Music 1900 - 1945 essays

Music 1900 - 1945 essays American jazz is another non-European influence on twentieth-century composers. Musicians were fascinated by its syncopated rhythms and improvisational quality, as well as by the unique tone colors of jazz bands. Unlike a string-dominated symphony orchestra, a jazz band emphasizes woodwinds, brasses, and percussion. Jazz elements were used in works as early as Debussys Golliwoggs Cake-Walk (from the suite Childrens Corner, 1908) and Stravinskys Ragtime (from The Soldiers Tale, 1918). But the peak of jazz influence came during the jazz age of the 1920s, with works such as the ballet La Creation du monde (The Creation of the World, 1923) by the French composer Darius Milhaud and the Piano Concerto (1926) by the American composer Aaron Copland. For Americans, jazz idioms represented a kind of musical nationalism, a search for an American sound. lor European composers, the incorporation of jazz rhythms and tone colors represented a kind of musical exoticism. During the 1920s and 1930s, popular composers such as George Gershwin (1898-1937) used Jazz and popular elements within classical forms. Gershwins Rho psady in Blue (1924) and his opera lorgy and Bess (1934-1935) are well known. Modern composers can also draw inspiration from a wider historical range of music. During the twentieth century, music from remote times has been unearthed by scholars and then published, performed, and recorded. There has been a rediscovery of earlier masters such as Perotin and Machaut from the medieval period, Josquin Desprez and Gesualdo from the Renaissance, and Purcell and Vivaldi from the ba- nx1ue. Some important modern composers have been music historians, like Anton Webern, or experts in the performance of old music, like Paul I lindemith. Music from the past is a fruitful source of forms, rhythms, tone colors, textures, and compositional techni...