Impressionism

At the end of the Romantic Era, the entire zeitgeist of the music—the tradition, style, the
musical rules—began to disintegrate into a period of upheaval marked by
experimentation. The expressive usefulness of tonal harmony, the foundation for the
music of the previous 200 years, was no longer adequate for what composers wanted to
express. The forms it had spawned—the symphony and the sonata cycle—were less
useful to the composers of the new era, even if their spirit of creating and resolving
drama were still needed.
One of the artistic movements from this era is known as Impressionism and takes its
name from a style of painting that appeared in France in the late 1800s.
The music of the Impressionists owes a great deal to the movement of Nationalism and,
by the numbers, wasn't actually that broad of a movement. There were only two major
French composers associated with it: Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy (who hated the
label). A third composer, American Charles Griffes, also composed in the style early in
his life but moved away from it before his very untimely death at age 35 in a worldwide
flu pandemic. One reason it probably didn’t become as wide reaching of a momevent is
that if you follow Debussy's musical rules, you end up sounding. . . like Debussy. Most
Illustration 1: "Jerusalem
Artichoke Flowers", Claude
Monet 1880
composers want to create their own unique sound and be known as originators—this is
not a good way to achieve that goal.
The label Impressionism came from a specific painting by Claude Monet—Impression,
Sunrise. First exhibited in 1874, Monet chose to avoid hard lines and shapes, instead
creating an image that captured the essence of the image without capturing the details.
Monet and a number of other painters—Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne—adopted this style in spite of it not always being
well received by critics. To describe them, one annoyed critic coined the term
“Impressionists” that was intended to have a derogatory meaning. The painters
rebelliously adopted the label.

Impressionist paintings often convey the diffusion of light in reflections on the surface
of water or diffused through warm air. In addition to the appearance, the subject matter
of many Impressionist paintings is more ephemeral—focusing on the fleeting moment
that quickly goes by (very similar to the work of the great 20th century photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was also French). Many of them experimented with vivid
pure colors in place of the usual mixing.
With the same cultural influences, the desire for their own distinct French sound (during
the era of Nationalism), musicians took inspiration from the painters and created a style
of music that also became known as Impressionism.

There are parallels to painting in the music of the Impressionist composers. Like their
visual counterparts, they avoided hard lines and distinct shapes—in musical terms, the
great soaring melodies of Romantic music and the traditional structures such as sonata
form and the sonata cycles.
Subject matters also strikingly paralleled the painting such as nature, water, and
ephemeral scenes that capture a fleeting moment. The orchestral music—especially that
of Maurice Ravel—boldly uses exotic tone colors in the same way as his visual art
counterparts would on a canvas. Exotic non-European music was a source of inspiration
for Debussy and Ravel (just as Eastern art inspired their counterparts)i
.
While this musical movement lasted only a few decades and was mainly associated with
two composers from one country (France) , it is far more than just a footnote in music
history.
This text has talked about the use of tonal harmony as being a very powerful way to
create a piece of music and a sense of dramatic flow. Harmonies are assembled in a very
distinct way that pulls the piece forward.
A “home base” is established at the beginning. We get away from that foundation,
creating a sense of tension and anticipation. The composer will eventually lead us back
to that (after taking a few deceptive twists and turns) until we reach the home base and
feel a sense of satisfaction and gratification.
This tonal harmony also comes with a very elaborate set of rules in part writing (the
lines that different voices or instruments sound) that dictate how different voice lines
must behave relative to each other and what NOT to do.

One characteristic of much Impressionist music is the use of parallel chords. Without
getting into a technically involved explanation here--in traditional harmony, all parts of a
chord are expected to act independently. Deliberately breaking that rule by having the
parts move parallel to each other in a particular interval known as a fifth created a
drastically different sound and undercut the tonal harmonic sense of a home baseii
.
Much of the music written by Debussy and Ravel was for piano. They were both
excellent pianists who understood the subtleties they could create. While breaking some
early rules, the music is nevertheless HIGHLY dependent on well tempered tuning.
Additionally, the complex sonorities of the harmonies require extremely precise tuning
in order to blend properly. Earlier pianos would not have had the richness and clarity
available to properly achieve all of the effects.
Impressionism was one of a number of experiments in the general area that went outside
of the boundaries of tonal harmony. However, it is one of the few that created music that
Illustration 3: "Rouen Cathedral, West
Facade, Sunlight", Claude Monet 1894
is strikingly beautiful—as long as you're not a critic expecting to find traditional
harmonic practices.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918)

Debussy is regarded as the father of Impressionistic music. While thoroughly skilled in
the traditional way of writing music, Debussy began to break a lot of the old rules
governing the way music is written. Many musical experiments were performed in the
late 1800s and early 1900s, but of all of the movements that took off in their own
directions, Debussy's is one of the few that are quite listenable. One of his devices is the
Illustration 4: Claude Monet, "The Artist's Garden at Vethiel"
(1880)
use of dissonance as a stable structural sound ("structural dissonance") instead of
something to be avoided or used as a weak point (not unlike the treatment in jazz).
Debussy was a highly skilled pianist who instinctively understood its potential as an
instrument with many different colors and effects available. While he composed a lot of
music, much of his orchestral music started off as piano music and was orchestrated by
someone else.
Compared to Romanticism, much of his music almost seems minimalist.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937)

Maurice Ravel was another composer associated with Impressionism, and he was also a
close friend of Debussy. Although he really wasn't an Impressionist in the same sense as
Debussy, his music shares many of the same characteristics and both composers are
usually linked together.
Ravel composed a moderate amount of music for solo piano, much orhestral music,
chamber music, and several ballets. He was the most skilled orchestrator of his time,
showing masterly control over the many tone colors of an orchestra.
One of his ballets was based on a Spanish dance rhythm called a “bolero” that he simply
called Bolero. It consists of fifteen minutes of doing little but repeating the same melody
(and a slight variation) over and over, only getting louder and adding more instruments.
This description sounds as if it should have been laughed out of the concert hall, but to
Ravel's chagrin (the composer himself didn't think much of the piece), he found that it
quickly became his most popular piece of music. Decades later when it was used in a
popular movie, record stores couldn't keep recordings of it in stock.
He also composed two piano concertos, one of them for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who
had his right arm amputated during World War I. Performed with the left hand only, it is
so ingeniously composed that it is nearly impossible to tell that the soloist is using only
one hand!

Nationalism in Music, Europe and the United States

Nationalism in music has traditionally been described as a late-nineteenth-century

phenomenon associated with countries or regions aspiring to nationhood whose
composers strove to wed a national (most often folk-based) musical idiom to existing
"main-stream" genres. Some of these accounts begin with Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849),
but he is more often understood as "cosmopolitan" or "universal," a Romantic composer
of Polish and French parentage whose work was often based on Polish dance forms but
was too early to count as nationalist. Most accounts of musical nationalism start with
Russians in the next generation, especially the moguchaya kuchka —the "mighty little
heap," or the "mighty five," including Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), Modest
Musorgsky (1839–1881), and Aleksandr Borodin (1833–1887)—and continue with the
Czechs Bedrich Smetana (1824–1884) and Antonín Dvorák (1841–1904), the Norwegian
Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), and the Finnish Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Within this
narrative line, the rise of a musical form of Impressionism in France and the genesis of a
distinctively American music may be seen as late developments, somewhat out of step
with general trends.

Yet nationalism has provided the principal cultural and political framework for musical
expression within European-based traditions for most of the nineteenth century and has
continued to do so up to the present. This tendency has not been widely noted for two
main reasons: First, it remained overlooked because of the entrenched habit of
considering European music history apart from history more generally, as encouraged by
the doctrine of absolute music; and second, the genesis and development of musicology—
the discipline entrusted to tell the history of music—were both intimately connected to
nationalist ideologies.

Musicology and Nationalism

Music history in the nineteenth century has generally been perceived in terms of
"mainstream" traditions continuing from the late eighteenth century, the general rise of
Romanticism across these mainstreams, and the splintering into a variety of "nationalist"
musics in the later part of the century. But nationalism lay at the heart of all facets of this
master narrative, from the maintenance of the "mainstreams" to Romanticism and, most
especially, to the narrative perspective. The principal task of historical musicology, for
much of the time since about 1850, has been the promotion and development of a
historicist canon to support a particular nationalist ideology. Moreover, as European
nationalism, especially in Germany and Italy, led to two world wars in the twentieth
century, some of its victims who fled to the United States (especially in the 1930s)
established the American scholarly tradition in musicology, teaching the same history they
had been taught and thus perpetuating the view that the most important musical tradition
was German, which was to be understood as the least nationalist and most universal
(Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc.), trailed by Italian opera and older Italian traditions, a few
isolated "cosmopolitan" geniuses such as Chopin, and various "national"
schools at the margin of respectability, whose legitimacy was cast in doubt not least
because their music was widely enjoyed.

Nationalism and Art

Nationalism holds that a "people," whether defined in terms of cultural or ethnic roots,
constitutes the only legitimate basis for a political state. This belief took root in Europe
around the beginning of the nineteenth century, as an outgrowth of German
Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and (according to some views)
human inclinations. The merger of nationalist feeling and art was accomplished using the
model proposed by German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) of
how an artist might project—for those in the urbanized present who stand in imperfect
relation to a more ideal past—either a fuller sense of that lost past (through idyll and
elegy), a critical account of the present (through satire), or a believable future restoration.
Coupled with the idea of the Volksgeist (the spirit of a people) promulgated by fellow
German Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Schiller's structure became a recipe for
the nationalist artist: the idealized past, for the nationalist, is the past of a "people" who
survive into the present (i.e., in the Volk of the countryside), and the ideal future for which
one strives is a "nation" in which they are restored to their earlier oneness with the land
of their past. Images, narratives, and projections that instill belief in a people's valued past
—that is, mythologies—thus quickly became a core ingredient in the artistic advancement
of nationalism.

German Nationalism
The early stages of a specifically musical engagement with nationalism may be found in
the late-eighteenth-century fascination with folk song, which fed the development of early
nineteenth-century German lieder, folk-based chamber songs expressive of a yearning
subjectivity. In his lieder, Franz Schubert (1797–1828) placed that subjectivity, often
alienated, within a specific landscape, frequently carried within the piano's figuration.
Such placement of people within a landscape became a core strategy of nationalist art,
and was more elaborately accomplished in German Romantic Opera, beginning with Der
Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) and continuing in the next
generation with the operas and music dramas of Richard Wagner (1813–1883);
particularly effective were Weber's evocations of the German woods, through horn choirs,
and his (and Wagner's) frequent recourse to mythology. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
(1824) is implicitly nationalist, but in a forward-looking way, projecting a temporal and
geographic fusion of classical Greek ideals (Elysium), "oriental" ("Turkish") tropes, and
modern German Christianity. In the generation following his death, Beethoven became
the cornerstone of Germany's nationalist claims to preeminence in music. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, older German musical treasures from the past (especially those
by J. S. Bach) were being systematically collected, establishing a milestone in the nascent
field of musicology. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the unification of
Germany that resulted from it, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth—the opera house designed
and built by Wagner—became an enduring monument to "Holy German Art."
Features of Nationalist Music
While musical nationalism could adopt a variety of specific profiles according to the
"nation" involved, these all had a number of features in common. Many nationalist musics
relied on folk idioms that, however inaccurately, could be claimed as a national heritage.
Opera and program music lent themselves easily to national themes; and opera also had
recourse to rousing choruses, which could not only evoke the character and presence of a
people—most notably "Va, pensiero" in Verdi's Nabucco (1842) and the coronation scene
in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1872)—but also cross over into popular currency.
Ethnographic studies could either add legitimacy to native folk idioms or form the basis for
a nationally conceived exotic "other" to be assimilated and synthesized in national terms.
Thus, "Spanish" music provided both Russian and French composers an opportunity to
indulge in coloristic orchestration that was itself a source of nationalist pride; such as in
Carmen (1874) by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and Capriccio Espanole (1887) by Rimsky-
Korsakov. Similar use was made of Asian sources (e.g., in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherezade,
1888), analogous to the earlier tradition regarding the "Turkish" topic. Eventually,
ethnographic research evolved from a kind of colonialist interest in the "other" into
another vehicle for nationalist endeavor, with some ethnomusicologists holding that only
"authentic" members of a group ought to conduct research into its musical traditions.

The Legacy of Nationalism and the Special Case of the United States
Nationalism must be at least partly blamed for the Holocaust and other instances of
"ethnic cleansing" in the twentieth century, given that nationalism's intense focus on
defining an authenticating group identity entailed a corollary focus on what that group
was not. The most notorious early instance of this in musical discourse was Wagner's
essay Das Judentum in der Musik (1850; rev. 1869), which helped give nationalism a
racialized profile it has never lost.

Nationalism has often moved in quite another direction in the United States, which,
according to the European model, would have had either to elevate the American Indian
as the core part of its authenticating past or to foster an alternative mythology of a
"virgin" land settled by Europeans, transformed by their new setting. A third alternative,
which has helped absorb the contradictions between the first two, has been to claim some
form of "melting pot" nationalist basis; such was Dvorák's approach in his "New World"
Symphony, op. 95 (1893), blending "Negro" melodies (spirituals), Indianist idioms, and a
European-based style, in a recipe later taken up by William Grant Still (1895–1978) in his
blues-based Afro-American Symphony (1930), for example. More central exemplars of
American nationalist music are the often nostalgic "New England" idiom of early
modernist Charles Ives (1874–1954), the jazz-based concert idiom of George Gershwin
(1898–1937), and the "wide-open spaces" idiom of Aaron Copland (1900–1990), which
was often allied with an emergent American style of balletic dance. Departing from these
"high art" traditions, many have chosen to locate America's most distinctive musical
profile within popular music, either within jazz ("America's classical music") or song, which
has, historically, absorbed a wide number of influences. In terms of musical nationalism,
perhaps the most fully realized American tradition—based on popular song styles and a
variety of mostly assimilationist plots—is that of the American musical, both for the stage
and in films.
The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold
Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna, where he
lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925. Their music was initially
characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, following Schoenberg's own
evolution, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre, often referred to
as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. Though this
common development took place, it neither followed a common time-line nor a
cooperative path. Likewise, it was not a direct result of Schoenberg's teaching—which, as
his various published textbooks demonstrate, was highly traditional and conservative.
Schoenberg's textbooks also reveal that the Second Viennese School spawned not from
the development of his serial method, but rather from the influence of his creative
example.

The principal members of the school, besides Schoenberg, were Alban Berg and Anton
Webern, who were among his first composition pupils. Both of them had already
produced copious and talented music in a late Romantic idiom but felt they gained new
direction and discipline from Schoenberg's teaching. Other pupils of this generation
included Ernst Krenek, Heinrich Jalowetz, Erwin Stein and Egon Wellesz, and somewhat
later Eduard Steuermann, Hanns Eisler, Robert Gerhard, Norbert von Hannenheim, Rudolf
Kolisch, Paul A. Pisk, Karl Rankl, Josef Rufer, Nikos Skalkottas, Viktor Ullmann, and
Winfried Zillig.[1] Though Berg and Webern both followed Schoenberg into total
chromaticism and both, each in his own way, adopted twelve-tone technique soon after
he did, not all of these other pupils did so, or waited for a considerable time before
following suit. Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky is sometimes included as
part of the Second Viennese School, though he was never Schoenberg's pupil and never
renounced a traditional conception of tonality. Several yet later pupils, such as Zillig, the
Catalan Gerhard, the Transylvanian Hannenheim and the Greek Skalkottas, are sometimes
covered by the term, though (apart from Gerhard) they never studied in Vienna but as
part of Schoenberg's masterclass in Berlin. Membership in the school is not generally
extended to Schoenberg's many pupils in the United States from 1933, such as John Cage,
Leon Kirchner and Gerald Strang, nor to many other composers who, at a greater remove,
wrote compositions evocative of the Second Viennese style, such as the Canadian pianist
Glenn Gould. By extension, however, certain pupils of Schoenberg's pupils, such as Berg's
pupil Hans Erich Apostel and Webern's pupils René Leibowitz, Leopold Spinner and Ludwig
Zenk, are usually included in the roll-call.

Though the school included highly distinct musical personalities (the styles of Berg and
Webern are in fact very different from each other, and from Schoenberg—for example,
only the works of Webern conform to the rule stated by Schoenberg that only a single row
be used throughout all movements of a composition[2]—while Gerhard and Skalkottas
were closely involved with the folk music of their respective countries) the impression of
cohesiveness was enhanced by the literary efforts of some of its members. Wellesz wrote
the first book on Schoenberg, who was also the subject of several Festschriften put
together by his friends and pupils; Rufer and Spinner both wrote books on the technique
of twelve-tone composition; and Leibowitz's influential study of Schoenberg, Berg and
Webern, Schoenberg et son école, helped to establish the image of a school in the period
immediately after World War II in France and abroad. Several of those mentioned (e.g.
Jalowetz, Rufer) were also influential as teachers, and others (e.g. Kolisch, Rankl, Stein,
Steuermann, Zillig) as performers, in disseminating the ideals, ideas and approved
repertoire of the group. Perhaps the culmination of the school took place at Darmstadt
almost immediately after World War II, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik,
wherein Schoenberg—who was invited but too ill to travel—was ultimately usurped in
musical ideology by the music of his pupil, Webern, as composers and performers from
the Second Viennese School (e.g. Leibowitz, Rufer, Adorno, Kolisch, Heiss, Stadlen,
Stuckenschmidt, Scherchen) converged with the new serialists (e.g. Boulez, Stockhausen,
Maderna, Nono, et al.).

Atonality, in music, the absence of functional harmony as a primary structural element.

The reemergence of purely melodic-rhythmic forces as major determinants of musical
form in the Expressionist works of Arnold Schoenberg and his school prior to World War I
was a logical, perhaps inevitable consequence of the weakening of tonal centres in 19th-
century post-Romantic music. By the time of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for
example, the emphasis on expressive chromaticism had caused successive chords to relate
more strongly to each other than to a common tonic firmly established by intermittent
harmonic cadences. Eventually, the chromatic scale of 12 equidistant semitones
superseded the diatonic scale, the inseparable partner of functional harmony, to the
extent that melodic-rhythmic tensions and resolutions took the place of the harmonic
cadences and modulations that had determined the structure of Western music for
centuries.

Atonality, although well-suited for relatively brief musical utterances of great rhetorical or
emotional intensity, proved unable to sustain large-scale musical events. It was in an
attempt to resolve this vexing dilemma that Schoenberg devised the method of
composing with 12 tones related only to each other, a method predicated on purely
polyphonic considerations of the sort that had been largely abandoned during the
Classical and Romantic eras but had, by the same token, been typical of pre-tonal and
early tonal music.

In practice, the atonality of a composition is relative, for an atonal work may contain
fragmentary passages in which tonal centres seem to exist. Schoenberg’s song cycle
Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1925) are typical examples of
atonal works.

12-tone music, large body of music, written roughly since World War I, that uses the so-
called 12-tone method or technique of composition. The Austrian-born composer Arnold
Schoenberg is credited with the invention of this technique, although other composers
(e.g., the American composer Charles Ives and the Austrian Josef Hauer) anticipated
Schoenberg’s invention by writing music that in a few respects was similar technically to
his 12-tone music.

Between 1912 and 1922 Schoenberg came to realize that he was searching for a new
method of composition that would provide a new basis for musical structure to replace
the old basis of tonality, which he felt was being stretched and distorted too much to
remain a unifying structural principle. Instead of using 1 or 2 tones as main points of focus
for an entire composition (as key centres in tonal music), Schoenberg suggested using all
12 tones “related only to one another.” In such a system, unlike tonality, no notes would
predominate as focal points, nor would any hierarchy of importance be assigned to the
individual tones.

The new unifying principle in composition would then arise from the particular order given
to a collection of the 12 tones, an order that would be different for each composition. The
basic order for any one composition came to be known as its basic set, its 12-tone row, or
its 12-tone series, all of which terms are synonymous. The basic set for Schoenberg’s Wind
Quintet (1924) is E♭–G–A–B–C♯–C–B♭–D–E–F♯–A♭–F; for his String Quartet No. 4 (1936) it
is D–C♯–A–B♭–F–E♭–E–C–A♭–G–F♯–B.

The basic set is not a theme, for it has no specific shape, rhythm, or loudness. It is a
backbone, a musical idea that permeates the composition in which it is used. Because of
the various principles of composing and manipulating the basic set recognized by
Schoenberg and others, it is not often possible nor even desirable to hear the basic set
when the composition is performed. This situation has led many people to attack
Schoenberg’s method as unmusical and as mathematical madness. Such views seem
unjustifiable, because, as Schoenberg pointed out, his method specifies only a tiny fraction
of the total nature of a composition—certainly no more than composing with tonality
specifies.

Schoenberg’s best-known pupils were the Austrian composers Anton von Webern and
Alban Berg, each of whom wrote 12-tone music. Neither used the idea of the basic set in
the same manner as Schoenberg did, and their music differs greatly in many respects from
each other’s and from Schoenberg’s. Other important composers include the Russian-born
Igor Stravinsky, the American Roger Sessions, the Austrian-born Ernst Krenek, the Italian
Luigi Dallapiccola, and the German Hans Werner Henze. Many, such as Stravinsky (who
had earlier criticized the approach severely) and Sessions, began writing 12-tone music
after composing much non-12-tone music.

Some composers also have used some of the notions behind the basic set while
simultaneously writing tonal music; among them are Schoenberg himself, the Austrian-
born Ernst Toch, the American Walter Piston, and the Russian Dmitry Shostakovich. The
American composer Benjamin Johnston combined principles of 12-tone music with
microtonality (use of intervals smaller than whole tones or semitones). There are no
sufficient analytic techniques used by musicians in understanding 12-tone music, which is
partly why it remains not very well understood as a total musical phenomenon by
composers, performers, and listeners alike. Twelve-tone music is an example of serialism
(q.v.) in music.

Primitivism refers to: an artistic movement in particular which originated as a reaction to

the Enlightenment the general tendency to idealize any social behavior judged relatively
simple or primitive, whether in the arts, social sciences or elsewhere.

Main Characteristics of Primitivism

A concern with cultural phenomena of the ideas in European society- particularly sexuality,
madness, spiritual punishment, and violence.
 Celebration of the "unconscious”, often with the implication that non-western cultures
are more in touch with the unconscious. A concern with drama and symbiosis, often
assumed to be "universal."
 Abstraction of the figure, particularly facial and bodily proportions. Inspired by "non-
western" arts, particularly African masks. Occidental primitivist artists were inspired by the
visual abstraction of African artwork, which tend to favor it over naturalistic representation.
This is because many African artworks, regardless of medium, tend to represent objects or
ideas rather than depict them.
 Focus on rhythmic and percussive elements, especially in music and ritual performance.

In the U.S., this movement was often associated with African or African Americans-
particularly the popularity of Josephine Baker, jazz, and the broad characterization (esp. in
France) of Africans as "soul of rhythm."
 Flatness and geometric designs inspired by "nonWestern" art forms.
 Application of paint in a rough, manipulated style, so as to connote "rawness."

Stravinsky

Born Igor Feodorvich Stravinsky, June 17 1882 near St. Petersburg.

 Father was in St. Petersburg Opera
 Despite his parents’ involvement in music, Igor was sent to law school.
 While in law school he befriended the youngest son of Rimsky-Korsakov, who
introduced Stravinsky to his father. The older man played a significant role in Stravinsky’s
early musical formation, helping him find his own special sound technique.

Several works debuted in his early twenties:

 Symphony in E flat major (1907)
 Faun and the Shepherdess (1907)
 Fantastic Scherzo (1909)
 Fireworks (1909)
 His ballet “The Fire-Bird” established him firmly in the international scene of prominent
composers.
 Some of Stravinsky’s fame is due to his producer, Diaghilev, and the Russian Ballet. At
that time, Diaghilev represented the artistic avant-garde in Russia. Had Stravinsky not
caught the attention of such a prominent figure, his career would likely not have taken off
so quickly.

In the U.S., professional bands such as the celebrated band of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore
(1829–92) competed in attracting virtuoso soloists. Gilmore, whose musical skill was
matched by a flair for showmanship, was particularly influential in promoting technical
skill and repertory of high quality. His true successor was John Philip Sousa (1854–32),
bandmaster of the U.S. Marine Band and composer of such marches as Semper Fidelis, The
Washington Post, and The Stars and Stripes Forever. The accomplishments of Gilmore and
Sousa were to raise the art of the band to a distinguished level, making band music, in a
sense, a very American musical genre. It remains a staple in parades and in the
extravaganzas that form an important part of the entertainment incidental to sports events.

Ragtime, propulsively syncopated musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the
predominant style of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime evolved
in the playing of honky-tonk pianists along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the last
decades of the 19th century. It was influenced by minstrel-show songs, blacks’ banjo styles,
and syncopated (off-beat) dance rhythms of the cakewalk, and also elements of European
music. Ragtime found its characteristic expression in formally structured piano
compositions. The regularly accented left-hand beat, in 4/4 or 2/4 time, was opposed in the
right hand by a fast, bouncingly syncopated melody that gave the music its powerful
forward impetus.

Scott Joplin, called “King of Ragtime,” published the most successful of the early rags,
“The Maple Leaf Rag,” in 1899. Joplin, who considered ragtime a permanent and serious
branch of classical music, composed hundreds of short pieces, a set of études, and operas in
the style. Other important performers were, in St. Louis, Louis Chauvin and Thomas M.
Turpin (father of St. Louis ragtime) and, in New Orleans, Tony Jackson.
Blues

W.C. Handy, in full William Christopher Handy, (born November 16, 1873, Florence,
Alabama, U.S.—died March 28, 1958, New York, New York), African American composer
who changed the course of popular music by integrating the blues idiom into then-
fashionable ragtime music. Among his best-known works is the classic “St. Louis Blues.”

Handy was a son and grandson of Methodist ministers, and he was educated at Teachers
Agricultural and Mechanical College in Huntsville, Alabama. Going against family
tradition, he began to cultivate his interest in music at a young age and learned to play
several instruments, including the organ, piano, and guitar. He was a particularly skilled
cornetist and trumpet player. Longing to experience the world beyond Florence, Alabama,
Handy left his hometown in 1892. He traveled throughout the Midwest, taking a variety of
jobs with several musical groups. He also worked as a teacher in 1900–02. He conducted
his own orchestra, the Knights of Pythias from Clarksdale, Mississippi, from 1903 to 1921.
During the early years of this period of his life, Handy was steeped in the music of the
Mississippi Delta and of Memphis, and he began to arrange some of those tunes for his
band’s performances. Unable to find a publisher for the songs he was beginning to write,
Handy formed a partnership with Harry Pace and founded Pace & Handy Music Company
(later Handy Brothers Music Company).
Handy worked during the period of transition from ragtime to jazz. Drawing on the vocal
blues melodies of African American folklore, he added harmonizations to his orchestral
arrangements. His work helped develop the conception of the blues as a harmonic
framework within which to improvise. With his “Memphis Blues” (published 1912) and
especially his “St. Louis Blues” (1914), he introduced a melancholic element, achieved
chiefly by use of the “blue” or slightly flattened seventh tone of the scale, which was
characteristic of African American folk music. Later he wrote other blues pieces (“Beale
Street Blues,” 1916; “Loveless Love”) and several marches and symphonic compositions.
He issued anthologies of African American spirituals and blues (Blues: An Anthology,
1926; W.C. Handy’s Collection of Negro Spirituals, 1938; A Treasury of the Blues, 1949)
and studies of black American musicians (Negro Authors and Composers of the United
States, 1938; Unsung Americans Sung, 1944). His autobiography, Father of the Blues, was
published in 1941.

Jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced
by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from
ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble
playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use
of original timbres.

Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probably futile.

Jazz has been, from its very beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, a constantly
evolving, expanding, changing music, passing through several distinctive phases of
development; a definition that might apply to one phase—for instance, to New Orleans
style or swing—becomes inappropriate when applied to another segment of its history, say,
to free jazz. Early attempts to define jazz as a music whose chief characteristic was
improvisation, for example, turned out to be too restrictive and largely untrue, since
composition, arrangement, and ensemble have also been essential components of jazz for
most of its history. Similarly, syncopation and swing, often considered essential and unique
to jazz, are in fact lacking in much authentic jazz, whether of the 1920s or of later decades.
Again, the long-held notion that swing could not occur without syncopation was roundly
disproved when trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bunny Berigan (among others) frequently
generated enormous swing while playing repeated, unsyncopated quarter notes.

Jazz, in fact, is not—and never has been—an entirely composed, predetermined music, nor
is it an entirely extemporized one. For almost all of its history it has employed both creative
approaches in varying degrees and endless permutations. And yet, despite these diverse
terminological confusions, jazz seems to be instantly recognized and distinguished as
something separate from all other forms of musical expression. To repeat Armstrong’s
famous reply when asked what swing meant: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” To
add to the confusion, there often have been seemingly unbridgeable perceptual differences
between the producers of jazz (performers, composers, and arrangers) and its audiences.
For example, with the arrival of free jazz and other latter-day avant-garde manifestations,
many senior musicians maintained that music that didn’t swing was not jazz.

Most early classical composers (such as Aaron Copland, John Alden Carpenter—and even
Igor Stravinsky, who became smitten with jazz) were drawn to its instrumental sounds and
timbres, the unusual effects and inflections of jazz playing (brass mutes, glissandos, scoops,
bends, and stringless ensembles), and its syncopations, completely ignoring, or at least
underappreciating, the extemporized aspects of jazz. Indeed, the sounds that jazz musicians
make on their instruments—the way they attack, inflect, release, embellish, and colour
notes—characterize jazz playing to such an extent that if a classical piece were played by
jazz musicians in their idiomatic phrasings, it would in all likelihood be called jazz.

Nonetheless, one important aspect of jazz clearly does distinguish it from other traditional
musical areas, especially from classical music: the jazz performer is primarily or wholly a
creative, improvising composer—his own composer, as it were—whereas in classical music
the performer typically expresses and interprets someone else’s composition.

Tin Pan Alley, genre of American popular music that arose in the late 19th century from the
American song-publishing industry centred in New York City.
The genre took its name from the byname of the street on which the industry was based,
being on 28th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in the early 20th century; around
Broadway and 32nd Street in the 1920s; and ultimately on Broadway between 42nd and
50th streets. The phrase tin pan referred to the sound of pianos furiously pounded by the so-
called song pluggers, who demonstrated tunes to publishers. Tin Pan Alley comprised the
commercial music of songwriters of ballads, dance music, and vaudeville, and its name
eventually became synonymous with American popular music in general. When these
genres first became prominent, the most profitable commercial product of Tin Pan Alley
was sheet music for home consumption, and songwriters, lyricists, and popular performers
laboured to produce music to meet the demand.
The growth of film, audio recording, radio, and television created an increased demand for
more and different kinds of music, and Tin Pan Alley was rendered actually and
metaphorically dead as other music-publishing centres arose to supply melodies for these
genres.