Page 274 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Listening Cue
reAD . . . a detailed Listening Guide of this selection online.
LiSTeN TO . . . this selection streaming online.
WATCH . . . an Active Listening Guide of this selection online.
DO . . . Listening Exercise 16.2, Zwilich, Concerto Grosso 1985, online.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Concerto Grosso 1985 (1985) Download 5208 Third movement, Largo (slow and broad)
Genre: Concerto grosso
what to listen for: A predominantly Modernist style infused with elements of the Baroque era. To understand how the generally consonant “American” style of Copland contrasts with the more dissonant Modernism of Zwilich, listen to a bit of Copland (Download 49) before moving on to Zwilich.
watch . . . Female trumpet sensation Bria Skonberg.
Jazz
Just as Ellen Zwilich sometimes borrows the idioms of the Baroque or Classi- cal eras for her Modernist music, so, too, her scores sometimes incorporate el- ements of a uniquely American kind of music: jazz. That Debussy, Stravinsky, and Copland also did suggests the importance of jazz to both European and American Modernism.
Jazz is a lively, energetic music with pulsating rhythms and scintillating syn- copations, usually played by either a small instrumental ensemble (a combo) or a larger group (a big band). Jazz originated as African-American popular music, much of it improvised spontaneously. And, like most pop music today, musi- cians learned jazz by listening to others play it (in this case in cafés and clubs) or from recordings, but not from written notation. Yet during the twentieth century, jazz gradually developed its own body of music theory and historical criticism—both hallmarks of an art in a mature “classical stage.” For this reason jazz is now often called “America’s classical music.” Today there are even concert halls to hear jazz, such as Preservation Hall in New Orleans and Rose Hall at Lin- coln Center, New York, a bastion of traditional classical music. Thus what began around 1910 as alternative-culture music by minority outsiders has, a century later, solidified into a mainstream cultural tradition, albeit with conventions all its own.
The roots of jazz are found in the rhythms and vocal practices of sub-Saharan Africa, and these traditions accompanied African slaves to America. By the turn of the twentieth century, the descendants of slaves had come to express themselves
252 chapter sixteen american modernism and postmodernism
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