Inhalt: The first three centuries. The first song : Native American music -- European inroads : early Christian music making -- From ritual to art : the flowering of sacred music -- "Old, simple Ditties" : Colonial song, dance, and home music making -- Performing "By particular desire" : Colonial military, concert, and theater music -- Maintaining oral traditions : African music in early America -- Correcting "the harshness of our singing" : New England psalmody reformed -- pt. 2. The nineteenth century. Edification and economics : the career of Lowell Mason -- Singing praises : Southern and frontier devotional music -- "Be it ever so humble" : theater and opera, 1800-1860 -- Blacks, whites, and the minstrel stage -- Home music making and the publishing industry -- From ramparts to romance : parlor songs, 1800-1865 -- Of Yankee Doodle and Ophicleides : bands and orchestras, 1800 to the 1870s -- From church to concert hall : the rise of classical music -- From log house to opera house : Anthony Philips Heinrich and William Henry Fry -- A New Orleans original : Gottschalk of Louisiana -- Two classic Bostonians : George W. Chadwick and Amy Beach -- Edward MacDowell and musical nationalism -- "Travel in the winds" : Native American music from 1820 -- "Make a noise!" : slave songs and other black music to the 1880s -- Songs of the later nineteenth century -- Stars, stripes and cylinders : Sousa, the band, and the phonograph -- "After the ball" : the rise of the Tin Pan Alley -- pt. 3. The twentieth century. "To stretch our ears" : the music of Charles Ives -- "Come on and hear" : the early twentieth century -- The jazz age dawns : blues, jazz and rhapsody -- "The birthright of all of us" : classical music, the mass media, and the Depression -- "All that is native and fine" : American folk song and its collectors -- From New Orleans to Chicago : jazz goes national -- "Crescendo in blue" : Ellington, Basie and the swing band -- The golden age of the American musical [u.a.]
Beschreibung:
America's Musical Life: A History tells the fascinating story of music in the United States, from the sacred music of its earliest days to the jazz and rock that enliven the turn of the millennium. Beginning with the music of Native Americans and continuing with traditions introduced by European colonizers and Africans brought here as slaves, the book reveals how this bountiful heritage was developed and enhanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to produce the music we hear today. As author Richard Crawford points out, American musical activity has taken place in three spheres: the traditional (folk music), which emphasizes continuity and the preservation of community custom; the popular, which seeks most of all to find paying audiences; and the classical (Western art music), which places priority on the musical works themselves. We observe American music making in each of these spheres and see, for the first time, how they have continually crossed over, interacted, and combined to shape the rich tapestry of sounds of the twenty-first century. Most important, the narrative is always set in its proper historical context - we cannot, for instance, truly understand Civil War music without knowing the social and political factors that precipitated the conflict. In juggling political, social, and musical history, the author strikes a happy balance between general background and specific accounts of individual composers, performers and pieces of music. [Verlagsangabe]
co-funded by the European Commission