...wide variety of literature written in regards to Aaron Copland the composer and his connection to defining the American sound in his musical works. Some of the literature used for this paper will include biographical information, analytical, and comprehensive material on the subject. Those sources will help this study argue against common belief in regards to American music being define through Aaron Copland's music. Although there are many sources used for this study the following represent the sources most critical for this study. Some of the sources that are more biographical in nature such as “Composer from the Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch,” will allow this paper to shape the parameters of its argument by placing Copland in Paris and establishing the effects of him living and studying there. Copland said, “It was a fortunate time to be studying music in France. All the pent-up energies of the...
Words: 617 - Pages: 3
...Copland was a great American composer during the 20th century, the compositions often incorporated different aspects of popular American music. For example, he often utilized forms such as Jazz and folk music into the works that he created. Copland aimed to create and develope something that could be distinctively called American music so that American music and culture could free itself from European influence (pbs). Later on in his career he became known as a Dean of American Music , which is a testament to his dedication of his goal. Some of his most famous works are the Appalachian spring which won the 1945 pulitzer prize for music and Fanfare for the Common man. Copland’s parents were both Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and he was born November 14, 1990 in Brooklyn. Copland’s parents had five children and Copland was the youngest. For much of his early childhood, Copland and his siblings would work in his...
Words: 1461 - Pages: 6
...Verna Arvey Present Day musical films and How they are made possible January, 1931 From The Etude 49 (Jauary 1931): 16-17, 61 and 72 This reading was about how present day musical films become available and how the music and film combined smoothly nowadays. It is sort of stating the transition between silent movies and musical films. According to the reading, ‘the choice of music was left largely to the organist, pianist, or orchestra leader’. However, in order to create musical films, it is much more complicated than just one or two people works on the music. The reading explains how the music is recorded in the studio with many experts in each area such as film director, music director, artists, and the actors. Not only recording the original songs is important but the author says mixing and accuracy makes the perfect synchronization between the music and the film. George Antheil Composers in Movieland January/February 1935 From Modern Music 12, no. 2 (January/February 1935): 62-66 From the reading, I was able to assume the author George Antheil is a composer or someone who know about the composer industry well at the time. In this reading, the George Antheil talks about how the composers make the music for motion pictures. One composer has the authority in its production in order to decrease the confusion and complication. In Hollywood, they kept around 17-30 composers to create a music for the film. One head composer will have a meeting with film director...
Words: 693 - Pages: 3
...invented by Thomas Edison as a recording device to be used in a variety of ways including the reproduction of sound. This device was a major tool in everyday society and changed the way people recorded sound and important speech to hear again and again. Edison’s phonograph was the first device that could reproduce recorded sound by recording the sound onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder. This was the first step in technologically recording sound and it started a competitive ingenuity in the field of sound engineering. This invention was improved and changed over time to record and reproduce sound better and more clearly. The phonograph revolutionized sound technology because...
Words: 2706 - Pages: 11
...Jazz could be written on the page, but is mostly defined by the unique touches singers and musicians bring to each performance. This genre was born in the red-light district of New Orleans and nurtured in the cities of New York, Memphis, and Chicago, but jazz was an African-American invention. Musicians found this music to be the expression of their passion, their sorrows, their anger, and their sheer energy. Disheartened by the senseless carnage of the World War, people just wanted to go out and have one hell of a good time, and jazz was the sound they partied, mated, and grieved to. By the end of the decade, the rise of jazz symbolized the new domination of popular culture...
Words: 455 - Pages: 2
...During the scenes of “The Fall of the House of Hur,” the hate theme appears when Ben-Hur chose to protect his Jewish friends by not backstabbing them by going along with Messala’s ambitions. The Hate theme foreshadowed a twist of fate when Ben-Hur opposed Messala. It was inserted in the 2nd and 3rd measures in the Roman march for Gratus, and was reiterated repeatedly. This became the prominent theme after the accident. Another important theme was Christ’s theme. Christ’s theme involved Jesus, and during Ben Hur’s desert march, music is played to reflect his feeling of distressed and torture. But, when Christ is introduced who offered him water, the music turns somewhat pure and halo. 2. During the 1960s, there were key changes in the way Americans noticed the world and themselves, and thus, adjusting the way leaders in the art world, expressed themselves. The 1960s envisioned an alteration in the thought process. The process of making art become just as significant as the final product itself. Also, the...
Words: 1211 - Pages: 5
...and popular music within their personal styles because they were attracted to the unconventional rhythms, sounds and melodic patterns 5. A great twentieth-century composer who was also a leading scholar of the folk music of his native land was Béla Bartók. 6. Which of the following composers was not stimulated by the folklore of his native land? Anton Webern 7. In twentieth-century music string players are sometimes called on to use the wood instead of the hair on their bows, percussion instruments have become very prominent and numerous, & dissonance has been emancipated 8. Among the unusual playing techniques that are widely used during the twentieth century is the glissando, a rapid slide up or down a scale. 9. In modern music instruments are played at the very top or bottom of their ranges; uncommon playing techniques have become normal; noiselike and percussive sounds are often used 10. A piano is often used in twentieth-century orchestral music to add a percussive edge 11. The combination of two traditional chords sounding together is known as a polychord 12. A fourth chord is a chord in which the tones are a fourth apart, instead of a third 13. A chord made of tones only a half step or a whole step apart is known as a tone cluster 14. Striking a group of adjacent keys on a piano with the fist or forearm will result in tone cluster 15. To create fresh sounds, twentieth-century...
Words: 1777 - Pages: 8
...suffering from any kind of illness are under tremendous stress, confusion, and sometimes they can feel lost. Music therapy can help with all of these problems. Music has been used in medicine for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that music could heal both the body and the soul. Native Americans have used singing and chanting as part of their healing rituals for millennia. The more formal approach to music therapy began in World War II, when U.S. Veterans Administration hospitals began to use music to help treat soldiers suffering from shell shock and to help cope with the tragic events they witnessed during that time. In the remainder of this paper I will be discussing music therapy and the effects it can have on people that are suffering from an illness. Music therapy is becoming a very common practice around the world. In 1944, Michigan State University established the first music therapy degree program in the world. Today, more than seventy colleges and universities have degree programs that are approved by the American Music Therapy Association. A musical therapist must have a college degree and complete a program that is certified by The American Music Therapy Association. Music therapists can go about treating patients in many different ways. First they assess a patient to...
Words: 1608 - Pages: 7
...A Biography of Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on August 25, 1918. He was born to first generation Jewish parents from Russia. At the age of ten, he began learning to play the piano, at one point in his studies at Hebrew Union he thought of becoming a rabbi. Latter he was awarded an honorary degree, for he became a rabbi of sorts (Gottlieb.) However, he went on the major in music at Harvard University. Although, his interest at college was in becoming a concert piano, but he was also introduced to orchestration. While in college, he conducted his own incidental music to “The Birds,” and directed and performed in Marc Blitstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock” (LB, Inc). After graduation he went to study with the Boston Symphon Orchestra’s summer institute, where he was the conducting assistant to Serge Koussevitsky. In 1943 he was placed in his first permanent conducting position with The New York Philharmonic, during his lifetime over 200 of his recordingings were made with the Philharmonic. In 1943 he was also asked to be a guest conductor at Carnegie Hall. This led to him being sought out as a guest conductor. He had his share of critics because of his dance-like style as a conductor. (Gottlieb) In 1945 he was named director of New York City Symphony. He held other positions from 1945 until 1969, conducting more concerts than any previous conductor. He spent a great deal of his time teaching and composing for non-classical...
Words: 2158 - Pages: 9
...THE HISTORY OF MUSIC The Middle Ages 450-1450 Characteristics of Music Music comes from the Ancient Greek muses, who were the nine goddesses of art and science. Music actually began around 500 B.C. when Pythagoras experimented with acoustics and how math related to tones formed from plucking strings. The main form of music during the Middle Ages was the Gregorian chant, named for Pope Gregory I. This music was used in the Catholic Churches to enhance the services. It consisted of a sacred Latin text sung by monks without instrumentation. The chant is sung in a monophonic texture, which means there is only one line of music. It has a free-flowing rhythm with little or no set beat. The chants were originally all passed through oral tradition, but the chants became so numerous that the monks began to notate them. Music in Society Towards the end of the Middle Ages, about the 12th and 13th centuries, music began to move outside of the church. French nobles called troubadours and trouveres were among the first to have written secular songs. Music of this time was contained among the nobility, with court minstrels performing for them. There were also wandering minstrels who would perform music and acrobatics in castles, taverns, and town squares. These people were among the lowest social class, along with prostitutes and slaves, but they were important because they passed along information, since there were no newspapers. Links to Composers...
Words: 2719 - Pages: 11
...Hajos scored Morocco (1930) and Franke Harling Shangai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934). In the 1930s, after a few years of experimentation, scoring film soundtracks became an art in earnest thanks to a small group of foreign-born musicians, first and foremost two Austrian-born and classically-trained composers. Erich-Wolfgang Korngold's coined a lush, overwhelming, operatic style with Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood (1935) and especially The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), as well as Charles Gerhardt's Anthony Adverse (1936) and Sam Wood's Kings Row (1942). Max Steiner explored many different moods, sensational in Ernest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), one of the first soundtracks to rely heavily on sound effects, pathetic in Victor Fleming's Gone With The Wind (1939), including Tara and countless references to traditional songs, exotic in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), melodramatic in Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942), gloomy in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), epic in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), romantic in Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959), whose instrumental theme was a massive hit for Percy Faith's orchestra, etc. He also scored Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), John Huston's Key Largo (1948), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949). Roy Webb (the New Yorker among all these foreigners)...
Words: 3071 - Pages: 13
...Hajos scored Morocco (1930) and Franke Harling Shangai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934). In the 1930s, after a few years of experimentation, scoring film soundtracks became an art in earnest thanks to a small group of foreign-born musicians, first and foremost two Austrian-born and classically-trained composers. Erich-Wolfgang Korngold's coined a lush, overwhelming, operatic style with Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood (1935) and especially The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), as well as Charles Gerhardt's Anthony Adverse (1936) and Sam Wood's Kings Row (1942). Max Steiner explored many different moods, sensational in Ernest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), one of the first soundtracks to rely heavily on sound effects, pathetic in Victor Fleming's Gone With The Wind (1939), including Tara and countless references to traditional songs, exotic in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), melodramatic in Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942), gloomy in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), epic in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), romantic in Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959), whose instrumental theme was a massive hit for Percy Faith's orchestra, etc. He also scored Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), John Huston's Key Largo (1948), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949). Roy Webb (the New Yorker among all these foreigners)...
Words: 3224 - Pages: 13
...feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.” Film composer Bernard Herrmann. Why Is There Music in Film? The general feeling about film is that it is singularly a visual experience. It is not. While we certainly experience film through our eyes, we just as surely experience it through our ears. Especially today, particularly with modern home and theater sound systems offering multi-channel sound and high fidelity. Films are generally fantasies. And fantasies by definition defy logic and reality. They conspire with the imagination. Music works upon the unconscious mind. Consequently, music works well with film because it is an ally of illusion. Music plays upon our emotions. It is generally a non-intellectual communication. The listener does not need to know what the music means, only how it makes him feel. Listeners, then, find the musical experience in film one that is less knowing and more feeling. The onscreen action, of course, provides clues and cues as to how the accompanying music does or is supposed to make us feel. Let us distinguish between scoring a movie, a movie score, and writing songs for...
Words: 10332 - Pages: 42
...The Story of the Fourth of July The Declaration of Independence We celebrate American Independence Day on the Fourth of July every year. We think of July 4, 1776, as a day that represents the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation. But July 4, 1776 wasn't the day that the Continental Congress decided to declare independence (they did that on July 2, 1776). It wasn’t the day we started the American Revolution either (that had happened back in April 1775). And it wasn't the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (that was in June 1776). Or the date on which the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain (that didn't happen until November 1776). Or the date it was signed (that was August 2, 1776). So what did happen on July 4, 1776? The Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. They'd been working on it for a couple of days after the draft was submitted on July 2nd and finally agreed on all of the edits and changes. July 4, 1776, became the date that was included on the Declaration of Independence, and the fancy handwritten copy that was signed in August (the copy now displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) It’s also the date that was printed on the Dunlap Broadsides, the original printed copies of the Declaration that were circulated throughout the new nation. So when people thought of the Declaration of Independence...
Words: 16917 - Pages: 68
...MUSIC Quarter III Quarter III: CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE MUSIC CONTENT STANDARDS The learner demonstrates understanding of... 1. Characteristic features of contemporary music. PERFORMANCE STANDARDS The learner... 1. Sings contemporary songs. DEPED COPY LEARNING COMPETENCIES The learner... 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Listens perceptively to excerpts of major contemporary works. Describes characteristics of traditional and new music. Gives a brief biography of selected contemporary Philippine composers. Sings selections of contemporary music with appropriate pitch, rhythm, style, and expression. Explores ways of creating sounds on a variety of sources. Improvises simple vocal/instrumental accompaniments to selected songs. Creates a musical on the life of a selected contemporary Philippine composer. Evaluates music and music performances using knowledge of musical elements and style. From the Department of Education curriculum for MUSIC Grade 10 (2014) 88 All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying without written permission from the DepEd Central Office. Contemporary Philippine Music CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE MUSIC A ccording to National Artist Ramon Santos, PhD, “contemporary music in the Philippines refers to compositions that have adopted ideas and elements from 20th century art music in the west, as well as the latest trends and musical styles in the entertainment...
Words: 17071 - Pages: 69
