Popular Music in 1900

1
Popular Music in 1900

• Race and Romance

2
Minstrelsy

• The Minstrel Show
• Featured mainly white performers who artificially
  blackened their skin and carried out parodies of
  African American music, dance, dress, and dialect

3
Minstrelsy

• From the 1840s through the 1880s, the predominant
  genre in the United States
• An important influence on the mainstream of
  American popular song
• Minstrel troupes toured the United States
  constantly, helping create a national popular
  culture.

4
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley

• By the end of the nineteenth century, the
  American music publishing business had become
  centered in New York City.
• After 1885, the established publishers were being
  challenged by smaller companies specializing in
  the more exciting popular songs performed in
  dance halls, beer gardens, and theaters.

5
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley

• These new publishing firmsmany of them founded
  by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europehad
  offices in a section of lower Manhattan, a dense
  hive of small rooms with pianos where composers
  and song pluggers produced and promoted popular
  songs.
• This stretch of 28th Street became known as Tin
  Pan Alley, a term that evoked the clanging sound
  of many pianos simultaneously playing songs in a
  variety of keys and tempos.

6
Vaudeville

• Theatrical form descended from music hall shows
  and minstrelsy
• By the turn of the century, it had become the
  most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan
  Alley songs.
• Vaudeville shows typically consisted of a series
  of performances presented one after the other
  without any overarching story line.

7
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley

• The 1890s saw the rise of the modern American
  music business.
• Sheet music sold for between twenty-five and
  sixty cents.
• The wholesale value of printed music in the
  United States more than tripled between 1890 and
  1909.

8
After the Ball

• Harris paid a well-known singer in a traveling
  theater production to incorporate After the
  Ball into his performance.
• It soon became the most popular part of the play,
  and audiences requested that it be repeated
  several times during each performance.
• Harris published the song himself and was soon
  clearing around twenty-five thousand dollars a
  month.
• After the Ball was performed by John Philip
  Sousas band at the Worlds Columbian Exposition
  in Chicago (1893).

9
Ragtime Music

• Emerged in the 1880s
• Its popularity peaked in the decade after the
  turn of the century.
• Ragtime initially was a piano music but gradually
  came to identify any syncopated music.
• The term ragtime was used to describe any music
  that contained syncopation.

10
Ragtime Music

• The word derives from the African American term
  to rag, meaning to enliven a piece of music by
  shifting melodic accents onto the offbeats (a
  technique known as syncopation).
• It began as an obscure folk-dance music played up
  and down the Mississippi valley during last
  quarter of the nineteenth century.
• Ragtime energized popular music in America by
  adding rhythmic vitality (syncopation) to the
  music.

11
The Banjo

• A stringed instrument developed by slave
  musicians from African prototypes during the
  early colonial period.
• The basic patterns of ragtime music were
  transferred from the banjo.

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Ragtime Songs

• Coon song
• Popular among white audiences from the 1890s
  until World War I
• Usually accompanied by a simplified version of
  the syncopated rhythms of ragtime piano music

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All Coons Look Alike to Me

• The first piece of sheet music to bear the term
  rag
• Composed by the African American songwriter
  Ernest Hogan
• Published (complete with racist caricatures on
  the cover) in 1896

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Ragtime Songs

• The growing market for ragtime songs at the turn
  of the century suggests a continuation of the
  white fascination with African American music
  first seen in minstrelsy.
• Most popular ragtime songs were vigorous
  march-style songs with a few irregular rhythms
  added for effect.

15
Scott Joplin (18681917)

• The most famous ragtime composer of the era
• Best known for his piano rags
• Born in Texas
• Began to play piano around the town of Texarkana
  during his teens and received instruction in
  classical music theory from a German teacher
• His first regular job as a pianist was in a cafe
  in St. Louis.

16
Scott Joplin (18681917)

• Developed a ragging piano style, improvising
  around the themes of popular songs and marches in
  a syncopated style
• Between 1895 and 1915, Joplin composed many of
  the classics of the ragtime repertoire
• Helped popularize the style through his piano
  arrangements, published as sheet music

17
Scott Joplin (18681917)

• Joplins rags were also widely heard on player
  pianos.
• Player pianos were elaborate mechanical devices
  activated by piano rollsspools of paper with
  punched holes that controlled the movement of the
  pianos keys.

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Maple Leaf Rag (1898)

• Scott Joplins first successful piece
• Named after the Maple Leaf social club in
  Sedalia, where he often played
• The piece was published in 1899 and became a huge
  hit, spreading Joplins fame to Europe and
  beyond.
• Maple Leaf started a nationwide craze for
  syncopated music.

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The Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley Song

• During the 1920s and 1930s, certain
  characteristic musical structures and styles of
  performance dominated popular song.
• Professional tunesmiths wrote some of the most
  influential and commercially successful songs of
  the period.
• The potential for fame and financial success on a
  previously unknown scale lured composers and
  lyricists with diverse skills and backgrounds.

20
Jewish Immigrants

• From Central and Eastern Europe
• Played a central role in the music business
  during the early twentieth century as composers,
  lyricists, performers, publishers, and promoters

21
Irving Berlin

• Born Israel, or Isadore, Baline
• The most productive, varied, and creative of the
  Tin Pan Alley songwriters
• His professional songwriting career started
  before World War I and continued into the 1960s.
• It has been said that Berlin often composed from
  three to seven songs a week.
• In 1969, the catalog of Irving Berlin
  compositions still available in print included
  899 songs.

22
Irving Berlin

• His most famous songs include
• Alexanders Ragtime Band,
• Blue Skies,
• Cheek to Cheek,
• Theres No Business Like Show Business,
• White Christmas, and
• God Bless America.

23
George Gershwin (18981937)

• His songs set new standards in excellence in
  terms of harmonic complexity and melodic flow.
• More classically trained and ambitious than other
  songwriters
• Sought and achieved success in the world of
  concert music and popular music
• Influenced by jazz and blues

24
Alexanders Ragtime Band

• Published in 1911
• The song that first brought Berlin mass acclaim
• Actually had little to do with ragtime as
  performed by the great black ragtime pianists of
  the day
• Sold 1.5 million copies almost immediately

25
Broadway and Film

• Berlin wrote songs for the Broadway stage and for
  sound film.
• Blue Skies, performed by Al Jolson in the first
  talkie, The Jazz Singer
• Wrote the entire score for the Marx Brothers
  debut movie, The Cocoanuts, in 1929
• The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced White
  Christmas.
• The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun
• Berlin was the most prolific and consistent of
  Tin Pan Alley composers.
• His songwriting career spanned almost sixty
  years.

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Tin Pan Alley Song Form

• Song forms inherited from the nineteenth century
• The AABA structure
• Verse-and-chorus form of After the Ball
• Verse-refrain form, with an AABA refrain
• Tin Pan Alley song form had two major sections
  the verse and the refrain/chorus.

27
Listening My Blue Heaven, performed by Gene
Austin (1927)

• Austin was one of the first crooners
• Singers who mastered the intimate style of
  singing made possible with the electric
  microphone.
• This recording was one of the bestselling records
  of the era.
• Form verse-refrain
• Introduction
• Verse two sections of equal length with nearly
  identical music
• Refrain four sections, AABAthe A sections all
  end with the words my blue heaven
• The B section, or bridge or release,
  provides variety.

28
Listening My Blue Heaven, performed by Gene
Austin (1927)

• The song depicts the deepest aspirations of the
  Tin Pan Alley listening public.
• The lyrics poetically reinforce a familiar and
  comfortable motif of the American dream home and
  family.
• Gene Austins performance reinforces the
  sentiments expressed in the lyrics quiet
  intimacy and tranquility.

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Listening April Showers, performed by Al
Jolson (1921)

• This recording reveals the sound and style of the
  premicrophone period.
• Jolsons singing style reflects the performance
  techniques used on the vaudeville stage.
• His vocal style was declamatory rather than
  lyrical.
• Form verse-refrain (ABAC structure)

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What Are Tin Pan Alley Songs About?

• Predominately aimed at white, urban middle- and
  upper-middle-class Americans
• Said little in the way of social or political
  commentary
• Were generally escapist
• Privacy and romance

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Tin Pan Alley and Broadway

• Mutually beneficial relationship between Tin Pan
  Alley Songs and Broadway shows
• Close proximity
• Fruitful relationship in the 1920s and 1930s
• The so-called Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley song

32
What Makes a Song a Standard?

• Standards
• Songs that remain an essential part of the
  repertoire of todays jazz musicians and pop
  singers
• Possess a continuing appeal that surpasses
  nostalgia
• Tin Pan Alley composers produced many standards.

33
Rock n Roll

• When rock n roll took over the pop charts in
  the later 1950s, the connection between Broadway
  and mainstream popular song had completely
  dissolved.

34
Conclusion

• Popular song both reflected and helped shape the
  profound changes in American society during the
  1920s and 1930s.
• The intermixing of high and low cultures
• The adoption of new technologies
• The expansion of corporate music industry
• The increasingly intimate interaction of white
  and black cultures during a period of strong
  racism
• The emergence of a truly national popular culture

35
Conclusion

• Tin Pan Alley and the singing style known as
  crooning were important influences on rhythm
  blues and rock n roll during the 1950s and
  1960s.
• Many Tin Pan Alley songs are still used by
  contemporary jazz musicians as a basis for
  improvising.