music's popularity.
Cantwell, Robert.
Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Ewing, Tom, ed.
The Bill Monroe Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Rosenberg, Neil V.
Bluegrass: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
Classical music encompasses instrumental and vocal music written by trained composers, expressing cultivated artistic and intellectual values, as opposed to music of an essentially commercial nature (popular) or music that develops anonymously and is transmitted aurally (folk).
In the eighteenth century, classical music could be heard in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Williamsburg, Charleston, New Orleans, and elsewhere in the homes of talented amateur musicians (most notably Francis Hopkinson and Thomas Jefferson) and in occasional public and private concerts (beginning in the 1730s) performed by local or touring musicians. Nearly all of the art music heard during this period was that of European masters such as George Frideric Handel, Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, Luigi Boccherini, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Thomas Arne. A few Americans, including Hopkinson and immigrant professional musicians Alexander Reinagle, Rayner Taylor, James Hewitt, and Benjamin Carr, composed and published songs and instrumental music in the style of their European contemporaries.
German-speaking Moravian or Unitas Fratrum settlers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina had perhaps the most active musical communities of the period. A large part of their music was composed locally by European-trained members.
A movement to regularize psalm singing in New England Protestant meeting houses led to the formation of singing schools that fostered the development of musical skill in a wider population.
Groups of amateurs formed musical societies for the recreational singing of sacred music, including psalm settings by Boston composer William Billings. In the nineteenth century, hymn singing gradually replaced psalm singing in popularity. Massachusetts composer Lowell Mason, along with writing his own hymn melodies, adapted music from classical composers such as Handel and Mozart to fit hymn texts.
The nineteenth century produced new audiences, performing venues, and important musical organizations. The Boston Handel and Haydn Society (established 1815) promoted the performance of choral music. The Philharmonic Society, predecessor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, gave its first concert in 1842.
As early as the 1790s, operas were performed in New Orleans and Philadelphia. In New York City, opera was performed in theaters and at the Academy of Music (beginning in the 1850s). A concert circuit developed during the 1840s, introducing solo performers and musical troupes to cities and towns throughout America.
The most famous of these performers was the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, promoted by the greatest of all entertainment entrepreneurs of the century, Phineas T. Barnum. In 1853, New Orleans composer Louis Gottschalk returned from studies in Paris to pursue a successful career as a touring concert pianist, which provided him opportunities to perform his own music.
Early American performers and composers lacked the main sources of patronage that supported the European tradition of art music, such as the aristocracy and the Catholic church, and depended on entrepreneurs willing to market classical music to the public. In spite of efforts by musicians such as Philadelphia composer William Henry Fry in the 1850s to champion the cause of American music, orchestras and other performing groups felt that the financial risk remained too high to allow performances of unknown American pieces in place of proven European masterworks. Fry further noted that only composers with independent means could afford to devote time and resources to writing music.
Following the Civil War, however, the idea of supporting music as an artistic and educational endeavor became popular, and a stable, professional musical culture finally took root in America. Subsidies supported resident orchestras and opera companies, helping to pay for music halls and touring expenses. Orchestras were established in St.
Louis (1880), Boston (1881), Chicago (1891), and Cincinnati (1895). The New York Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1883. In 1870 a landmark event occurred when Harvard College hired composer John Knowles Paine as assistant professor of music.
Later, Horatio Parker joined the faculty at Yale (1894), Edward MacDowell came to Columbia (1896), and George Whitefield Chadwick became the director of the New England Conservatory (1897). Since then, such teaching positions have provided financial security for many composers and performers.
An important group of American composers active at the end of the nineteenth century—including Paine, Parker, and Chadwick, sometimes labeled the "New England School" or the "Boston Classicists"—were related by background, interest, and age: each had studied in Germany, lived in Boston where their works were frequently performed, interacted in the same social circles, and composed in a primarily German Romantic style.
New York composer MacDowell also spent time in Boston but was more widely recognized and also advocated a kind of musical nationalism. He incorporated American landscapes and indigenous music into his style, as in the Woodland Sketches (1896) and his Indian Suite (1896), which includes several Native American melodies. At the end of the century the German influence began to fade.
The works of two early twentieth-century composers, Charles Martin Loeffler and Charles Tomlinson Griffes, instead display primarily French impressionist and Russian influences.
American composers produced a wealth of music over the course of the twentieth century. Some sought to innovate; others enriched European tradition.
Most taught at universities or such conservatories as Juilliard (established 1905), the Eastman School of Music (1921), and the New England Conservatory (1867). The most unique of American composers at the turn of the century was Charles Ives, who prospered as the founder of an insurance firm and made musical composition his avocation. His orchestral and chamber works, choral music, and songs often predate similar experiments by European composers, employing innovative techniques such as polytonal effects, multilayered structures, tone clusters, microtones, and free, unmetrical rhythms.
Ives often quotes American hymn and song tunes, and his descriptive pieces for orchestra are closely related to the American scene, including his Three Places in New England and The Housatonic at Stockbridge (which quotes the hymn tune "Dorrnance").
In the period following World War I, a group of composers arose who, although largely trained in the European tradition, were distinctly American in outlook: Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitz-stein, and Roger Sessions. Most studied with the French teacher Nadia Boulanger, who believed a non-European perspective would produce innovative musical ideas.
Copland, in particular, was an advocate of American music and at times fused jazz and folk elements into his compositions to create an audibly American style. Some African American composers, such as William Grant Still in his Afro American Symphony (1930), also practiced greater compositional diversity in an effort to express their heritage. Important symphonists in the traditional vein include Howard Hanson, Samuel Barber, Walter Piston, and William Schumann.
The most notable aspect of music in the twentieth century was an unparalleled diversity of musical styles resulting from the breakdown of the traditional tonal system and the disintegration of the idea of a universal musical language. Some composers, such as Milton Babbit, extended the serial techniques of Arnold Schoenbergand Anton Webern's "Viennese School." But many (including Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Edgar Varèse), inspired by Ives, largely abandoned traditional formal or technical practices and experimented with sound and other musical materials.
John Cage continued this exploration with a technique termed "indeterminacy" that intentionally included some degree of chance in composition or performance. Others made notational innovations and sought out new instrumental resources, such as percussion (George Crumb), introduced rhythmic and textural innovations (Elliott Carter), and investigated the sounds of language (Babbitt). In the 1960s a group of composers, including Philip Glass and Steve Reich, attempted to bring music back to its most basic elements by working with drastically reduced means—a practice known as "minimalism.
" Experimentation reached its climax in the 1960s, but in the 1970s musicians including David Del Tredici and George Rochberg began to reintroduce tonality into their music. Electronic and synthesizer music have also been explored by Varèse, Cage, Babbitt, Morton Subotnick, and others.
During earlier periods in America when concerts were rare, particularly for people outside of cosmopolitan areas, most classical music was heard in the home, primarily in the performance of songs and piano pieces.
After the Civil War, classical music found larger audiences because of the growing numbers of American symphony orchestras—1,400 by the late twentieth century. New halls and cultural centers opened in New York, Washington, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and other cities; older halls, including former movie theaters, were renovated and restored in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Oakland, and St. Louis.
Enrollment in conservatories and music schools and attendance at a growing number of summer music festivals increased. Many orchestras expanded their seasons, encouraged new music through composer-in-residence programs, and showed a remarkable ability to innovate in programming and format. Radio and television further disseminated music, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts beginning in 1940 and such public television series as "Great Performances" and "Live from Lincoln Center.
" Recordings have allowed unprecedented variety in musical consumption, allowing classical works, both new and old, by Americans and others, to be heard by anyone. Even in competition with the many other pursuits possible today, classical music remains a vital part of the musical culture of the United States.
Chase, Gilbert.
America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. 3rd. rev.
ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Crawford, Richard.
The American Musical Landscape: The Business of Musicianship from Billings to Gershwin. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000.
———. America's Musical Life: A History. New York: W.
W. Norton, 2001.
Levin, Monroe.
Clues to American Music. Washington, D.C.
: Starrhill Press, 1992.
Sadie, Stanley, and H. Wiley Hitchcock, eds.
The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. 4 vols. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986.
Country and western music often referred to just as country music, eludes precise definition because of its many sources and varieties. It can best be understood as a style of popular music that originated in the folk culture of the rural south, a culture of European and African origin. Fiddlers, banjo players, string bands, balladeers, and gospel singers drew upon existing music to develop materials suitable for performance at family and community events.
As southerners migrated to northern cities in the early twentieth century, their music went with them; and, beginning in the 1920s, radio and recordings did much to popularize and diversify this music. In 1934, when a radio hillbilly singer from Texas named Orvon Gene Autry went to Hollywood, the era of the great cowboy singer in the movies began. The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, beginning in the 1940s, made that city a mecca for country music fans, many of whom listened religiously to its performances on the radio.
The popularity of rock and roll through the revolution in popular music begun by Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s posed a challenge to country music, but the development of a new style known as country pop or the Nashville Sound countered it in part. By the 1990s country and western music had an international following.
Ching, Barbara.
Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Malone, Bill C.
Country Music, U.S.A.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
———. Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
By the early eighteenth century, the English colonies on the eastern seaboard stretched from Maine to Georgia. They were replicas of English culture in terms of language, religion, social institutions, and customs, including music.
While the population at this time included many Native Americans and newly arrived Africans, the colonists seemed little influenced by their cultures. The middle colonies were the most ethnically diverse, attracting people from all over Europe, including Germany, Sweden, France, and Holland. Nevertheless, the New England Puritans had considerable influence in shaping both the American ethos and American music.
While the Puritans considered secular music frivolous and attempted to limit its place in society, they considered the singing of psalms the highest form of spiritual expression.
The music of the colonists was based on British and other European genres, which included sacred music of the Protestant Church, classical music, and popular music, including ballads, madrigals, theater songs, dance music, and broadsides. While the musical life of each colonist depended on socio-economic factors, religious beliefs, and geographical location, there was much crossover of musical traditions.
The same repertories passed through all strata of society, although performed differently according to context. The performance of religious music, especially in New England, gave rise to the first music schools in America and the first truly American composers.
The a cappella singing of vernacular translations of the psalms by a whole congregation was common in Protestant England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Both Puritans and Anglicans continued this tradition in the American colonies. Some of the earliest books in the Colonies were Psalters, which include texts of the Psalms. The Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 brought with them the Book of Psalms, published in Holland by Henry Ainsworth in 1612.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, New England church leaders were dissatisfied with the state of hymn singing among their congregations. Many of the colonists did not read music, which led them to rely on the practice of "lining out," a call and response form originating in England, whereby the music was taught orally. While Psalters were readily available, including the popular Bay Psalm Book first published in America in 1642, most included text without musical notation.
Therefore, new versions of the musical settings began to emerge through the process of oral tradition. Leaders in the church deplored this lack of standardization and the low level of musical literacy.
By the mid-eighteenth century, singing schools were established in New England.
Boston became the first center for singing schools in the 1720s, and the practice gradually spread. The teachers were mostly itinerant singing masters who were the first professional musicians in New England. They typically spent several weeks in a community teaching participants to read music and to learn psalm tunes.
The classes were designed as both a religious and a secular activity, primarily for teenagers and young adults. Participants learned the art of singing within the church setting, but hymn singing also took place outside the church—in homes, in taverns, and at parties. It became a social pastime and a form of amateur entertainment.
As the general level of singing improved, singing provided a new expression of community.
The singing schools helped to raise the level of music literacy, expanded the repertoire, increased the demand for new books, and encouraged American composers to create new music. One of the most influential New England composers of this period was the musician, song-writer, and singing master William Billings (1746–1800), who published numerous collections of religious music, including the New England Psalm Singer (1770) and The Singing Master's Assistant (1778).
In the South, singing schools were maintained well into the nineteenth century. The schools took two paths of development. One was the regular singing of hymns and psalms, which led to the formation of choirs and choral societies, while the other was a more rural, folk-oriented style.
This form of communal singing became part of the outdoor, religious camp meetings of the early nineteenth century, a period known as the "Great Awakening."
Most secular music performed in the colonies also originated in England. Until after the Revolution, musicians, music, instruments, and music books were imported, and this had a tremendous impact on home entertainment and what was performed on concert stages.
While theater performances were restricted for religious reasons, especially in the North, by the 1730s, almost all American cities held public concerts. Charleston, South Carolina, was one of the most musical cities in the colonies before the Revolution, and the oldest musical society in North America, the St. Cecilia Society, was founded there in 1762.
As cities grew and became more prosperous, music making grew closer to its counterpart in England, where classical music, plays, ballad operas, and dancing were extremely popular. The music there became more like that in England, where the rage was classical music, plays, ballad operas, and dancing. By the 1750s and 1760s, there were theater performances in most major cities.
One of the most popular types of entertainment throughout the colonies was country-dancing, another import from England. Although thought to have originated with rural folk, by the sixteenth century country-dances had been appropriated by the upper classes and moved into a ballroom setting. Both men and women performed these figure dances in line, square, and circle formations.
By the eighteenth century, lines of men and women faced each other in the most popular form, the "longways for as many as will" country-dance.
Country-dancing took place regularly at balls, assemblies, private parties, and taverns in the colonies and provided entertainment for all social classes, though urban dance events for the elite were usually held in elegant ballrooms. As in England, dancing was regarded as a necessary social skill for social advancement.
Itinerant dancing masters taught both dancing and etiquette throughout the colonies. John Griffiths, a dancing master who traveled and taught between Boston and New York in the 1780s and 1790s, published the first collection of country-dances in America, A Collection of Figures of the Newest and Most Fashionable Country-Dances (1786).
The tunes associated with the country-dance came from a variety of sources.
While some tunes were part of the common repertory handed down by oral tradition in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, others were new. They were found not only in country-dance books, but also on broadsides, in collections of theater, instrumental, and vocal music, and in tutors for various instruments. Country-dances were often performed at the end of theater productions, and dancing masters borrowed popular tunes and songs from the stage to create and songs from the stage to create new dances.
Some of the country-dance tunes from this period, such as "Fisher's Hornpipe," "Irish Wash Woman," and "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning" are still found in the repertories of traditional dance musicians today.
After the Revolution, there was an increase in musical activity, and a new demand for instruments, instruction tutors, and printed copies of pieces performed on stage and in concert halls.
American printing also increased, especially in the form of sheet music. Movable type became more common in the 1780s and marked the rise of specialty publishing. While the printing of Psalm tune anthologies burgeoned in the 1760s and 1770s, major anthologies of secular instrumental music did not appear until the 1780s.
The first American publishers of secular music were established in Philadelphia, including Benjamin Carr (1768–1831), who arrived from England in 1791 and quickly became known as a singer in ballad operas, as well as a composer, arranger, and publisher. Carr and his son imported much of their music from Europe, but also published music by local musicians, including the first edition of the patriotic song, "Hail Columbia" (1798), with music by Philip Phile and lyrics by John Hopkinson.
New York and Boston also became important publishing centers.
The publishing houses in these cities had close ties with the theaters, and their early catalogues consisted largely of theater songs. By 1840, publishing as a whole was concentrated in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Major publishers, such as the Oliver Ditson Company of Boston, had near monopolies on the new music industry, including ownership of retail stores, publishing, distribution of music and musical supplies, and the manufacture of musical instruments.
The tremendous social and regional diversity of nineteenth-century America led to more clear-cut distinctions between traditional, popular, and classical music. For example, the Irish and Scottish immigrants who settled in the Appalachian Mountains during the late eighteenth century continued to pass down a distinct repertory of old ballads and tunes through oral tradition well into the twentieth century, partly because of their geographical isolation. Music on the western frontier was by necessity different from urban centers on the Eastern seaboard.
The first Italian opera performances, such as the 1818 Philadelphia premier of Rossini's Barber of Seville, were restricted to the major cities, where new musical organizations and patrons made such productions possible.
The period before the Civil War saw both the growth of classical music performance and the creation of the first orchestras (The Philharmonic Society of New York was the first, in 1842) and the rise of popular entertainment genres. Military and civic bands proliferated throughout the country and played for all kinds of ceremonial events.
With the introduction of keyed brass instruments in the 1830s, all-brass ensembles soon replaced the Revolutionary-era ensembles of clarinets, flutes, bassoons, trumpets, and drums. Band repertories included military, patriotic, and popular pieces of the day.
The nineteenth century also saw the rise of social dance ensembles called quadrille bands.
The quadrille, a social dance performed in sets of four couples in square formation, was exported from France to England in 1815, and soon after to America. By the mid-nineteenth century, the quadrille and variant forms—such as the Lancers and the Polka Quadrille—were extremely popular in both urban and rural settings. A large body of music repertory was published for the typical ensemble of first violin, second violin, clarinet, two coronets, bass, flute, viola, cello, trombone, and piano.
Popular songs were also an important part of theater productions, concerts, and home entertainment. The first songs published in America in the 1780s were in the form of sheet music and arranged for solo voice and piano. Irish and Scottish songs were popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the growing consumer market was flooded by arrangements of new songs set to traditional airs by Irishmen Thomas Moore (1779–1852) and Samuel Lover (1797–1868).
As the century progressed, the minstrel song emerged as one of the first distinctly American genres. Created by white Americans in blackface for the entertainment of other white people, minstrel songs caricatured slave life on the plantation, creating and maintaining grotesque stereotypes of African American customs and behavior. While the first performers in the 1820s were solo acts, by the 1840s, blackface performers toured in troupes.
The most famous of these groups was Christy's Minstrels, who first performed in New York in 1846. Like other groups of the period, all of their music was from the Anglo-American tradition. By the 1850s, black performers formed minstrel troupes, and many groups were touring by the 1870s.
The most famous songwriter to emerge from this period was Stephen Foster (1826–1864), whose "Oh Susanna" (1848), "Old Folks at Home" (1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), and "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" (1854) are considered classics. Foster was influenced by both the lyrical Anglo-Irish song repertory and the minstrel song tradition. His songs range from nostalgic, sentimental songs about love and loss to typical minstrel songs in dialect.
His songs in the early 1850s were more in the mold of earlier songwriters such as Thomas Moore, and it was these works that influenced a whole generation of songwriters after the Civil War.
Chase, Gilbert. America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present.
3d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Crawford, Richard.
The American Musical Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Davis, Ronald L.
A History of Music in American Life: The Formative Years, 1620–1865. Huntington, N.Y.
: Krieger, 1982.
Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World.
New York: Norton, 1983.
Hast, Dorothea. Music, Dance, and Community: Contra Dance in New England.
Doctoral dissertation, Wesleyan University, 1994.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley.
Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. Upper Saddle River, N.J.
: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Krummel, D. W.
"Publishing and Printing of Music." In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Edited by H.
Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986.
MacPherson, William A.
The Music of the English Country Dance 1651–1728. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1984.
Van Cleef, Joy, and Kate Keller.
"Selected American Country Dances and Their English Sources." In Music in Colonial Massachusetts 1630–1830: Music in Public Places. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980.
The American folk music revival began in the early twentieth century with collectors and folklorists who sought to preserve regional American music traditions, and composers and performers who wanted to bring these traditions into the concert hall. From the late 1920s until World War II, the work of folklorists and performers took two paths: the first was to promote and encourage rural musicians who were considered tradition bearers, such as Leadbelly and Molly Jackson, and the second was to use music to raise political consciousness, as in the performances of such artists as Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers. Between 1928 and 1934, four large folk festivals were organized in the rural South in an effort to bring performers out of isolation and to create new audiences.
Interest in regional American music was also fueled by the creation of numerous government-sponsored folklore projects of the Works Progress Administration. During this same period, folk music became ideologically associated with protest music, especially among left-wing urbanites. Drawing on both the music of earlier protest movements and newly composed repertory, performers such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Cisco Huston, Josh White, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, and Lee Hays performed at union rallies, hootenannies, and for a variety of social causes throughout the 1940s.
The movement gained momentum after World War II and adopted three routes for its development: the cultivation of a variety of world folk musics and dances, a rediscovery and appreciation of rural American music, and the growth of new urban styles devoted to political issues and social commentary. Publications and organizations such as The People's Song Book (1948 and 1956) and Lift Every Voice (1953) disseminated political music through print media, recordings, and performances. In the 1950s, the commercial success of the Weavers, Harry Belafonte, and the Kingston Trio ushered in a new relationship between folk music and the mass media.
The Weavers' rendition of "Goodnight Irene" is estimated to have sold over four million records in 1952.
At the peak of the revival in the 1960s, civil rights activism, resistance to the Vietnam War, and a youth subculture gave rise to new and mixed folk genres that entered into the mainstream. The increased visibility of acoustic folk music among college youth and others created a boom in concerts, folk festivals, recordings, broadcasts, instrument sales, and informal music making.
Many college-educated musicians were drawn into the serious study and recreation of folk styles, including old time, bluegrass, blues, New England contra dance, and Cape Breton fiddling. Although folk music was perceived as "people's music," in the 1960s it was in many ways no less a commercial genre than country music and rock and roll. The major figures associated with this period include Pete Seeger; Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; and Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, Mass.
: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Denisoff, R. Serge.
Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Hast, Dorothea.
Music, Dance, and Community: Contra Dance in New England. Ph.D.
diss., Wesleyan University, 1994.
Slobin, Mark.
"Fiddler Off the Roof: Klezmer Music as an Ethnic Musical Style." In The Jews of North America. Edited by Moses Rischin.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.
Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Religion.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Gospel hymns originated within the Protestant evangelical church in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, popularized through the revival meetings conducted by Dwight L. Moody and his musical partner Ira D.
Sand-key. The popularity of expressing one's religious experience through song convinced Sandkey to create a publication designed to bring the gospel hymn to a wider audience. With business partner Phillip P.
Bliss, in 1875 Sankey published Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs. The hymns were especially successful in the South, where songs like "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" demonstrated both the religious and commercial appeal of gospel music. For the next four decades, the classic southern gospel quartet—four men and a piano—dominated revival and secular gospel singing.
Thomas Dorsey, an African American from Chicago, challenged that traditional arrangement when he introduced the sounds of ragtime and the blues to accompany the religious text of the hymn. The founder and creative force behind the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Dorsey composed some 500 hymns, including the hit "Move On Up a Little Higher," performed by Mahalia Jackson in 1947. Gospel music continued to attract a larger audience over the next two decades, including the popularity of James Cleveland's traditional-sounding Gospel Choir tour and Edwin Hawkins's rhythm and blues "Oh Happy Day," which reached number one on Billboard's Top Fifty Chart in 1969.
Between 1970 and 2000, gospel music, sometimes referred to as "praise music" or simply "Christian music" had become a billion-dollar industry.
Blackwell, Lois S. The Wings of the Dove: The Story of Gospel Music in America.
Norfolk, Va.: Donning Press, 1978.
Harris, Michael W.
The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Through the twentieth century and in earlier times, music has been a major marker of ethnicity and nationality and an indispensable component of the ceremonial, spiritual, and social life of Native American cultures.
Ubiquitous in the daily cycle of tribal activity and in the year and life cycles of typical societies, music became in the twentieth century a significant part of the arsenal of cultural survival and revival, and has made a distinctive contribution to mainstream American popular and concert music. The importance of music is illustrated by its prominent appearance in virtually every event in which Native Americans mark or celebrate their cultural traditions.
Comparative study suggests that in distant, prehistoric times, virtually all ceremonies included music and dance; that music was thought to possess great spiritual and medicinal powers; that the creation of music was seen as the result of contact with the supernatural; that songs played a major role in recreational activities such as intra and inter-tribal games; and that distinctions were made between songs available to everyone and songs available only to particular groups of shamans or priests, or that were owned by clans, families, or individuals.
Songs were transmitted through aural tradition and learned from hearing, but nevertheless maintained consistency. Depending on aesthetic and cultural values, some societies permitted individual singers to develop personal variants of songs, while others prohibited and punished mistakes and creative departures. With significant exceptions—and in contrast to South America—men played a quantitatively greater role in musical life than women.
While varying enormously, the words of songs might consist of brief spiritual statements ("This grass, it is powerful"), accounts of visions ("Bird is here; it makes the sky yellow"), and the hopes of a team in a gambling game ("It is hidden in one of these"); they might also be extended complex poems narrating history and myth.
Each tribe had its own complement of instruments, but virtually all had various kinds of drums, rattles, and other percussion and many used flutes of various sorts and whistles. The vast preponderance of musical performance was, however, vocal.
Historical Native American music is stylistically unified and easily distinguished from other world traditions. In sound it is most like native South American music, and like that of tribal societies in northern and easternmost Asia, underscoring historical relationships. The early contact map of North American societies suggests a number of related but distinct musical areas that roughly parallel cultural areas.
However, songs associated with children, children's games, adult gambling games, and love charms were stylistically identical throughout the continent.
The traditional songs of all tribes were typically short and repeated many times in performance, melodic without harmony, and accompanied by percussion. Music of different areas differed in structure (for example, aabbcc in some Great Basin tribes, aa bcd bcd in Plains music, call-and-response patterns in the Southeast, and so on); in preferred melodic contour (sharply descending in Plains music, undulating with an occasional ascent in Yuman cultures, very complex in Pueblo music); and most important, in the singing style and type of vocal sound preferred (high and harsh in the Northern Plains, nasal-sounding in some Apache and Navajo singing, deep and raspy in some Pueblo genres).
North American Indian musical culture has changed enormously since it was first recorded around 1890. Disappearance of tribes and cultures and their musics was balanced by the development of intertribal, continent-wide musical genres. Significant among these was the music of the GHOST DANCE movement, derived from music of the Great Basin area, and from peyote songs, which are shared by many tribes that have members in the NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH.
The most vigorous musical development, dating from the mid-twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, accompanies powwows and social events celebrating tribal or broadly Native identity and culture and consists largely of singing and dancing. Adopted (by 1970) by virtually all American Indian peoples, the dance costume and song styles of POWWOWS are derived from historical Plains practices. Featuring singing groups of from six to eight men (and, since about 1980, also women) sitting around a drum (the groups therefore called Drums), powwows often permit participation by non-Natives and may have the function of introducing Native American culture to non-Indians.
Native American musicians made distinctive contributions to mainstream American forms of music in the late twentieth century. Popular singers of the 1960s and 1970s such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jim Pepper, and Peter LaFarge sang about oppression and other subjects of currency, with music referring to Indian styles and instruments. In the 1980s and 1990s, rock groups such as Xit and Ulali fashioned distinctive sounds combining European and Indian elements.
A number of musicians, prominently the Navajo-Ute artist Carlos Nakai, have developed Native-oriented flute music. In the world of classical music, Louis Ballard is most prominent.
Frisbie, Charlotte J.
, ed. Southwestern Indian Ritual Drama. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980.
Levine, Victoria. Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements. Middleton, Wisc.
: A-R Editions, 2002. An anthology, with detailed annotations, illustrating the way Indian songs were notated by scholars and musicians starting in the nineteenth century.
Merriam, Alan P.
Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians. Chicago: Aldine, 1967. A landmark study providing information on music and its cultural context in one tribal society.
"Music of the American Indians/First Nations in the United States and Canada." In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 3: The United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff.
New York: Garland, 2001. A reference book consisting of short essays by a number of authorities, for the nonspecialist.
Vander, Judith.
Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Popular music is embraced by the populace and includes almost all forms except classical and JAZZ, which are considered to be more elite.
In America, the early white settlers had a low regard for music because of their religious beliefs, in contrast with the Native population, which used music for communication and ceremony. Among Native Americans there was neither "high" nor "low" music—music was simply a part of community life. Thus, popular music did not take root in the United States until the eighteenth century, primarily in the form of theatrical entertainments, including ballad operas drawn from European influences, and MINSTREL SHOWS that were racist parodies of black life.
Minstrels were generally white artists who darkened their faces with burnt cork.
In the nineteenth century, the most popular American songwriter was Stephen Foster, whose nostalgic songs "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" were staples in white American homes. During the Civil War, minstrelsy continued to be popular along with a new form of entertainment, vaudeville.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the music that came from the New York City sheet music publishers located in "Tin Pan Alley" captured much popular attention. Among the crazes at the beginning of the twentieth century was rag-time, whose premier composer was Scott Joplin. Ragtime took its name from the practice of "ragging" tunes, or improvising them into lively, syncopated dance music.
In the meantime, former slaves were streaming into cities and developing new forms of their indigenous music, spirituals and BLUES. Until the twentieth century, this music was not generally published or written down, but rather passed on from person to person. Early blues were based on a variety of musical sources ranging from African to Middle Eastern and Spanish.
There were both country blues, including delta blues, and urban blues, named after various cities including Chicago. While ragtime and the blues were primarily the forerunners of jazz, they also inspired rock and roll.
In 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan's H.
M.S. Pinafore opened in America and began a long love affair with the musical theater.
Show tunes were hummed and sung in homes and in the movies. Among the greatest show tune composers were George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and later, Stephen Sondheim.
By about 1930, phonographs and radios became widely available and popular music—as performed by professional musicians—became accessible to the masses, not just those who lived in big cities or could afford to buy tickets for performances in theaters and nightclubs.
It was common for families to gather around the radio and listen to the swing music performed by big bands such as those led by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and sometimes even black musicians such as Duke Ellington. While the bands were mostly segregated, some race mixing occurred in solo performances since, after all, no one could see the performers on the radio. Bing Crosby and Perry Como were among the best-known singers to work with big bands.
Radio also enabled white audiences to listen to stations intended for black audiences. The black music, then called "race" music, was especially exciting to young white people who were enthralled by the edgy rawness of blues and rhythm and blues. By 1945, many white teenagers had become enamored of "jumpin' jive," played by such artists as Louis Jordan.
As teens started to buy the records, the recording industry went into a tailspin. The industry's response to white interest in black music was twofold. In some instances, white artists made covers of black songs.
For example, in 1956, singer Pat Boone recorded a sanitized version of Little Richard's 1955 rhythm-and-blues classic "Tutti Frutti," and Boone's version vastly outsold the original. In other instances, the white recording establishment decided to go head-to-head with the sexually open lyrics and staccato beat of black musicians. Thus, the hip-gyrating, southern-roots sound of Elvis Presley was born.
Before long, radio stations were playing racially mixed music, which caused outrage in some white circles, and was vehemently denounced in white newspapers and from the pulpits. Nevertheless, Elvis Presley became an enormous star, British musicians including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones immersed themselves in rhythm and blues, and ROCK AND ROLL became an unstoppable phenomenon.
Over the years, rock has become a catchall term for a wide range of popular music styles such as pop, country rock, doo-wop, surf music, folk rock, bubblegum music, jazz rock, psychedelic rock, funk, disco, glitter and glam rock, hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock, new wave, and alternative and underground rock.
Popular music styles played mostly by black musicians, such as soul, Motown, ska, reggae, hip hop, and rap music, are also considered rock.
Charlton, Katherine. Rock Music Styles: A History.
Boston: Mc Graw Hill, 1998.
Ward, Geoffrey C. Jazz: A History of America's Music.
New York: Knopf, 2000.
Londré, Felicia Hardison, and Daniel J. Watermeier.
The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1999.
Luther, Frank.
Americans and Their Songs. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942.
Some of the richest strains of American music have emerged from stage and screen.
Puritan culture and foreign influences retarded the development of a native stage musical tradition, but the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of genuinely American music theater from Reginald De Koven (Robin Hood, 1890), John Philip Sousa (El Capitan, 1896), George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones, 1904), and Victor Herbert (Naughty Marietta, 1910). In the niche between European operetta and theatrical burlesque emerged composers like Jerome Kern (Show Boat, 1927) and George Gershwin, both of whom drew upon black musical traditions, as in Kern's "Ol' Man River" and the whole of Gershwin's operatic Porgy and Bess (1935).
Vincent Youmans (No, No, Nanette, 1923), Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song, 1926), and Cole Porter (Anything Goes, 1934) furthered the popularity of original musical theater.
The "Broadway musical," integrating story, dance, and song, achieved supreme popularity and influence in the mid-twentieth-century collaborations of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, including Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949).
These works helped to inspire a golden age of musicals by the likes of Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun, 1946), Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, 1950), Frederick Loewe (My Fair Lady, 1956), Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story, 1957), and Jule Style (Gypsy, 1959). Stephen Sondheim, lyricist for the last two shows, went on to a successful composing career of his own in increasingly ambitious works like A Little Night Music (1973) and Sweeney Todd (1979). By the end of the century, rising production costs, demand for theatrical spectacle, and the narrowing of the popular musical mainstream led to renewed foreign domination of Broadway (e.
g., Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables), although native composers enjoyed striking successes with A Chorus Line (Marvin Hamlisch, 1975), Dreamgirls (Henry Krieger, 1981), and Rent (Jonathan Larson, 1996).
Many Broadway classics, including all of Rodgers and Hammerstein's key works, were adapted as Hollywood films to great domestic success, although film musicals did not export as well as other Hollywood product.
There was also a thriving tradition of original screen musicals from the beginning of the sound era (42nd Street, Dames, Meet Me in St. Louis, Singin' in the Rain), although most of these films drew heavily upon the existing body of popular song. The Wizard of Oz (Harold Arlen, 1939) has become one of the best-loved of all American movies.
Moviemakers have always used music to heighten drama and set the scene. The "silent era" was never without sound. Sometimes a pianist would play along; at other times an orchestra played classical selections.
Studios hired libraries of "mood" music for theaters. Occasionally, a major production such as D. W.
Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) used specially composed music, played by teams of musicians traveling with the film.
The innovation of "talkies" in the late 1920s sealed the marriage of film and music. Studios employed full orchestras and hired eminent composers to create original scores.
By 1940, film music had become a highly specialized compositional form. In the golden age of film music (c. 1935–1960), such composers as the immigrants Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Miklós Rózsa and the native-born Alfred Newman, Roy Webb, Bernard Herrmann, and later Alex North, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, and Jerry Goldsmith created compelling symphonic and jazz-based film scores.
The advent of rock and roll inspired a trend of incorporating pop songs into films, beginning with Richard Brooks's use of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" in Blackboard Jungle (1955). Elvis Presley's strong screen presence made hits of a mostly mediocre string of movie musicals from 1956 to 1972. The integration of popular songs by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel was central to the huge success of The Graduate (1967).
The disco movement of the late 1970s spawned such film scores as the Bee Gees songs for Saturday Night Fever (1977). Director Spike Lee gave African American music greater prominence in Do the Right Thing (1989), which employed a radical rap and blues soundtrack.
America's characteristic musical eclecticism continued in the early 2000s.
The symphonic tradition revived mightily in the hands of the enormously popular John Williams (Star Wars [1977], Schindler's List [1993]), who became a sort of unofficial American composer laureate. And the movie musical was revitalized by the influence of MUSIC TELEVISION's video style in Moulin Rouge (2001).
Gänzl, Kurt.
The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre. 2d ed. New York: Schirmer Books, 2001.
Gänzl, Kurt, and Andrew Lamb. Gänzl's Book of the Musical Theatre. New York: Schirmer Books, 1989.
Palmer, Christopher. The Composer in Hollywood. London: Marion Boyars, 1990.
Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music, A Neglected Art. 2d ed.
New York: Norton, 1992.
Romney, Jonathan, and Adrian Wooten, eds. Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the Fifties.
London: BFI Press, 1995.
Musicians in the have, over the centuries, produced a great classical tradition in a variety of regional forms.
Historically, Middle Eastern music has been predominantly melodic, drawing from a complicated system of modes called maqam in Arabic, makam in Turkish, and mugam in .
The melodic system of Iran is based on dastgaha, similar in principle if not in practice. These systems and their repertoires frequently have written histories - music theories that date back to the time of al-Farabi and earlier.
Sung poetry is fundamental to the musical art of the region.
The elegant or clever text and the performance that highlights the affective phrase or the play on words often are highly valued by listeners.
Instrument types include long- and short-neck lutes, plucked and hammered dulcimers, end-blown reed flutes, hourglass drums, frame drums, and several sizes of double-reed wind instruments often played in concert with large field drums. These instruments have different names, shapes, and playing styles.
Overarching genres of performance occur throughout the region, often consisting of suites of instrumental and vocal music, both improvised and formally composed. They occur in devotional rituals, dance, neoclassical performance, and performances by folk musicians. Despite the disparate sounds, contexts, and audiences, these performances are often linked by listeners with their Arabic musical-poetic heritage (turath), which encompasses a broad range of religious, classical, and folk musics.
Typologies common in the West that separate the religious and the secular, or the classical, the folk, and the popular, do not always apply to Middle Eastern repertoires. For instance, in Iran the classical radif stands in stark contrast to folk songs but is colored by Iranian Sufi performance. By contrast, the Azerbaijani mugam, a classical genre, includes and arguably depends on folk music in its structure.
Over the years these historic materials and aesthetics have yielded distinct styles, genres, and practices in different times and places. For example, the governments of Morocco and and private agencies in have participated in the revitalization of local forms of nawba, a suite-like genre. It is believed to have originated in Andalusia and to have been carried from there to North Africa.
What results, in the twentieth century, is "classical" music so emblematic of a particular region that it is really not possible to speak of "Algerian" classical music, let alone "Arab" classical music but rather the repertories of Tlemcen, Constantine, Algiers, Fez, Tunis, and so on. However in general, revitalization of these genes serves to mark cultures as "Arab" rather than Berber.
On the other hand, styles drawn from the peoples of southern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and have created distinctly popular genres exemplified by the group Nas alGhiwan.
Similiarly, Algerian ra?i offers an excellent example of a style rooted in local musical practice, transformed with imported electronic instruments and modern texts. These styles draw the historic aesthetic of the clever, sometimes stinging colloquial text and favorite local instruments into contact with the electronics, and sometimes the staging, of rock music.
The result may or may not be considered "westernized" by local listeners.
Regional distinctions have long been part of mashriq performances. Microtonal intervals tend to be tuned slightly higher in Turkey and Syria than in Egypt and North Africa.
The buzuq is an important part of folk culture. The resurgence of "classical" repertoires has been discouraged in Turkey since the establishment of the republic (1923). The governments of Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon have sponsored neoclassical ensembles that often give concerts in opera houses, with musicians in evening dress performing without the extemporization that is historically part of Middle Eastern traditions.
In other words, Arab pieces of music are presented in the context of a Western concert.
Transformed classical and folk traditions have emerged in nongovernmental venues as well. Perhaps the best known are the plays by Fayruz and the Rahbani brothers, articulating local pride and local concerns by using distinctly Lebanese styles and a combination of local and Western instruments.
The Western models of the musical play and film,
popular in the Arab world, serve local purposes well. The best-known recent exponent of music from the turath is the Syrian Sabah Fakhri, who travels internationally, performing muwashshahat, taqasim, classical instrumental pieces, and newer songs in suite-like arrangements. Umm Kulthum and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab are well-known performers of "new" or "popular" music that has attracted a large audience throughout the Arab world.
Abd al-Wahhab's style is the more innovative, creating a pastiche of Western and Arab musical styles in a single composition and establishing the free-form instrumental piece (al-qit?a al-musiqiyya) as an important independent genre. Although both Umm Kulthum and Abd al-Wahhab sing complicated neoclassical works, Umm Kulthum has claimed this area as her own.
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