All about Jazz History

Jazz started out with a mixture of many types of music. It's roots date back to the 1880's with African origins. Jazz combines elements of African music with elements of Western European music. The birthplace of that combination, which is Jazz, is said to be New Orleans. One theory as to why New Orleans is the birthplace is contributed to the black Creole subculture.The Creoles were originally from the West Indies and lived under the Spanish and French rule in Louisiana. They became free Americans under the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The Creoles spoke Spanish and French and lived in the high society of the French district in New Orleans. The Creoles took pride in their formal knowledge of the Western European music and their social and cultural values that classified them as upper class. Their music focused on sight-readings and correct performances for they played at the Opera House and chamber ensembles.

On the West Side of New Orleans live the uneducated, culturally and economically poor American blacks. Their music was based on simple melodies and complex cross-rhythms mixed in with verbal slurs, vibrato, syncopated rhythms, and "blues notes". The songs they sang were mostly spiritual or sung to pass the time of hardship and hard labor. The songs were actually encouraged because the workers seem to work better with the soothing effects of the music. Their music was characterized more by memorization and improvisation, and not of formal training.

In 1894, the segregation laws were in effect in New Orleans, which forced the upper class Creoles to live on the West Side with the poor, uneducated American blacks. The mixture of the two styles of music and two cultures clashed and created the start of Jazz.

Jazz changed and new forms were developed often. Between the 1890 and the 1900, "Ragtime" and the Blues was the new craze. New Orleans seemed to be the Mecca of new artists and sounds that included everything including but not limited to brass band, Ragtime, marches, pop, dances, and Blues. The music spread to the north and west through migrating travelers and records. Jazz really came into effect by the 1920's when the whites adapted and imitated it. Some of the leaders of the popular Jazz bands include Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton. These bands played in a style that would come to be known as Dixieland.Dancing became the latest craze during the late 30's. Many people wanted to shake off the depression by dancing. So Jazz music developed into new types of music to dance to.

By the 1940's Jazz has developed into many styles of music. There were Bop, Traditional, Swing, Dixieland, and Latin influences of Jazz. Jazz has a variety of forms, even today. Acid Jazz is the most recent form of Jazz. It is becoming more and more popular these days. Jazz has such a great mixture of rhythm and beats that Jazz will never cease to exist. To view great photographs and listen to some great Jazz songs from the golden age of Jazz visit the American Memory Library of Congress.

Early music

Term used, mainly since the 1960s, to stand not only for music of an earlier era but also for a particular attitude towards its performance. It is sometimes applied to music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (i.e. up to 1600), sometimes to the Baroque period too (up to 1750), but increasingly up to 1800, so including much of the Classical period. But the usage of the term for such concepts as ‘authentic’ or historically informed performance, extends up to more recent times and could (for example) comprehend playing Schumann's piano music on instruments of his day or Mahler's symphonies using the kinds of portamento favoured by string players of the early 20th century.

The ‘early music movement’ is particularly concerned with performing practice and the revival and use of period instruments as well as period techniques and understandings of such matters as notation, rhythm, tempo and articulation, along with the establishment of texts that conform with the composer's intentions. The movement may be seen as going back to the musical antiquarianism of the 18th century and the critical scholarship that arose from it during the 19th. Its true father figure is Arnold Dolmetsch who did much in the early 20th century to revive interest in early techniques and instruments; his pupils and followers continued the tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s, groups such as Concentus Musicus (Vienna), the Early Music Consort (London), the Studio für Frühe Musik (Munich), the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basle) and the New York Pro Musica cultivated performance in period styles; their work has since been followed up by groups and individuals, particularly in such centres as London, the Low Countries and Boston. Most of these groups concentrated on Baroque music or earlier; with the work of the Academy of Ancient Music, the Collegium Aureum and the London Classical Players, the Classical and early Romantic repertories have also been examined in the light of period performance. The early music movement has been much fostered not only by scholars but also by modern builders of period instruments, by journals (notably the British quarterly Early Music, founded in 1973), by publishers (particularly of facsimile editions) and by the record industry. See illustration.

Some families of early instruments as shown by Praetorius in ‘Syntagma musicum’ (1620)

History of the Music

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Western Europe entered a time known as "The Dark Ages" — a period when invading hordes of Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths overran Europe. These years were marked by constant warfare, the absence of a Holy Roman Emperor, and the virtual disappearance of urban life. Over the next next nine centuries, the newly emerging Christian Church came to dominate Europe, administering justice, instigating "Holy" Crusades against the East, establishing Universities, and generally dictating the destiny of music, art, and literature. It was during this time that Pope Gregory I is generally believed to have collected and codified the music known as Gregorian Chant, which was the approved music of the Church. Much later, the University at Notre Dame in Paris saw the creation of a new kind of music called organum. Secular music was performed throughout Europe by the troubadours and trouvères of France. And it was during these "Middle Ages" that Western culture saw the appearance of the first great name in music, Guillaume de Machaut.

The Renaissance

"rebirth") was a time of great cultural awakening and a flowering of the arts, letters, and sciences throughout Europe. With the rise of humanism, sacred music began for the first Generally considered to be from ca.1420 to 1600, the Renaissance (which literally means time to break free of the confines of the Church, and a school of composers trained in the Netherlands mastered the art of polyphony in their settings of sacred music. One of the early masters of the Flemish style was Josquin des Prez. These polyphonic traditions reached their culmination in the unsurpassed works of Giovanni da Palestrina.
Of course, secular music thrived during this period, and instrumental and dance music was performed in abundance, if not always written down. It was left for others to collect and notate the wide variety of irrepressible instrumental music of the period. The late Renaissance also saw in England the flourishing of the English madrigal, the best known of which were composed by such masters as John Dowland, William Byrd, Thomas Morley and others.

The Baroque Age

Named after the popular ornate architectural style of the time, the Baroque period (ca.1600 to 1750) saw composers beginning to rebel against the styles that were prevalent during the High Renaissance. This was a time when the many monarchies of Europe vied in outdoing each other in pride, pomp and pageantry. Many monarchs employed composers at their courts, where they were little more than servants expected to churn out music for any desired occasions. The greatest composer of the period, Johann Sebastian Bach, was such a servant. Yet the best composers of the time were able to break new musical ground, and in so doing succeeded in creating an entirely new style of music.
It was during the early part of the seventeenth century that the genre of opera was first created by a group of composers in Florence, Italy, and the earliest operatic masterpieces were composed by Claudio Monteverdi. The instrumental concerto became a staple of the Baroque era, and found its strongest exponent in the works of the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. Harpsichord music achieved new heights, due to the works of such masters as Domenico Scarlatti and others. Dances became formalized into instrumental suites and were composed by virtually all composers of the era. But vocal and choral music still reigned supreme during this age, and culminated in the operas and oratorios of German-born composer George Frideric Handel

The Classical Period

From roughly 1750 to 1820, artists, architechts, and musicians moved away from the heavily ornamented styles of the Baroque and the Rococo, and instead embraced a clean, uncluttered style they thought reminiscent of Classical Greece. The newly established aristocracies were replacing monarchs and the church as patrons of the arts, and were demanding an impersonal, but tuneful and elegant music. Dances such as the minuet and the gavotte were provided in the forms of entertaining serenades and divertimenti.

At this time the Austrian capital of Vienna became the musical center of Europe, and works of the period are often referred to as being in the Viennese style. Composers came from all over Europe to train in and around Vienna, and gradually they developed and formalized the standard musical forms that were to predominate European musical culture for the next several decades. A reform of the extravagance of Baroque opera was undertaken by Christoph von Gluck. Johann Stamitz contributed greatly to the growth of the orchestra and developed the idea of the orchestral symphony. The Classical period reached its majestic culmination with the masterful symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets by the three great composers of the Viennese school: Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. During the same period, the first voice of the burgeoning Romantic musical ethic can be found in the music of Viennese composer Franz Schubert.

The Romantic Era

As the many socio-political revolutions of the late eighteenth-century established new social orders and new ways of life and thought, so composers of the period broke new musical ground by adding a new emotional depth to the prevailing classical forms. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth-century (from ca. 1820 to 1900), artists of all kinds became intent in expressing their subjective, personal emotions. "Romanticism" derives its name from the romances of medieval times -- long poems telling stories of heroes and chivalry, of distant lands and far away places, and often of unattainable love. The romantic artists are the first in history to give to themselves the name by which they are identified.

The earliest Romantic composers were all born within a few years of each other in the early years of the nineteenth century. These include the great German masters Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann ; the Polish poet of the piano Frédéric Chopin; the French genius Hector Berlioz ; and the greatest pianistic showman in history, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.

During the early nineteenth century, opera composers such as Carl Maria von Weber turned to German folk stories for the stories of their operas, while the Italians looked to the literature of the time and created what is known as Bel canto opera (literally "beautiful singing"). Later in the century, the field of Italian opera was dominated by Giuseppe Verdi, while German opera was virtually monopolized by Richard Wagner

During the nineteenth century, composers from non-Germanic countries began looking for ways in which they might express the musical soul of their homelands. Many of these Nationalist composers turned to indigenous history and legends as plots for their operas, and to the popular folk melodies and dance rhythms of their homelands as inspiration for their symphonies and instrumental music. Others developed a highly personal harmonic language and melodic style which distinguishes their music from that of the Austro-Germanic traditions.

The continued modification and enhancement of existing instruments, plus the invention of new ones, led to the further expansion of the symphony orchestra throughout the century. Taking advantage of these new sounds and new instrumental combinations, the late Romantic composers of the second half of the nineteenth-century created richer and ever larger symphonies, ballets, and concertos. Two of the giants of this period are the German-born Johannes Brahms and the great Russian melodist Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The Twentieth-Century

By the turn of the century and for the next few decades, artists of all nationalities were searching for exciting and different modes of expression. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg explored unusual and unorthodox harmonies and tonal schemes. French composer Claude Debussy was fascinated by Eastern music and the whole-tone scale, and created a style of music named after the movement in French painting called Impressionism. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók continued in the traditions of the still strong Nationalist movement and fused the music of Hungarian peasants with twentieth century forms. Avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse explored the manipulation of rhythms rather than the usual melodic/harmonic schemes. The tried-and-true genre of the symphony, albeit somewhat modified by this time, attracted such masters as Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich, while Igor Stravinsky gave full rein to his manipulation of kaleidoscopic rhythms and instrumental colors throughout his extremely long and varied career.

While many composers throughout the twentieth-century experimented in new ways with traditional instruments (such as the "prepared piano" used by American composer John Cage), many of the twentieth-century’s greatest composers, such as Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini and the Russian pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, remained true to the traditional forms of music history. In addition to new and eclectic styles of musical trends, the twentieth century boasts numerous composers whose harmonic and melodic styles an average listener can still easily appreciate and enjoy.