For as long as human beings have needed to express their cultural, spiritual and creative statements using sound, music has shaped the way they interact with one another and themselves. Music itself, as the art form and media platform it is known to be today, has only recently managed to be effectively defined in a way that is separate from the various historical and cultural artifacts that have performed this function in the past.
The American populace conveniently shifted into a post-modern musical environment that is both self-aware and self-reproducing while remaining uniquely American only in the 20th century. This happened thanks to the pioneering work of modern American composers such as John Cage, whose compositions begged the listener to define music. Getting to this point, however, has been a journey as long as America’s history as a country.
American music has made many important steps on the way to becoming the globally significant cultural identifier that it is today. These steps involved the creations of notable composers, the promotion of their works using then-state-of-the-art broadcasting technology to create a never-before-seen mass media culture.
There were also many notorious attempts at control, censorship, and propaganda that, unintentionally, gave even greater power to culturally populist artists. But, before getting there, it is important to see how music in general and American music, in particular, have been defined throughout time.
Defining Music in General and American Music in Particular
Throughout human history, music has been described in a wide variety of ways, most usually determined by cultural and political factors defined by the society in question. As mentioned earlier, it was only in the 20th century, in the wake of modernism, that seriously challenging art music gave rise to a critical theoretical examination of what it means to create music, what music does, and how to define it.
While modernists would be happy to simply describe music as any collection of sounds presented to an audience as music, a structural approach would be more forgiving to the popular tastes: music is any collection of sounds that express an artistic statement through the use of rhythm, melody, and harmony.
The self-referencing nature of contemporary music is what the post-modern definition makes very clear as being necessary ever since the age of broadcast and, lately, of the Internet, challenged people’s abilities to reject artistic statements as being unmusical.
While music itself is easy enough to define, the tastes and trends that go into defining the music of a culture are a much more sensitive matter. This is even more sensitive in the case of the music of the United States of America, due to the huge number of unique cultural elements that have historically combined to create it.
American music is relatively easy to identify, but difficult to define; the best method of doing so is through the history of musical influences that led to the confluence of musical statements and genres that created, not just American music, but American culture in general.
The Roots of American Music
There are several seeds of American music that can be identified within the context of the first American settler’s colonization of the 13 colonies. One of these is made of the folk minstrels that the first Protestant colonists brought with them, later adapted through time into Appalachian folk music, and then into styles such as country and bluegrass.
Another seed is represented by the influences made out of later African-American cultural contributions, such as gospel and, later, blues. Yet another starting point and seed for what would become known as American music is to be found in the sphere of classical music.
Here, prominent cultural influences developed in America gave way to the importation and transfiguration of the existing European classical model. The most significant of these early classical contributors is the Czech-born composer Antonín Dvořák.
While American music certainly existed before Dvořák emigrated to early America, it was his method of combining traditional folk idioms and his search for “American Music” that made his contributions especially notable. His most famous symphony, The New World Symphony, is a prime example of American music, due to its mixture of traditional themes with the long-standing European musical culture upon which it diverges.
American cultural history has long been defined by its ability to mix and interpolate widely different cultural starting points to inspire the creation of new forms. Dvořák is well-known for having been the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City between the years of 1892 and 1895.
Soon thereafter, he retreated to Spillville, Iowa, where he would live with the Czech-speaking community there, after having completed the New World Symphony, which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon that put the composer — and the burgeoning country he authored his composition about – on the cultural and musical map.
This momentous symphony is important for marking the first inarguably significant piece of American art music to be taken seriously by the world at large. While previous early American classical composers certainly existed and created important works before Dvořák the New World Symphony is largely regarded as the first and most recognizable.
It has been influencing and will continue to influence generations of artists for decades to come and remains significant to this day for its part in building the vision of a unique American artistic culture that would culminate in the later designations of being the land of opportunities.
Having accepted the basis of American music in being the mixture of traditional folk music with established European musical structures, the artists who would go on to succeed Dvořák began to look at the traditional cultures brought into the country with a newfound fascination.
African-Americans, often neglected culturally in early America due to their social and political standing as either slaves or second-class citizens, formed some of the most significant contributions to American music thanks to this newfound appreciation for folk music.
At the very end of the 19th century, ragtime music was born out this cultural approbation of African-American rhythms and syncopation with European harmonic and melodic styles, performed most commonly on the piano. Scott Joplin’s 1899 Maple Leaf Rag solidified the style and gave it national attention, leading to ragtime performances nationwide.
Ragtime, in accepting African-American syncopation with European harmony, eventually gave birth to Jazz. This was made possible by the unique cultural and geopolitical characteristics of New Orleans, long hailed as the birthplace of Jazz music.
The large contingent of French inhabitants along with the unique African-American culture of the city created the perfect conditions for the signature American cultural mixing process that would create a recognizable new music form - Jazz music.
Jazz borrows heavily from ragtime music, but switches from a primarily piano-based saloon act into a ballroom-level presentation with a full ensemble including brass and woodwind instruments. Jazz was made possible by the contributions of American marching band pioneers such as John Phillip Sousa, whose compositions made the ensemble format a viable one for performing this new popular music.
Once the ensemble format was established, it only took a number of inspired American artists to create momentous works in the new style and let it spread throughout the rest of the country. For many jazz historians and listeners, the primary and most readily recognizable artist of Jazz music was Louis Armstrong.
Trumpeter, bandleader, and celebrated singer Louis Armstrong created numerous pieces of music that helped to define the uniquely American sound and did so at a time when musical recording technology was on the rise.
The most significant of these songs, Stardust, is celebrated as a championing piece of uniquely American music, as well as a unique 1931 recording that would go on to set the standard for recordings to come. This is because of the innovative use of the newly invented ribbon microphone that would later become a characteristic of many other recordings such as those by Bing Crosby.
Alan Lomax was responsible for the recordings of many folk artists and influential blues singers before this, but the establishment of radio and later, television, as popular cultural formats for media consumption put a new emphasis on the recording process as it became economically viable and culturally desired.
As mass media grew in its cultural importance and leverage, other new forms of music began to meet the new cultural needs of the American populace. Many of these new forms of music had similarly American ethnic mixtures at the heart of their creation: Latino-American music and salsa music were defined by the contributions of early pioneers such as Tito Puente.
The difference at the time was that new audiences could be reached in relatively inexpensive ways, leading to the fragmentation of musical genres into a wide popular music format. African-American Gospel music was mixed with Country and R&B to create Rock N’ Roll through the artistic creations of artists such as Ray Charles and Chuck Berry.
This particular style was unique for its focus on youth culture, and for its instrumentation, which would become highly influential after Berry’s electric guitar sound became embedded into the minds of generations of young musicians to come.
The new media format offered by radio and television allowed new and never-before-heard sounds to reach wider audiences than ever before, creating a new era of expression in American music, but also skirting with censorship.
Beginning with the prohibition laws that came into effect in the 1920’s, American culture has followed a predictable pattern of attempting to fix societal problems by banning things. This has generally backfired and led to the banned or censored item becoming more popular than ever before, and music is no different.
For example, early Rock N’ Roll music was considered too banal to be played on the radio, and attempts to disregard it only led to increasing interest from the young people to whom it was targeted. Attempts at silencing vocal protesters such as the famous blues singer Paul Robeson for their communist ties only worked temporarily.
One of the most sensitive subjects, especially for early American music, is the role of music in church and the borrowing of spiritual music for other formats. Since this music is ostensibly sacred in nature, attempts to mix gospel music with popular formats have historically been met with great resistance — there was never any shortage of people calling Ray Charles’ music the music of the Devil.
While the particulars may vary over time, this resistance to contemporary music being mixed with spiritual music exists today as well, especially in the religiously homogenous areas of America, where religious institutions and churches play a role in the solidarity of the society they represent.
The mixture of religious music with the popular music format has a long tradition of creating quality pop music, but it tends to degrade the historicity of sacred music in the process. Degraded historicity is not a problem for pop music, which already has little historical capability as it is, as evidenced by Starr’s research into the recycling nature of remixes, pop chart contents, and throwback genres, but it poses a significant problem for sacred music.
Sacred music, like the church that it is a part of, needs to be understood and celebrated within a historical context rather than a contemporary one, in order to connect to the artistic values of the music itself.
While it is not the author’s opinion that any particular kind of music is the Devil’s music, there is an important historical element to a religious ceremony that is lost when a church replaces old, powerful songs with contemporary hits, for example, by Christian rock bands.
Churches, being responsible both for the moral values and the historicity of the society they represent, owe it to their members to maintain those values in the face of changing popular music trends. It is also their responsibility to offer a historically significant musical experience that rejects modern rock, pop, hip-hop and R&B, leaving those genres for the mass media audience they were intended for in the first place.
References
Kamien, Roger. Music. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Print.
Starr, Larry, and Christopher Alan Waterman. American Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.
Tibbetts, John C. Dvořák In America, 1892-1895. Portland, Or.: Amadeus Press, 1993. Print.
Ward, Geoffrey C, and Ken Burns. Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.
