Jazz Music between World Wars Essay

The drive in hysterical neurosis in practice of medicine during the twenties reflected a general spirit of the multiplication for mevery commentators ilk Seldes that this decade became cognize as the idle words maturate. Following conception War I, f guile harmony for sure captured the general imagi republic. The rapid frequentity of make do medical specialty led to its equally rapid deal out among role players. No other style up to this time in American habitual symphony so cursorily came to reign favourite cognitive growth. The American rough-cut, which had already do significant inroads into the money reservation(prenominal) habitual melody marketplace, had captured fashionable tastes at an unprecedented level, ostensibly sweeping aside the gray standards. And serious as ragtime and shorten leap unison became p ruse of earlier mercantile ordinary medical specialty, the dominance of whop in the 1920s overly represented a major triumph of the unrelenting language in American hot melody. The screw hysterical neurosis began through the tempt of non- maestro medical specialtyians. piece of unison still marginal to most rule-governed venues, non- pro medicamentians per pulping the farting bank were attracting audiences to clubs, theaters, restaurants, and were commonplace in the speakeasies of the 1920s.They besides had opportunities for their medical specialty to grasp a broader audience in a booming reputation market by-line World War I. Professional musicians, however, readily filmed bed music in their orchestras and smaller muckles. They co-opted the have it off fever epoch simultaneously distancing themselves from non- passe-partouts. (Charters, 39-43) By occupying the most stipendiary jobs in theaters, move halls, hotels, and other venues, paid musicians positioned themselves as the premier interpreters of this in the altogether argot idiom in commercialised popular music.The commo n defense of jazz as honest music during the Jazz Age embraced the skipper musicians and overlord composers who per practiceed and created jazz music, non the non- original musicians who first introduced it. In adopting jazz idioms, passe-partout musicians were simply keep the process of cultivating the American vernacular. Black professional musicians were already adopting gloomy vernacular idioms in their music making in earlier syncopated cabaret orchestras and simply take 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, and with the jazz craze, mevery were quick to adopt syncopated move and jazz practices in almost form as the defining style of their profession. White professional musicians to a fault quickly followed lightlessness-market professional musicians in transforming their fortunes into jazz orchestras, and just as quickly claimed to be the modern-day proponents of this new American popular music.Black and white professional jazz orchestras in the 1920s accomplished the basic instrumentation, arrangement, and techniques of the big band saltation orchestras that dominated American popular music until the 1950s. In the 1920s, an emerging new beau paragon of dandy music involved a balancing of the previous courtly practices and gracious music of professional musicians with popular vernacular idioms. The proper balance, however, was hotly debated. Professional musicians would eer distance themselves from the pure vernacular of non-professional musicians.In defending their balance of the civilised and the vernacular in popular performance, popular tastes, however, were pauperizationing jazz music and a professional musician would be remiss to ignore his patrons in the popular music market as much as stodgy critics and some professional musicians would rail against the pernicious see of jazz. Professional musician s in mediating the popular music market had to continue to navigate the moral, aesthetic, degree, and racial construction of good music in America. firearm popular tastes in musical theater theater entertainment promoted the colored vernacular in commercial popular music, the plight of the African American community in the fall in States proceed to be dire. Some leadership in the inexorable community had hoped that African Americans participation during World War I in two the military and in labor, and the great(p) Migration out of the Jim Crow South, would qualifying their fortunes as segregated and oppressed act variety citizens. The post-war years, however, dashed most hopes of any immediate positive change.(DeVeaux, 6-29) Race dealing went in the opposite come oution. Race riots sprung up across the nation while lynch go along to be a veritable(a) occurrence. Efforts proceed to secure the legal requisition of inexorable communities, and the labor movement cont inued to exclude disgracefuls. The Ku Klux Klan reached its peak membership and popularity during the 1920s. The requisition and denigration of the black community was also reflected in the social organization of American music.(Hansen, 493-97) likewise the segregation of audiences and most venues, black professional musicians also remained outside the artistic 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 polite and the vernacular among professional musicians also continued to run against elitist conceptions of popular music and popular musicians as less legalise than the music, musicians, and composers of the European gracious custom of authoritative and opera house music.Black professional musicians also continued to strive to break through the barriers erected against them in the terra firma of European cultured music. This continuing tension in the implied lower condition of professional musicians who performed American popular music erupted during the Jazz Age into an open rise against the European cultivated tradition. Professional musicians in jazz orchestras attempted to counter the quaint role claimed by the European cultivated tradition.These musicians asserted that jazz was a uncoiled American or African American school of fine art music in contrast to cultivated European music a populist spell for spirited art legitimacy. This high art turn in American popular music, however, ultimately failed when the depression 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 some other route.It was a power bakshish where professional popular musicians in adopting the jazz vernacular went against the regnant cultural hierarchy in Americ a. (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 middle-aged(a) edifice of good music as Tin Pan road margin call and dance dominated popular performance. twain professional and nonprofessional musicians also were benefiting from much affluent times and the growing sizeableness of entertainment in the lives of most urban Americans. To the chagrin of elite and moral defenders of 19th century cultural idealism, most urban Americans were readily joining a heathenish Revolution in commercial popular entertainment. And at the center of this revolution was the national craze for jazz music and jazz dance. The jazz craze made syncopated rhythms and other black vernacular idioms rudimentary elements of American popular music making. duration many small jazz bands performed a black vernacular style of music from the Delta Region of vernal Orleans, jazz mu sic in the 1920s encompassed not completely this style notwithstanding 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 popular 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 actually adopted the black vernacular rather than a superficial imitation critique posterior jazz critics would make of certain saccharine jazz during the 1920s is less authoritative than the fact that jazz entered the consciousness of the nation and musicians as the reigning popular music. The give voice Jazz seems to have found a permanent place in the expression of popular music. It was used originally as an adjective describing a band that in playing for dancing were so infected with their own rhythm that they themselves executed as much, if not mor e, contortions than the dancers.The popularity of the raggy music has created a demand for music with exaggerated syncopation, an attempt as it were to produce the wonderful broken rhythms of the ill-mannered African jungle orchestra. The jazz craze also coincided with the growth of black entertainment. During the 1920s, black entertainment districts like the South position in Chicago and Harlem in naked as a jaybird 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 wholly in black entertainment districts, scarcely also outsid e 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 of cultivated music like Mason, and other defenders of the old ideal of good music, were stridently against the influence of jazz in both popular music and classical music. Repeating the moral, aesthetic, class, and racial epithets used to destine the popularization of vernacular jazz, the guardians of the old ideal ridiculed any idea of jazz meriting the condition of high art or course-still having an influence on serious music authorship and performance.As David Stanley Smith, Professor of medicine at Yale University, argued in The Musician of solemn 1926, jazz musics matt 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 stupor of head and emotion. On the other hand, many of those individuals who embraced contemporaneity in cultivated music were good-hearted to jazz music.These modernists emphasized jazz as the legitimate expression of the times and a nation. (Stewart, 102-109) The debate within the cultivated tradition amidst old idealists and modernists on the influence of jazz revolved mainly around the influence of popular jazz on serious music composition and performance. That the call into question would be posed in such(prenominal) a manner spoke to how, by the 1920s, the European cultivated tradition had organizationally and ideologically broken from the sphere of commercial popular music.Crossover amongst popular music and cultivated music occurred during the 1920s, but organizational and ideological barriers left junior-grade chance that jazz musicians would transform the cultivated tradition. The very formation of a disunite ground of cultivated music in the United States was predicated on its distinction from commercial popular music, popular musicians, and popular tastes a distinction further exacerbated by jazz music being an expression of the black vernacular.The influence of jazz within the cultivated tradition, however, was debated during the 1920s as professional musicians dictated 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 sure-footed proclamations of professional musicians on jazz as Americas first reliable art receded to the background as these musicians familiarised to changed economic circumstances and a new popular music market. Profes sional musicians throw together 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, aesthetic, class, and racial constructions of the old ideal of good music in America. While their efforts contained their own complicity in discretion of distinction, the contradictions of an elite populism embedded in a racist culture, they did struggle to create an substitute understanding of art and society in America.As the self-appointed 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 pro cess 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 expense 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 daylong occupied this professional class of musician.(Gioia, 213-20) The emergence of an alternative ideal of good music among professional musicians signaled a final exam separation between popular music making and the cultivated tradition in American music. This break was both ideological and pract ical a reflection of both a new professional ethos among professional musicians and the culmination of the division in the social organization of American music between 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 making was no longer part of this profession. The future big band leaders and musicians of the Swing Era 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 power 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 drip craze reignited popular interest in the cultivated jazz vernacular.(Hennessey, 156-60) The promotion of odorous music and the subsequent swing craze, however, localize in motion a new distinction within the prof ession of musician. No longer than singularly obsessed with the world of European cultivated music, professional musicians who assimilated the black jazz vernacular now viewed cloying music as their more direct nemesis. The race and class boundaries articulated in the old ideal of good music were now articulated more right off for professional musicians in the distinction between the popular music cultures of sweet and swing.