Jazz Music between World Wars Essay

The flatus furor in symphony during the twenties reflected a general spirit of the times for many commentators like Seldes that this hug drug became k instantaneouslyn as the hunch Age. Following World War I, lead symphony certainly captured the pop imagi nation. The rapid ordinaryity of get by medication guide to its equally rapid spread among practice of medicineians. No other(a) ardor up to this time in American prevalent medicinal drug so cursorily came to dominate pop per categoryance. The American vocabulary, which had already do significant inroads into the mercenaryized favorite symphony trade, had captured habitual tastes at an unprecedented level, seemingly move aside the old standards. And just as ragtime and shorten saltation medicinal drug became p artistry of earlier commercial ordinary music, the dominance of whop in the twenties also represented a major hold of the down in the mouth vernacular in American popular music. The sleep wi th craze began through the twist of non- captain musicians. While still marginal to approximately legitimatize venues, non- victor musicians performing the chouse vernacular were attracting audiences to clubs, theaters, restaurants, and were popular in the speakeasies of the 1920s.They also had opportunities for their music to reach a broader audience in a booming account book market following World War I. overlord musicians, however, quickly adoptive manage music in their orchestras and smaller binds. They co-opted the jazz fever speckle simultaneously distancing themselves from non-professionals. (Charters, 39-43) By occupying the most lucrative jobs in theaters, move halls, hotels, and other venues, professional musicians positioned themselves as the premier interpreters of this recent vernacular idiom in commercial popular music.The common defense of jazz as entire music during the Jazz Age embraced the professional musicians and professional composers who performed and hitd jazz music, non the non-professional musicians who first introduced it. In adopting jazz idioms, professional musicians were obviously continuing the attend of cultivating the American vernacular. Black professional musicians were already adopting baleful vernacular idioms in their music making in earlier syncopated society orchestras and simply adopted jazz idioms as well as the name in their jazz orchestras.(Bushell, 72-75) White professional musicians had performed rags as part of their repertoire in the past, but with the jazz craze, many were quick to adopt syncopated dance and jazz practices in some form as the defining style of their profession. White professional musicians also quickly followed disconsolate professional musicians in transforming their bands into jazz orchestras, and just as quickly claimed to be the modern proponents of this new American popular music.Black and white professional jazz orchestras in the 1920s established the basic instrumentati on, arrangement, and techniques of the big band dance orchestras that rule American popular music until the 1950s. In the 1920s, an emerging new model of thoroughly music involved a balancing of the previous genteel practices and elegant music of professional musicians with popular vernacular idioms. The proper balance, however, was heatedly debated. Professional musicians would constantly distance themselves from the pure vernacular of non-professional musicians.In defend their balance of the cultivate and the vernacular in popular performance, popular tastes, however, were necessitateing jazz music and a professional musician would be remiss to curve his patrons in the popular music market as much as stodgy critics and some professional musicians would rail against the pernicious influence of jazz. Professional musicians in mediating the popular music market had to continue to navigate the moral, aesthetic, set, and racial construction of groovy music in America.While p opular tastes in musical pleasure promoted the coloured vernacular in commercial popular music, the plight of the African American community in the United States go along to be dire. Some leaders in the black community had hoped that African Americans participation during World War I in twain the armed forces and in diligence, and the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, would change their fortunes as segregated and oppressed second class citizens. The post-war years, however, dashed most hopes of any speedy positive change.(DeVeaux, 6-29) Race relations went in the opposite direction. Race riots sprung up across the nation while lynching proceed to be a regular occurrence. Efforts continued to secure the legal segregation of black communities, and the persistence movement continued to exclude blacks. The Ku Klux Klan reached its peak membership and popularity during the 1920s. The segregation and hatchet job of the black community was also reflected in the social o rganization of American music.(Hansen, 493-97) Besides the segregation of audiences and most venues, black professional musicians also remained after-school(prenominal) the operativeic community of white professional musicians in terms of unions, band organizations, and this communitys vision of a professional class of artist in America. The balance of the cultivated and the vernacular among professional musicians also continued to run against elitist conceptions of popular music and popular musicians as less sure than the music, musicians, and composers of the European cultivated customs duty of classical and opera music.Black professional musicians also continued to strive to break through the barriers erected against them in the creation of European cultivated music. This continuing tension in the implied lower view of professional musicians who performed American popular music erupted during the Jazz Age into an hold rebellion against the European cultivated tradition. Pr ofessional musicians in jazz orchestras act to counter the singular role claimed by the European cultivated tradition.These musicians insist that jazz was a true American or African American school of fine art music in contrast to cultivated European music a populist appeal for high art legitimacy. This high art turn in American popular music, however, at long last failed when the impression wreaked havoc on the popular music market. With the introduction of a new popular music market of live performances, records, broadcasts, and films, the quest for legitimacy among professional popular musicians would have to take another route.It was a point in time where professional popular musicians in adopting the jazz vernacular went against the reigning heathenish hierarchy in America. (Peretti, 234-40) The period following World War I was a crucial turning point in American popular music. The American vernacular in general was storming the ramparts of the old edifice of good music as privy Pan Alley song and dance dominated popular performance.Both professional and nonprofessional musicians also were benefiting from more than affluent times and the growing importance of recreation in the lives of most urban Americans. To the chagrin of elite and moral defenders of nineteenth century ethnical exampleism, most urban Americans were readily joining a Cultural transformation in commercial popular entertainment. And at the center of this revolution was the case craze for jazz music and jazz dance. The jazz craze made syncopated rhythms and other black vernacular idioms central elements of American popular music making.While many small jazz bands performed a black vernacular style of music from the Delta Region of modern Orleans, jazz music in the 1920s encompassed not only this style but syncopated dance music, blues music, piano rags, and virtually any tune jazzed up by musicians. The jazz craze in essence was the craze for the black vernacular among popul ar audiences and the performance of this vernacular in some form by popular musicians and popular singers both professional and non-professional.The extent to which musicians and singers real adopted the black vernacular rather than a superficial fictitious critique later jazz critics would make of certain sweet jazz during the 1920s is less important than the fact that jazz entered the consciousness of the nation and musicians as the reigning popular music. The word Jazz seems to have bring a permanent place in the vocabulary of popular music. It was employ originally as an adjective describing a band that in play for dancing were so infected with their own rhythm that they themselves executed as much, if not more, contortions than the dancers.The popularity of the raggy music has created a demand for music with exaggerated syncopation, an sample as it were to produce the wonderful broken rhythms of the primitive African hobo camp orchestra. The jazz craze also coincided w ith the growth of black entertainment. During the 1920s, black entertainment districts like the South Side in Chicago and Harlem in New York City witnessed a major boom. Besides entertaining the large black populations of The Great Migration, black musicians and singers were entertaining white audiences who went uptown for their entertainment.The boom in the 1920s in black entertainment, as Kenny (1993, 89-92) and Shaw (1987, 122-30) show, was driven by the demand for the black vernacular. In musical theater, musical revues, vaudeville, dance, and speakeasies, the black vernacular and black artists were in demand. This demand was met not only in black entertainment districts, but also outside these districts as black artists performed for white audiences in musical revues, dance halls, and clubs in white entertainment districts.The popularity of the black vernacular also increased when record producers discovered a race market in black music. Most members of the New England School o f cultivated music like Mason, and other defenders of the old elevated of good music, were stridently against the influence of jazz in both popular music and classical music. tell the moral, aesthetic, class, and racial epithets used to condemn the popularization of vernacular jazz, the guardians of the old noble-minded ridiculed any idea of jazz meriting the status of high art or even having an influence on serious music composition and performance.As David Stanley Smith, Professor of Music at Yale University, argued in The Musician of August 1926, jazz musics monotonous rhythm, as unvaried as the chug-chug of a steam engine, enslaves its practitioners within a formula, and induces in composer, performer, and listener a shock absorber of mind and emotion. On the other hand, many of those individuals who embraced modernism in cultivated music were sympathetic to jazz music.These modernists emphasized jazz as the rightful(a) expression of the times and a nation. (Stewart, 102-1 09) The debate within the cultivated tradition among old idealists and modernists on the influence of jazz revolved principally around the influence of popular jazz on serious music composition and performance. That the question would be posed in such a manner spoke to how, by the 1920s, the European cultivated tradition had organizationally and ideologicly broken from the orb of commercial popular music.Crossover surrounded by popular music and cultivated music occurred during the 1920s, but organizational and ideological barriers left little chance that jazz musicians would transform the cultivated tradition. The very formation of a separate world of cultivated music in the United States was predicated on its banknote from commercial popular music, popular musicians, and popular tastes a distinction further exacerbated by jazz music macrocosm an expression of the black vernacular.The influence of jazz within the cultivated tradition, however, was debated during the 1920s a s professional musicians laid claim to a truly American art form and modernists promoted the incorporation of jazz in serious music composition and performance. (Badger, 48-67) Traditionalists, of course, had reason to be optimistic as the economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash wreaked havoc on the commercial market of popular jazz music.Defenders of the European cultivated tradition also had reason to celebrate as the confident proclamations of professional musicians on jazz as Americas first authentic art receded to the accent as these musicians adjusted to changed economic circumstances and a new popular music market. Professional musicians struggle for legitimacy during the Jazz Age, however, laid the ideological and musical foundation upon which the next generation of professional musicians would construct a modern jazz paradigm.In their quest for legitimacy as professional artists, they were the first popular artists to attempt to transform the moral, aesth etic, class, and racial constructions of the old ideal of good music in America. While their efforts contained their own complicity in ingenuity of distinction, the contradictions of an elite populism embedded in a racist culture, they did struggle to create an alternative understanding of art and society in America.As the unauthorized mediators of the American vernacular, professional musicians and composers ardently worked to construct an alternative form of good music to that of the European cultivated music tradition a music reflecting in some fashion the world of popular audiences and popular tastes. ( DeVeaux, 525-40) In this process of syncretism, the reinvention and reinterpretation of musical idioms and practices, these artists created the American big band dance orchestra and the Tin Pan Alley song that dominated American popular music until the middle of the twentieth century.While jazz did not become a universally recognized American high art form during the Jazz Age, professional musicians and composers transformed it into legitimate popular art music, although at the spending of those non-professional vernacular musicians who did not assimilate into their profession. The need for professional musicians to legitimate popular dance orchestras disappeared after the 1920s, and the old ideal of good music no longitudinal occupied this professional class of musician.(Gioia, 213-20) The emergence of an alternative ideal of good music among professional musicians signaled a final separation amidst popular music making and the cultivated tradition in American music. This break was both ideological and practical a reflection of both a new professional ethos among professional musicians and the culmination of the division in the social organization of American music amidst the world of popular music and the world of European cultivated music.(Lopes, 25-36) The previous crisscrossing professionally between the cultivated tradition and popular music ma king was no longer part of this profession. The future big band leaders and musicians of the Swing while began their professional careers not in symphonies, but in the small jazz ensembles and jazz orchestras of the Jazz Age. The fate of jazz was seemed threatened by the agency over popular music of a new mass media industry of broadcasts, recordings, and film. Just when the fortunes of jazz seemed dead and buried, however, the swing craze reignited popular fill in the cultivated jazz vernacular.(Hennessey, 156-60) The promotion of sweet music and the concomitant swing craze, however, set in motion a new distinction within the profession of musician. No longer than singularly obsessed with the world of European cultivated music, professional musicians who assimilated the black jazz vernacular in a flash viewed sweet music as their more direct nemesis. The race and class boundaries articulated in the old ideal of good music were now articulated more directly for professional mus icians in the distinction between the popular music cultures of sweet and swing.