Английская музыка
Culture is one of the most important components, which form every
nation. It is one occurrence that distinguishes and unites all the people
who live in the world. But it is impossible to imagine the culture without
music, a very big part of our life.
Every nation has one’s own music and I think that inside music are
concluded all peculiarities of the nation, it is contain the key for
understand the soul of people.
When I was associated with foreigners (they were Americans) I noted
that they liked our folk music, they frequently listened it and each of
them had without fail an audiocassette with Russian folk music. They told
me about the most popular in United States Russian singers and composers.
Our pop music is not famous outside Russia. But many people from other
countries love our folk and classical music.
On the contrary we know nothing about American folk and classical
music and I would like to discuss about it.
By my opinion a serious study of American music is arrestingly
important at this time. Music has become on of American leading industries
American performing standards are probably now higher than anywhere else in
the world, and Americans are making rapid strides in music education. How
large a part in all this activity is American music to play? How good is
it? How does it differ from Russian music?
There are many signs of an awakened interest in American composition.
More of it is performed, published, and recorded than ever before. This
interest is not confined to the United States alone. During the past few
years Russians who have always liked American popular music (like Brithney
Spears, Madonna, Michael Jackson) have discovered that America have several
composers in the serious field well worth its attention. As for the
foundations, fortunes are being spent to discover, to train and to
encourage American native talent.
We could imagine a pattern, which would include Billings, Harris and
Gershwin. Each of them contributed substantially to American musical
tradition, and when American can grasp their interrelationship they
perceive that there is indeed an American music, a hardy one just beginning
to fell its strength and destined to stand beside their other contributions
to world culture.
I would like to tell about my three favorites American composers.
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn on September 25, 1989. He was by
no means a prodigy, and his musical education was spasmodic. He took
lessons at the piano and later studied harmony. In his teens, he acquired a
job as song plugger at one of the largest publishing houses. Before long he
was writing songs of his own; and in 1919, he was the proud present of a
“hit” that swept the country – Swanee. His rise as one of the most
successful composers for the Broadway stage was rapid.
In 1924, he composed his first serious work in the jazz idiom, the
historic “Rhapsody in Blue” the success of which made Gershwin famous
throughout the world of music. After that he divided his activities between
writing popular music for the Broadway stage (and later for the Hollywood
cinema) and serious works for concert hall consumption. In both fields, he
was extraordinary successful and popular. He died in Hollywood on June 11,
1937, after an unsuccessful operation on the brain.
It is mainly since Gershwin’s death that complete awareness of his
musical importance has become almost universal. The little defects in his
major works – those occasional awkward modulations, the strained
transitions, the obscure instrumentation – no longer appear quite so
important as they did several decades ago. What many did not realize then
and what they now know – is that the intrinsically vital qualities of
Gershwin’s works reduce these technical flaws to insignificance. The music
is so alive, so freshly conceived, and put down on paper with such
spontaneity and enthusiasm that is youthful spirit refuses to age. The
capacity of this music to enchant and magnetize audiences’ remains as great
today, even with, familiarity, as it was yesterday, when it came upon us
with the freshness of novelty.
That he had a wonderful reservoir of melodies was, of course, self-
evident when Gershwin was alive. What was not quite so obvious then was
that he had impressed his identity on those melodies – his way of shaping a
lyric line, his use of certain rhythmic phrases, the piquant effect of some
of his accompaniments – so that they would always remain recognizably his.
Other my favorite American composers is Roy Harris.
Few American composers of XX century and our time have achieved so
personal a style as Roy Harris. His music is easily identified by many
stylistic traits to which he has doing through his creative development:
the long themes which span many bars before pausing to catch a breath, the
long and involved development in which the resources of variation and
transformation are utilized exhaustively, the powerfully projected
contrapuntal lines, the modal harmonies and the asymmetrical rhythms are a
few of the qualities found in most Harris’s works.
Through Harris has frequently employed the forms of the past
(toccata, passacaglia, fugue, etc), has shown a predilection for ancient
modes, and en occasion has drawn thematic inspiration from Celtic folk
songs and Protestant hymns, he is modern in spirit. His music has a
contemporary pulse, the cogent drive and force of present –day living;
there is certainly nothing archaic about it. More important still, it is
essentially American music, even in those works in which he does not draw
his ideas from folk or popular music. The broad sweep of his melodies
suggests the vast plains of Kansas, the open spaces of the West. The
momentum of his rhythmic drive is American in its nervousness and vitality.
But in subtler qualities, too, Harris’s music is the music of America. “The
moods”, Harris once wrote, “which seem particularly American to me are
noisy ribaldry, then sadness, a groping earnestness which amount to
suppilance toward those deepest spiritual yearnings within ourselves; there
is little grace or mellowness in our midst”.
Such moods as noisy ribaldry, sadness, groping earnestness are caught
in Harris’s music, and to these moods are added other American qualities;
youthful vigor, health, optimism and enthusiasm.
Harris was born in the Lincoln country, Oklahoma, on February 12,
1898. While still a child, he learned to play the clarinet and the piano.
In 1926 he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. In Paris he wrote
his first major works: of them, The Concerto for the Piano, Clarinet and
String Quartet (1927) was the most successful. His Fifth Symphony has been
dedicated to the “Heroic and Peace-loving People of the Soviet Union”.
I guess, we know nothing about American folk music excepting jazz-
singers and composers. The sole and the most famous of them is Louis
Armstrong. I believe that all people know this name and I would like to
tell about my favorite album of his legendary music, it’s called “Louis and
the Good Book”.
Anyone who has ever read a history book on jazz knows that there’s a
connection between jazz, spiritual music, work songs and the blues. But
often historians don’t explain this relationship clearly enough. The
phrasing of the arrangements for the brass and read sections in big jazz
bands are of course a direct inheritance from the preacher’s call and the
parishioner’s customary response in church. The some is true for today’s
funky songs, which derives from gospel. But all this illuminates only
specific styles without saying anything about the antecedence and legacy of
jazz in general. This album introduces some aspects of this history and by
my opinion is the best album of Louis Armstrong.
During the first three years of his recording career, Louis Armstrong
played blues and stomps. In fact, that was what he recorded in his very
first session with king Oliver in 1923. Then same rhythmical airs and other
hits of that era were added. During those years his technique and musical
concepts acquired such a degree of substance and affluence that he became
the first jazz virtuoso. Beginning with the late 20’s he added a new kind
of melody to his repertoire: the “ballad”. In these interpretations another
side of his talent unfolded, incorporating a whole series of standards into
his jazz repertoire. Standards refer to themes taken up by all musicians.
Thus, he not only demonstrated that jazz phrasing is applicable to these
kinds of melodies and tempos, but he did it so well that the mood of show
ballads became an integral part of every form of jazz. This is not the
first time that Louis Armstrong interprets spirituals. In 1938 he recorded
same versions of four pieces with the Lynn Murray choir for MCA. Shadrack,
based on the traditional form of spirituals, Jonah and the Whale, Going to
Shout All Over the God’s Heaven and Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. Two
years later he did a version of Cain and Abel with the big band he was
directing at that time. He had actually recorded Motherless Child in 1930.
While the melody is identical to the second part of the Dear Old Southland
interlude by Creamer and Layton, which he recorded in a duo with the near
legendary pianist Buck Washington, the melody of Motherless Child is also
very close to others that he used in several blues, better known in their
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