broad versions: Steady Roll, Round the Clock, My Daddy Rock Me. So, a
number of spirituals are blues at least in form.
On My Way in this volume obviously belongs to the blues, which are
most commonly known in the 12 measures from today. One stanza, musically of
four measures – iambic pentameter in prosody – the stanza is repeated and
finally a third stanza which rhymes with the first, completing the couplet.
Some maintain that in its most archaic form of the blues the first stanza
was repeated three times instead of twice, thus arriving at a verse of 16
measures. On My Way is precisely of this format. Rock My Soul belongs to a
different category of blues with 16 measures. Each chorus consists of a
verse with eight-measures played in “stop-time”, each time in a variation
ending with the same refrain every time. If you know Georgia Grind, which
Louis Armstrong recorded in 1926, or Hesitating Blues, by Handy, which he
recorded in 1954, or even Blue Suede Shoes, you know the shortened version
in 12 measures of this type of blues with refrain. Go Down Moses in this
album is structured in this manner.
A jazz musician playing spirituals? In a sense that Louis Armstrong
has been doing all along.
A few other features need to be painting out. The second chorus in
Down By the Riverside starts with a break (the steady rhythm being
interrupted for an instant) just the way it is in dozen of work songs.
In This Train there is so-called stop-time interlude, which Louis
Armstrong used so successfully in several of his instrumental renderings
during the 20’s. The “call and response” formula can be heard in This
Train, Didn’t it Rain, and Go Down Moses.
But for me Louis Armstrong’s greatest talent is the way he handles
the exposition of a melody. The trumpet solo in Swing low, Sweet Chariot
and down By the Riverside sow what I mean. Of course his play is forceful
and convincing. But there are suspensions; almost imperceptible melodic
changes showing his offbeat rhythm. All this will immediately and most
directly bring out the melody, enhancing it to a point of opening up new
vistas that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
The arrangements are by Sy Oliver who was also the musical director.
Oliver’s career as trumpeter – composer – arranger goes back to the time of
Zack Whyte’s orchestra in the early 30’s and he, more than anyone else,
created the style of Jimmy Lunceford’s powerful orchestra between 1933 and
1939. After that, he was Tommy Dorsey’s arranger and has since become one
of the principal arranger – directors for MCA.
As for pop American music I believe that since death of Frank Sinatra
in the U.S have not anyone real pop-singer. By my opinion “Sinatra was
America and America was Sinatra”.
Frank Sinatra has been called the greatest popular singer of the
century. Whether that is true, in a century that also offers us Bing
Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and many others is, of course, a matter of personal
emotional choice and, therefore, unknowable. What can be said is that under
the intense and fickle scrutiny of the pop marketplace for nearly two-
thirds of a century, Sinatra's music was in the air the world breathed and
fell out of fashion only long enough for the deserters either to grow up or
recognize that what was offered in its place was almost always trash by
comparison.
Sinatra was born December 15, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J., and as a
schoolboy nursed ambitions to be a journalist. The earliest known example
of Sinatra on record come from his 1935 performance on the Major Bowes
Amateur Hour, in which he was matched with three other aspirants to sing
"Shine." After the program they were sent out as a group, the Hoboken Four,
on a Major Bowes road show.
Sinatra touched the big time in 1939 when Harry James, fresh out of
the Benny Goodman band and not yet a major star in him own right, hired him
to be vocalists in his new band. In August he recorded "All Or Nothing At
All" with James, but the record would not become a major hit until Columbia
reissued it during the recording ban in 1943. Sinatra was on a fast
trajectory to the top himself. He left James to take an offer from Tommy
Dorsey, with whom he recorded more than 90 songs before he left. The Dorsey
years connected him to Axel Stordahl, who would arrange and conduct the
first four Sinatra records under his own name in 1942 and become his chief
musical architect for the next decade. He also made two movies with Dorsey,
Las Vagas Night at Paramount and Ship Ahoy at MGM. But aside from two
pictures with Gene Kelly, Sinatra's film career would be of passing
interest until the 1950s.
The band singer period ended in September 1942. When Sinatra went out
on as a soloist, it was to join the stock company of vocalists on the
weekly "Lucky Strike Hit Parade." But there was buzz in the air about
Sinatra, and it burst wide open when in 1943 when he was booked as a
supporting act to Goodman at the Paramount Theater. Goodman introduced him,
turned to kick off his band, and before he could lower his arm heard an ear-
shattering scream of 3,000 mostly female fans explode behind him. "What
they hell is that?" Goodman muttered.
During the bobby-sox years, Sinatra recorded for Columbia and turned out a
steady flow of romantic ballads backed by Stordahl's tasteful
orchestrations. But nothing as intense as the Sinatra phenomenon of the
'40s could sustain indefinitely. The energy ran out of the Sinatra boom and
by the 1952, it is said, he was washed up.
With the '40s behind him, however, the stage was set for his golden age.
Capitol Records signed him up and concentrated on marketing him to young
adults through carefully planned long playing albums organized around a
mood, an idea, a feeling, a concept. In the Wee Small Hours, crafted by
Nelson Riddle, became the matrix for his recording career from then on.
Among the ballad albums, All Alone, arranged by Gordon Jenkins in 1962,
stands in a class by itself for its stark sense of melancholy.
After Wee Small Hours, Sinatra turned to develop a side of his musical
personality that had never been exploited -- the swinging Sinatra doing
upbeat tempos against jazz-styled big band charts that caught some of the
feeling that the new Count Basie band was generating on the instrumental
side.
The albums and a string of successful films took Sinatra into the '60s at
the top of his fame and form. He played the Newport Jazz Festival in the
'60s, recorded with the Basie and Ellington, and played the Chairman to a
colorful Clan that included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and other chums.
Talent was the admission ticket.
Yet, the force of youth movement and rock music in the late '60s and early
'70s seemed to shake his own confidence in his own hipness, and he tried to
embrace some of the new material. But after a period of retirement and a
few false starts in the recording studio, he returned to form doing the
kind of music that told stories worth telling. In the '90s his stubbornness
paid off. The youth icons of the '60s and '70s finally came to him to sing
his song on his terms. Duets may have received mixed critical reaction, but
once again Sinatra was king of the hill, scoring the largest album sales of
his career.
Sinatra received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983. He died May 14,
1998, at the age of 82.
In 1998, Sinatra was elected by the Readers into the Down Beat Hall of
Fame.
From the times of the Pilgrims American people have liked music and
made it a part of their lives. They have played and sung and fashioned
their own songs for all occasions.
There were, however, no European courts for the cultivation of art
music and opportunities were rare for the training and development of
individual talents. When sufficient number of professional musicians had
arrived to establish centers of serious musical culture American role as a
backward province of European music was firmly established. I was only
natural that the foreign arbiters of taste would regard any deviations from
European musical thinking as deplorable savagery to be resolutely put down.
Small wonder, then, that a serious dichotomy developed in the field
of American composition. American educated young people, fresh from French
or German influences, did their loyal best to write good German or French
music. For subject matter they turned to “remote legends and misty myths”
guaranteed to keep them from thinking about the crudities of the land,
which they found so excruciating upon their return from abroad. They did,
however, bring back with them a professional competence, which was to be
their significant contribution to the American scene.
Meanwhile the uneducated creator, finding good stuff about him,
carried on a rapidly developing music speech, which was a blend of European
folk music, African rhythm, and regional color, and discovered that the
public the public liked his music and was ready to pay for it handsomely.
As a result via the minstrel ballad, through ragtime into jazz, a genuine
popular American music made its appearance and was given every
encouragement by the entertainment industry. European musicians were quick
to recognize the originality and value of this music and, beginning with
Debussy, accepted it as a new resource.
The American serious group, however, anxious to preserve their new-
found dignity, nervously dismissed this music as purely commercial (a lot
of it was and is), and until it was made respectable by the attention paid
to it by Ravel and Stravinsky there were only occasional attempts to borrow
from its rhythms and melodies. The highly successful popular group, on the
other hand, has developed the notion that the technique of composition is
not only unnecessary but an affectation. Such needs as may arise for their
concerted numbers, ballets, and orchestrations they can well afford to pay
for from the hacks (the underprivileged literate musicians). Gershwin’s
contribution to the American scene is significant beyond his music itself
in that he was able to reconcile the two points of view and achieve popular
music in the large traditional forms.
Americans are ex – Europeans, to be sure, and as such have
responsibilities to the preservation and continuance of European culture,
but American are also a race – and a vigorous one – and it is increasingly
evident that we are capable of developing cultural traditions of our own.
As for Russian music it is impossible to describe its contribution to
the world musical culture, and will be difficult to estimate it. Of course,
the great musical occurrence is the Russian classical music, and I would
like to tell about my favorites Russian composers.
Sergei Procofyev was five when his mother gave him his first piano
lesson. At the age of six he was already composing and actually writing
small pieces for the piano and a few years later he write an opera to his
own libretto called The Giant. Procofyev graduated from the Conservatoire
in the spring of 1914. Taking his final exams as a pianist, he won the
highest distinction: the Anton Rubinstein gold medal and prize.
Procofyev worked for nearly fifty years in all spheres and genres of
music. His powerful and original talent has won universal recognition. His
best works – and these are not few – have enriched the legacy of world
musical culture.
Procofyev belonged to the older generation of Soviet composers who
entered upon the scene before the October Revolution. He was a pupil of
Rimsky – Korsakov and Lyadov who educated the young composers of their time
in the spirit of the finest Russian classical traditions, which they strove
to protect from modernistic influences.
Procofyev was a man of independent thinking who traveled his own way.
He was one of the greatest masters of the new, Soviet period in the history
of the Russian music. Never satisfied with his achievements, Procofyev was
forever probing, forever working on new ideas. The development of music in
the first half of this century is unthinkable without him.
Operas and ballets held an important place among the works he
created. The opera Love for Three Oranges was written in1919 and has become
very popular. Procofyev wrote another opera in the twenties – The Flaming
Angel, but did not live to see it on the stage. No more than two fragments
of it were performed in his lifetime.
Ballet music appealed to Procofyev even more than the opera. Besides
his Buffoon he wrote three other ballet scores while abroad – The Age of
Steel, The Prodigal Son, and On the Dnieper. The Fourth Symphony, the last
to be written abroad, was the most interesting.
Procofyev’s best works, written after his return to the Soviet Union
are: the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935 - 1936), the symphonic fairy – tale
Peter and the Wolf (1936), the heroic cantata Alexander Nevsky (1938 –
1939), the opera War and Peace (1941), the Fifth Symphony (1944), the
ballet Cinderella (1944).
The last five years of his life brought such important works as the
Seventh Symphony, the oratorio On guard of peace, the symphonic suite
Winter Fire and the ballet The Stone Flower. Unforgettable are Procofyev’s
sonatas and concertos for violin and many other compositions revealing the
finest qualities of his tremendous talent.
Other greatest Russian composer is Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky was a pupil of Rimsky – Korsakov, but his reputation was
made by the music he wrote for the Diaghilev Ballet in Paris (The Firebird,
Petrouchka, The Rite of Spring). This period is marked by interest in
Russia folk song and brilliant orchestral coloring. The most varied rhythms
are used for percussive effects to accentuate the brutally harsh
sonorities, and a highly dissonant harmony results from the use of
polytonality.
About 1920, Stravinsky struck out in directions that were new, partly
in technique and partly in the kinds of subjects and mediums employed. His
technique showed a new restrained, a less dissonant and more tonal style,
and greater clarity of form; in short, a tendency toward the neoclassic
style. His material was typically drawn from the classics of the eighteenth
century. The great variety of the musical types after 1920 is astonishing:
oratorios, chamber music, concertos, ballets, symphonies, pieces for a
piano, and so on. Every work of Stravinsky’s has a special individuality,
and in each he achieves a uniqueness of style and solves a problem to which
he seldom returns. Directly after first World War, Stravinsky wrote a
number of works marked by economy of means and expression, using a few solo
players (The Soldier’s Tale; The Wind Octet). Later, in his “third” period,
he returned to the larger forms of the symphony (Symphony in Three
Movements, 1945). Stravinsky’s early interest in American jazz rhythms
dates from Ragtime (1918). A more ambitious work , Ebony Concerto (1945),
for jazz band, appeared after he had settled permanently in the United
States.
On the whole, Stravinsky’s style is essentially anti-romantic. The
elasticity and primitive vigor of his rhythms was calculated to represent
his non-romantic subject matter, and his melodies, especially in later
works, are deliberately matter – of – fact, dry, and occasionally
commonplace, as a reaction to the expressive melodies of Romanticism.
Stravinsky uses the tonal material of the diatonic (seven – tone)
scale, sometimes combined with the old modes. His early polytonality is
replaced later by clearer tonality, but his dissonant harmony is often the
result of the combination of polyphonic voices. A special feature of his
style is parallel dissonant chords or intervals.
Stravinsky was always a virtuoso orchestrator. A fondness for the dry
brilliant sonorities of the woodwinds and particularly the percussion
instruments tended to relegate the strings to the background. To
individualize the voice parts of chords, Stravinsky often used instruments
of different timbre.
As a young man, Stravinsky burst on the musical scene with ballet The
Rite of Spring. It excited everybody, exhilarated a number, and outraged
more. Stravinsky’s later styles were also viewed with alarm – often by
those who had just accustomed themselves to his earlier style. They were
dry, the wells of inspiration had run out, some said. The truth was, of
course, that Stravinsky was simply being himself, and like every great
artist, his style changed, as he did, from work to work. No one, however,
has ever denied Stravinsky’s consummate draftsmanship, his deep respect for
the past, or his extraordinary impact on the music of the present day.
As for Russian pop music I could say almost nothing. I don’t know a
contemporary pop singer or compositor who, by my opinion, bring in world
musical culture anything really great. But I think that our time arranges
to make anything memorable in the musical area and may be soon we could see
a birth a new Russian musical talent.
In conclusion I should say that music is the greatest occurrence in
our life. From this work we can see that music don’t has limits and however
it try to unite the people in the world. Someone famous said that
mathematics is the universal language. I’m ready to argue – music is the
universal language, because this language understands everyone. If you want
understand foreigner – listen his native music and you will see his true
soul.
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