Final -- HUM 223

HUM 223: Ethnic Music

Springfield College in Illinois

Fall Semester 2008

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Final Exam – Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008

Answer each of the three essay questions below; No. 1 is worth 50 points, and Nos. 2A and 2B are worth 25 points each. This is an open-book test, so in grading it I will take into account the amount of detail you use to support your answers as well as their clarity, correctness and relevance to the questions. Specific detail is very important; the more detail you cite to support your points, and the more logically you use it to prove your points, the better your grade. It’s that simple. So be specific. . Due Dec. 4. You have the option of writing it in Dawson 220 during the scheduled period, 1:30-3:30 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 4.

Essay #1 (50 points). In the TV show Godfathers and Sons, Chicago rap artist Common said, “Hip hop is definitely a child of the blues, and I think you’ve got to know the roots to really grow [as a musician]. It’s like knowing your parents, it’s like knowing your culture so you can be proud of that culture and take it to the world and say, ‘Hey, this is where we’re taking it. We’re utilizing the origins of this to take it somewhere else. We’re paying homage, and we’re taking it to a new place.’” In each of the three videos about the blues we watched this semester, we saw artists searching back to the origins of blues and reflecting them in other forms of music including jazz, rock and hip hop. How did bluesman Corey Harris’ search for musical origins in Feel Like Going Home differ from that of the English rock singers like Eric Clapton featured in Red, White and Blues and mentioned in the book Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues? How was it the same? How do Harris’ and the English rockers’ quests compare to the hip hop artists featured in Godfathers and Sons? How have the music and the cultural values of musicians from Africa, rural Mississippi and the Chicago of Muddy Waters’ day been reflected in the blues and contemporary popular music?

Short essay #2A (25 points). What have you learned in HUM 223 that surprised you? What was your overall impression of the blues before you took the course? Has that impression changed as a result of your reading, class discussion and research for the course? What specific thing (or things) surprised you the most? Why? What do you think was the most important point? As always, be specific. Cite specific evidence - in this case, while discussing what you learned in the course. Your grade on the essay will depend on the specific evidence you cite.

Short essay #2B (25 points). As you wrote your research paper, did you expect to learn when you started? What did you find out from your research that was unexpected? In other words, what surprised you? What new insights did you gain? What did you learn about the history of American popular music? Where did the musician(s) you studied fit into the development of blues, jazz, rock, hip hop or other forms of American popular music? How did your appreciation of their music change from doing the paper?

HUM 223: Final exam, blues videos

Please note correction in 2nd graf!

I haven't made out your final exam question yet, but it will heavily depend on the videos we screened this month in class and "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer. I have made arrangements at SCI's Becker Library to have the DVDs put on reserve at the circulation desk, which I will do after class today (Thursday). In order to level the playing field, you'll have to watch it in the library so everybody gets an equal chance at it.

Final exam schedule for our class (cut-and-pasted from the schedule on line) is: 1:00p.m. TR ... December 2 [at] 1:30p.m. – 3:30p.m.Thursday, December 4 [at] 1:30p.m. – 3:30p.m.

I will hand out the final exam at our last class session, at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25. It is a take-home exam, and it is due at the scheduled time and place -- in other words, at 1:30 p.m. Tiesdau. Dec. 2, in Dawson 220, our regular classroom. You can write it ahead of time and bring it in then, or you can write the exam in D220 during the scheduled time from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.

You are responsible for the three videos we watched, which are part of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series "The Blues directed by Martin Scorsese:

• "Feel Like Going Home" directed by Martin Scorsese.
  
• "Red, White and Blues directed by Mike Figgis.
  
• "Godfathers and Sons" directed by Marc Levine.

Note: If you follow the links above, they'll take you to webpages with a short blurb on each of the videos as well as links to remarks by the directors of each. They'll also show you how to spell the singers' names, so you can check your finals for spelling errors.

If you have questions, you can reach me most easily by email ... at SCI at pellertsen@sci.edu or at home at peterellertsen@yahoo.com.

Annbjørg Lien, "Waltz with Me" CD w/ sound files

http://www.cdroots.com/sst-com4492.html

Annbjørg Lien
Waltz with Me (Compass Records)
Norwegian hardanger fiddler and composer Annbjørg Lien was commissioned last year to compose new music for the prestigious Telemark Festival in Bø, Norway. She responded with an ensemble of Bruce Molsky on violin and vocals, Christine Hanson on cello and Mikael Marin on viola, then wrote a varied set of tradition-based tunes and songs that reflect an eclectic attitude. The strong chemistry shared by members of the group is apparent on each and every track on ths lovely recording of new Nordic music.
Listen:
The Traveller
Sula Mountain
The Fiddle
Home East

Odd Nordstoga og Øyonn Groven Myhren

http://www.cdroots.com/grcd-nivelkinn.html

Odd Nordstoga og Øyonn Groven Myhren
Nivelkinn16.99
Harp and accordion are not your usual duet configuration, but this CD presents traditional and modern Norwegian folk music by an excellent duo who use these intruments and their voices in unusual combinations to create new music for the poetry of Aslaug Vaa. It's still genuinely "folky" but here and there a surprising modernity sneaks in, catches you off guard and charms the heck out of you.
Odd Nordstoga - vocal, guitar and accordionØyonn Groven Myhren - harp and vocals

HUM 223: DVD on Corey Harris and the blues

Tomorrow (Tuesday< Nov. 4) and Thursday we will screen a DVD called "Feel Like Going Home," directed by Martin Scorsese for the Public Breoadcasting System in 2003. It features blues and reggae artist Corey Harris of Charlottesville, Va., (whose MySpace page has more information) searching for the roots of blues and playing with local musicians in Mississippi and the West African nation of Mali. You'll notice I'm giving you a handout in class that lists the performers and interviewees in the video. That's the good news. Since you have the handout, you'll know how to spell their names correctly. Right? Which means you'll be expected to. That's the ... was I about to say "bad news?" No, it's good news.

We all want to spell correctly. Right?

I thought so.

Scorsese put together a whole series of seven TV shows for his series The Blues. In his introduction he says:

Corey isn't just a great player, he also knows the history of the blues very well. We filmed him in Mississippi talking to some of the old, legendary figures who were still around and visiting some of the places where the music was made. This section culminates in a meeting with the great Otha Turner, sitting on his porch in Senatobia with his family nearby and playing his cane flute. We were also fortunate to film Otha's magnificent November 2001 concert at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, which I believe was his last performance captured on film. It seemed natural to trace the music back from Mississippi to West Africa, where Corey met and played with extraordinary artists like Salif Keita, Habib Koité, and Ali Farka Toure. It's fascinating to hear the links between the African and American music, to see the influences going both ways, back and forth across time and space.

You can -- and should! -- read more on the linked page. Scorsese ends by saying:

People like to think of the great blues singers as raw, instinctive, with talent and genius flowing from their fingertips. But John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and so many other amazing talents, more names than I have space for here, are some of the greatest artists America has ever had. When you listen to Lead Belly, or Son House, or Robert Johnson, or John Lee Hooker, or Charley Patton, or Muddy Waters, you're moved, your heart is shaken, you're carried and inspired by its visceral energy, and its rock solid emotional truth. You go right to the heart of what it is to be human, the condition of being human. That's the blues.

"Some of the greatest artists America has ever had." That's pretty high praise. Think about it. You don't have to agree. Just think about it.

Taizé links on YouTube

My --- and my Joy" -- Bant: Choral "Meine Hoffnung und meine Freude" (Taizé) at Ev. Luth. church in Wilhelmshaven Germany

"Meine Hoffnung ..." Kirchentag 2007 Köln

"Jesus the Christ" Taizé Geneve - Jesus le Christ

"The Kingdom of God" Taizé Genève - "The kingdom of God" live in the train -- w/ bongos

"The Lord is My Life and My Salvation" Episcopal church in St. Louis (?)

"Ubi Caritas" Taizé Prayer in the Holy Land, Nazareth, West Bank

Heard on KKR, folk singer from Nordmøre

Unni Boksasp, "På Gulevei" (Golden roads)

home page http://www.boksasp.no/boksasp.php

MySpace (w/ audio clips) http://www.myspace.com/unniboksasp

YouTube (concert at Frei Kirke in Kristiansund N and interviews on Norwegian TV) -- 9 min. at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fBwIx6Gk_s and 2nd part 9 min. at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgV260yoGog ... she played at the Kirke Kunst og Kulturfestival in Kristiansund

Blurb on http://www.folkogdans.no/index.php?cat=74513&view=1072

Folksinger, composer and arranger, born in Tingvoll, Nordmøre in 1972, living in Tinn, Telemark

Unni Boksasp is a versatile musician with voice as her instrument. Her core repertoire derives from the vocal tradition of Nordmøre, with Magnhild Almhjell (1894-1985) serving as the most comprehensive source. She has also studied the singing traditions of Tinn and Telemark with Hanne Kjersti Yndestad. She has qualified for the elite Category A in traditional singing in the National Contest for Traditional Music. Boksasp studied folk music at Telemark College Institute of Folk Culture, folk dance in Trondheim, and folk music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. She is currently working as a full-time musician in addition to teaching at the Telemark College Institute of Folk Culture. She is also involved in a number of school projects aimed at teaching children and young people the art of singing. Boksasp performs both as a soloist and in various ensembles such as the Nordmøre group Brann i blått and the children’s concert group Æppel pæppel, which has presented around 250 concerts for Concerts Norway in the county of Møre og Romsdal. In autumn 2007 she recorded her first solo CD, Songar frå Havdal, featuring her interpretations of folk music from northwestern Norway. Jorun Marie Kvernberg, Magne Vestrum, Ånon Egeland and Henning Sommerro accompanied her on the record. Unni Boksasp has performed at festivals in Norway and abroad, and has presented concerts throughout Norway. For the past few years she has worked with arranging folk music pieces for different ensembles and composing material based on traditional music. She has also worked with recently composed pieces by Henning Sommerro, Henrik Ødegård and others.

HUM 223: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Black Snake Moan"

A recording is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Lyrics at http://www.lyricstime.com/blind-lemon-jefferson-that-black-snake-moan-lyrics.html ... open a window to follow them as I play the song.

There's a good biography of Jefferson in the "Handbook of Texas" at http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/JJ/fje1.html

HUM 223: Term paper (which I will also hand out in hard copy)

HUM 223: Ethnic Music

Springfield College in Illinois

Fall Semester 2008

http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/humanities/hum223syllabus.html

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Term Paper – Fall 2008

One of your requirements in Humanities 223 is to write a documented term paper (at least 2,000 words or eight pages in 12pt type) on some aspect of cultural and artistic expression in traditional music or a commercial genre derived from traditional music. This handout tells you how to do it. The instructions, and updates, will be posted to my teaching blog at http://www.hogfiddle.blogspot.com/ -- Pete Ellertsen, instructor

Your overall assignment. Choose a musician, band or group whose work you enjoy or whom you want to know more about, and write a paper about their artistic influences; how their culture and/or artistic shaped their life and career; how they dealt with issues of commercial and artistic success; and their place in the history of American popular music. You may choose your own topic. But since this is a roots music class, you will do best if you choose a historical figure or a contemporary musician whose art has been influenced by traditional music and who seeks to modify those traditions in today’s world. Be sure to clear your topic with me before you begin researching it; I must approve the topic ahead of time. Your opinions and your response to the artist’s music are an important part of the paper, but you need to research your artists’ career and respond to their music in order to support your opinion. In other words, it is a documented research paper. A “Citation Machine” is available on my faculty page.

How to approach your paper. In researching and writing your paper, you’ll want to address the following points. Not all of them will be appropriate for every paper you write (for example you don’t need to spell out for me that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson didn’t use drugs), but you’ll want to touch these bases in your research:

· Some biography of your artist or band members, including musical influences, artistic vision (i.e. anything they said about music, like the quote from jazz saxophone player Charlie “Bird” Parker above), and how they made a living from their music. How did they handle the stresses of a musical career, including drug use, road trips, etc.? How successful were they? What compromises, if any, did they make between their artistic vision and commercial success? How successful were they, both artistically and commercially?

· What does your artist’s career tell you about what it means to have a career in the arts in American society? What does it tell you about American popular culture? If you do a historical figures, how did they influence later musicians? If you do contemporary musicians, how do they build on the music of the past?

· How well was your artist or band received in their time? By the public? By other musicians? Listen to some of their music, and ask yourself: (1) What about it stands out in my mind as I listen to it? (2) What in my background, values, taste and interests makes me feel that way? (3) What specifically about the music leads me to my response to it? Consult the handout linked to my faculty webpage at http://www.sci.edu/faculty/ellertsen/humanities/reflective%20response.html and my sample essay linked to it for more ideas on how to write about music. Your response to roots music is what HUM 223 is all about, and this response is an essential part of the paper.

In researching the paper, you should both read up on the musicians and listen to some of their music. You will find some sources in the library, others on the Internet. If you have trouble tracking down recordings or sound files, see me and I’ll help out.

Who to write about? Any of the artists we have talked about in class are fair game. You can find plenty on historical figures like Stephen A. Foster, the Fisk Jubilee Singers or Louie Armstrong. Blues and/or jazz vocalists like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday would be good subjects. Gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson (mentioned above) or Thomas A. Dorsey who also sang blues as “Georgia Tom,” or more recent evangelists like Kirk Franklin who have their roots in gospel music. As you read “Deep Blues” by Robert Palmer, You will learn a lot about Delta and Chicago bluesmen Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as the rock artists like Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan or the Rolling Stones who emulated their music. You will get other ideas as we watch “Feel Like Going Home” and other DVDs from Martin Scorese’s PBS series “The Blues” we screen in class during the remainder of the semester. Just be sure to clear your topic with me first.

What are my deadlines? There are three. You will give me a two-page typewritten proposal by Thursday, Nov. 6, in which you tell me which performer(s) you will research and what your tentative thesis is; and list, in MLA or APA format, three to five specific sources you have consulted. Your papers will be due the week before Thanksgiving, which is the week of Nov. 17-21. I will post further directions and/or suggestions to Hogfiddle, and we can discuss paper-writing stragegies in class.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. The quickest way to get hold of me is to email me at pellertsen@sci.edu.

HUM 223: W.C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and the birth of the blues 'where the Southern cross the Dog'

W.C. Handy is known as the "Father of the Blues." Fair enough. But he was an accomplished, classically trained musician who taught at Alabama A&M College and played at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He first heard the blues, when he was waiting for a train one night in Tutweiler, Miss., when a heard a street musician playing slide guitar country-style. Years later Handy recalled the moment like this:

As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who use steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

"Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog"
The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. When the singer paused, I leaned over and asked him what the words meant. He rolled his eyes, showing a trace of mild amusement.

Perhaps I should have known, but he didn't mind explaining. At [the nearby town of] Moorhead, the east and west bound met and crossed the north and south bound trains four times a day. This fellow was going where the Southern railroad crossed the Yazoo Delta railroad, (nicknamed the "Yellow Dog"), and he didn't care who knew it.

Steve Cheseborough, program host for Mississippi Public Television, tells viewers what it must have been like that night to hear the country blues in 1903. Here's what it may have sounded like, a sound file of Charlie Patton's "Green River Blues" with the same refrain. The recording is from the 1920s, but Patton played in the old country blues style. Notice how intricate and polyrhythmic his guitar-picking is. He is simply one of the best guitar players ever.

Handy saw commercial possibilties in the blues (see the handout I give you in class about his reaction when a "rain of silver dollars becan to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet" of a country blues band in Cleveland, Miss.), and he published "St. Louis Blues" in 1914 (as played here on a 78rpm record by Louie Armstrong in 1933. It was the first huge crossover blues hit, although purists would say it doesn't really have the structure of a 12-bar country blues song.

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of the most successful blues singers of the 1920s. She made the transition from minstrel shows and the TOBA circuit to movies, and perhaps more importantly she was popular as a crossover artist. But her music kept the earthy beginnings of the blues with what our textbook calls "the down-and-out [musicians] who had gravitated to the larger cities to make the street music that became their prime means of livelihood and independence" (p. 112). I couldn't find "Hustlin' Blues" (discussed on pp. 113-14) on YouTube. Instead, we'll listen to her sing "Black Bottom Blues" backed by her Georgia Jazz Band. The piano player at the far right is Thomas A. "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, who later wrote gospel songs including "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." But first, we'll watch a 1920s-era silent movie about the Black Bottom. (There's s more about the dance itself available in Wikipedia.)

Then we'll listen to Ma Rainey sing. You can -- and should -- follow the lyrics in another window. They're full of double meanings, as when she sings, "Ma Rainey's going to show you her black bottom." The double meaning is intentional:

I want to see that dance you call the black bottom
I want to learn that dance
Don't you see the dance you call your big black bottom
That'll put you in a trance.

But Ma Rainey had the last laugh. Unlike many musicians of the day (or any other), she invested her money wisely and made enough to build and manage two successful theaters in her home town of Columbus, Ga., even in the middle of the Great Depression.

Bessie Smith got her start as a street musician in Chattanooga, Tenn., and in 1912 joined Ma Rainey's minstrel show on the TOBA circuit. According to the RedHotJazz.com website, she was "the greatest of the classic Blues singers of the 1920s."

Two passages in our textbook by Candlearia and Kingman discuss the structure of the blues. They're important.

• Bessie Smith's "Lost Your Head Blues" is quoted and analyzed in our book (pp. 114-15).
  
• Ma Rainey's "Counting the Blues" is on page 116. We'll listen to it in audio.

Then we'll complete the circle, with a sophisticated musical tribute to the earliest country blues. Years after that night at the railroad station in northern Mississippi, Handy wrote a song called "Yellow Dog Blues," and he incorporated some of what he remembered of the night. In 1926 Bessie Smith recorded it with a band including Joe Smith on cornet, Charlie Green on trombone, Buster Bailey clarinet, Coleman Hawkins tenor saxaphone, Fletcher Henderson piano, Charlie Dixon banjo and Bob Escudero on brass bass. You can follow the lyrics by opening this window. Handy's treatment of the song is sophisticated, but it harkens back to the very earliest blues.

ABC Notation Sites

Courtesy of my Appalachian dulcimer-playing buddy Mike Thomas:

ABC Notation Sites

JC's ABC Tune Match at trillian.mit.edu - Just type in the song title orword in the title and you have a good chance of getting back what you'relooking for a maybe some that you're not :-).

Type in the name (such as Snake River Reel), click on the FIND button,select PDF hyperlink, then click on the GET button, then select*.ABC to download the ABC file*.PDF to download the PDF file

Or just try just playing around with the different options

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind

Free ABC Format Music Siteshttp://www.freesheetmusic.net/abc.html

JC's ABC music collectionhttp://ecf-guest.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/

the abc musical notation language http://www2.redhawk.org:8080/irish/abc/index.html

ABC Navigator - I lost my ABC converter program when I reinstalled my operating system but I believe this is the one I was playing around with:http://abcnavigator.free.fr/abcnvgt.php?lang=eng

Music Notation Links

http://www3.telus.net/On-LineMusicWorldofWendy/Tablature.htm

HUM 223: Jazz (a quick-and-dirty summary)

Jazz was another form of American music that went from folk beginnings, a lot of them in New Orleans, to a very popular art form and eventually crossed over into something that has a lot in common with classical music ... including very complex music, highly trained musicians and a limited audience.

We don't have time to do more than look at a few video clips, but we need to do at least that because jazz strongly influenced the blues. Terms in CAPS and boldface you should know, and in quotes you can look up in Kingman's chapters on jazz and blues. At the end, I'll try to take it back around to something I think is important about roots music.

The big thing about jazz is it's IMPROVISED, like folk music is. It started in a "bounded community," the black community of New Orleans in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It went worldwide, but it always kept that focus on improvisation -- it's not played note-for-note from sheet music, so players can vary they way they play a song and build on each other's interpretations during a performance.

One of the first roots of jazz was band music of the Civil War. Hundreds of regimental bands were organized, and most of them had bands. The YouTube clip shows vintage photos with the Federal City Brass Band playing in the background. Louisiana raised at least 30 regiments for the Confederate Army, and 11 regiments of African American troops for the union. That meant a lot of surplus musical instruments after the war, and some of them found their way to street bands in New Orleans. Marches were very popular everywhere. Here's a very early movie (1889) for the Thomas A. Edison Music Video Co. showing a regimental band. And a Victorla record playing a John Philip Sousa march called "Under the Double Eagle." (Notice the picture of the dog listening to an old-fashioned record player on the label.)

Jazz has always been, and continues to be even now, band music. Religion, not surprisingly, was another deep root of jazz.

STREET BANDS combined the two. They grew up in New Orleans' black community in the late 1800s, and they developed a tradition that combined church processions with street dancing, Mardi Gras and what in time came to be called "dixieland" jazz. The band would play a solemn, dignified tune in the first line on the way to the cemetery. Often it was the old spiritual, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." Afterward, on the SECOND LINE or way back to a celebration very similar to a wake, the band would play upbeat numbers like "When the Saints Go Marching In." The tradition survives in New Orleans, not only in the tourist sections but in the neighborhoods. The YouTube clip seen here shows a second line from New Orleans' St. Augustine Church in June 2007. Historical footage of several jazz funerals shows the progression from the church to the cemetery -- where graves are in mansoleums above ground -- and the transition to second-line music (at 2:30 min.) after interment.

Louis Armstrong was one performer whose career spanned the popularity of jazz. He started out in street bands like those linked above, and evolved into a polished "big band" performer during the 1930s and 1940s. His career lasted into the period of "modern jazz," which was more classical in tone, but he was uniquely himself. Here he plays "When the Saints Go Marching In" with what looks like a 1950s television studio band. In this clip from the 1947 movie clip, he introduces band members in a New Orleans club. And here he sings his trademark song "Wonderful World" on BBC-TV in 1968. Backing him are Tyree Glenn ontrombone, Joe Muranyi clarinet, Marty Napoleon piano, Buddy Catlett bass and Danny Barcelona drums. The BBC show was one of Armstrong's last public appearances.

Jazz evolved into what some consider a form of ART MUSIC with the advent of players like Charles "Bird" Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Here the John Coltrane Quartet plays an arrangment of "Alabama" in 1963. McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones rounded out the quartet. Their playing is improvised, but very subtle, intricate and formal like art music. It came to be known as "modern jazz," and it still has a strong market niche mostly in college towns and major metro areas.

In 2006 rock artist Bruce Springsteen made a "roots" album in honor of folksinger Pete Seeger. (My definition of ROOTS MUSIC is pretty simple -- just about any music that tries to capture the spirit of its roots in the folk music of a bounded community.) And Springsteen played a roots-y version of "The Saints" on the Seeger Sessions tour afterward in the U.S. and Europe. A fan who saw the concert Nov. 11, 2006, in Sheffield, England, said, "Introducing When The saints Go Marching In [Springsteen] said that this song explained what the show was all about. The slowed down arrangement worked perfectly with band members Marc Anthony Thompson and Lisa Lowell each taking a verse." Is it folk? Is it art music? Is it roots? I'd say it's all three.

HUM 223: Assignment for Tuesday

Read Candelaria and Kingman, Chapters 15-16, on ragtime and jazz.

MORE EXCITING ASSIGNMENTS TO COME.

HUM 223: Thursday -- quiz and class links

First, here's the quiz. Write a good, detailed paragraph on the following question and turn it in to me:

Stephen Foster was the first American songwriter to quit his day job and make his living writing songs. How did he deal with the problem of balancing his artistic vision -- i.e. write the kind of songs he wanted to write -- with the necessity of making money?

Be specific. (Heard that before?) Always be specific.

Today in class we will look at some more information on the ministrel shows like those that Foster wrote for. Here are links to some current resources on minstrel shows, including supporting material for the documentary on Stephen A. Foster we watched in class. There's a good overview of Blackface Minstrelsy with comments by historians and musicians linked to a directory page. Be especially sure to read how historian Eric Lott and rock music critic Ken Emerson answer the question, "What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll?" Several people are interviewed for this feature, and they give varied but thoughtful critiques of the racial and artistic issues it raises. Also: There's a very good history of ministrel shows and vaudeville by John Kenrick on the "Musicals101.com" website.

What were the early minstrel shows like? Joe Bethancourt performs an minstrel tune called "Juba" on a fretless banjo made of a gourd. The lyrics, in their entirety, are:

Juba this, and Juba that
Juba stole my yellow cat.

The banjo is like the instruments that were developed by African Americans from several West African antecedents. Little else about the song shows African influence. "Old Dan Tucker" was a very popular song from the minstrel shows. I've linked to several files on the Internet that suggest how widespread the song got to be, especially after it went back into oral tradition as a fiddle tune.

• Original lyrics, as they were published in 1843, played by Japher's "Original" SANDY RIVER MINSTRELS, show the typical nonsense lyrics of the ministrel shows without some of the more egregious racial stereotyping.
  
• Old-time string band musicians jam on "Old Dan Tucker" at the 2006 Early Banjo Gathering in the barn of the Pry House Field Hospital Museum at Antietam Civil War battlefield. They're in period clothes (except for the guy with the white ballcap), playing fiddle, banjo and bones -- or spoons, which jug bands often use instead of castanets.
  
• "Old Dan Tucker" was a favorite during the Civil War. Played at a slightly slower tempo, it made a good march. Here historical reenactors of the Excelsior Brigade Fife and Drum Corps play it during a Mardi Gras parade in 2007 in Brockport, N.Y.
  
• Habla español? Spanish television broadcasts Bruce Springsteen and his Seeger Sessions band playing "Old Dan Tucker" (and, later, a snippet from "John Henry") when they played in Madrid in 2006. Also Springsteen talks (in English) about the "raw democracy" he finds in American roots music. Notice his band combines the instrumentation of an oldtime string band (fiddle, banjo, guitar) with the brass instruments of a Dixieland jazz band. We've seen clips from these concerts before, and we'll see more as we go along.

How did the shows change when black people got involved with them? John Kendrick's history of ministrel shows and vaudeville on "Musicals101.com" takes them up into the 20th century. (Did you know the first popular "talking picture show," or movie with sound on film, featured a white blackface singer named Al Jolson?) Be sure to click through to Kenrick's discussion of how black vaudville performers changed the art form.

Vaudeville did much to to teach audiences of different ethnic and social backgrounds to get along. Defying the racist norm that dominated American society, vaudeville had black and white performers sharing the same stage as early as the 1890s. But managers had to deal with the legal and social realities of their time. Most southern states did not allow blacks and whites to sit in the same theatre, and even most Northern cities barred blacks from the best seats as late as the 1920s.

The TOBA Circuit ("Theatre Owners Booking Agency," which performers re-named "Tough On Black Asses") were the only venues below the Mason-Dixon Line that welcomed "colored" customers in the early part of the 20th Century, offering all-black bills for all-black audiences. For midnight performances on Saturdays, some TOBA houses allowed whites to sneak into the balcony.

This discussion on "Musicals101.com" is much better than what we have in our textbook. You may want to bookmark it so you can consult it when you write your midterm.

Song and dance was an important part of the legacy of the minstrel shows. As early as the 1840s, William Henry Lane, a black dancer who went by the stage name of Master Juba, was an international success. He combined Irish and African American steps, and is credited as the person who invented tap dance. A London theater and dance troupe recently toured the United States with a tribute to Master Juba that told his story.

Years later, at the turn of the 20th century, a dance known as the Cakewalk became a nationwide craze. It is said to have originated with slaves mocking the "high-falutin' airs" of their masters (without the masters realizing it). A very early motion picture, filmed in 1903, shows a professional dance troupe doing the cakewalk on stage and amateurs cakewalking in the surf along a beach. Note the bathing suits!

We can gain perhaps the best feel for what these stereotypes were like and the profound influence they had on the American entertainment industry from a documentry on blacks in vaudville -- a very popular kind of variety show that lasted up to the early days of television in the 1950s -- that shows clips from old movies.

The first part of the documentary shows how lasted well into the 1900s. But they also allowed African American artists to gain a foothold and shape the entertainment industry into what it is today.

The second part of the documentary shows how Bert Williams, the Nicholas Brothers and other gifted black artists performed with style, grace and artistic integrity on the TOBA circuit. Williams has been called the "Jackie Robinson of show business." The comedian W.C. Fields once said Bert Williams was "The funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever met."

HUM 223: TRANSLATION -- WHAT THE SCRIBBLES AND SQUIGGLES ON YOUR MIDTERMS MEAN

This may save you from wondering about ...

1. Checkmarks in the margin of your paper are good. When you see one, it means you said something I liked. Usually something specific that relates to the main themes of the course, your readings, etc.
2. A "bang mark" or exclamation point is good! It can mean a variety of things. Often I put a bang mark in the margin when you said something that made me laugh.
3. "Be specific" in the margin means ... (drum roll) ... be specific! I really, really like specific.

If you can't read my writing, ask me after class. If I can read it myself (which is usually, but not always, the case), I'll translate it into English for you.

ONE LAST NOTE: If you get a "C" on your midterm grade report, that does not mean you are getting a C in the class. It means I don't have a midterm for you, but you've been coming to class so I'm not going to flunk you.

Yet.

It also means: See me after class, and we'll get it straightened out.

HUM 223: In-class quiz

Sometimes in my classes, I give quizzes to encourage attendance. I try to ask questions that are not too intellectually demanding, so you get credit basically for being here that day.

So I will ask two questions below, and you will post your answers as a comment to this blogpost.

Here's how.

How to post your comment

Go to the bottom of this post, right below the next graf. On the right side of the last line, there will be a link that says "Posted by Pete at 12:34 PM ___ comments" (with a number filled in where I've left a blank, depending on how many comments have been posted). Click on that " ___ comments" link and fill in the comment field on the right. Sign in.

You'll probably have to do something to register for Blogger. Do it (they'll prompt you). Make a note of the username and password you choose. We'll keep on posting to the blog, and if you don't make a note you'll forget it. Please believe me on this. It is something we have learned by hard experience! When you've reviewed your comment, publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." And that's how you publish your comment. Logical, isn't it?

And now, the questions ...

1. Irish fiddle tunes are one of the sources of 19th-century American popular music. From what European country do Irish fiddle tunes come?

a. Japan
b. New Zealand
c. Khazakistan
d. Illinois
e. Ireland

2. On what musical instrument are Irish fiddle tunes played?

a. Trombone
b. piano
c. tuba
d. chain saw
e. fiddle

Please post your answers to the blog so you will recieve proper credit for being here today.

Daniel Pearl Music Days

7th Annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days - October 1st - 31st, 2008

An international network of concerts using the power of music to reaffirm our commitment to tolerance and humanity.


From the website at http://www.danielpearlmusicdays.org/:

7th Annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days - October 1st - 31st, 2008

An international network of concerts using the power of music to reaffirm our commitment to tolerance and humanity.

The Daniel Pearl Foundation invites you to join us in promoting international friendship by dedicating a musical performance this October as part of Daniel Pearl World Music Days.

Inspired by the legacy of journalist and musician Daniel Pearl, World Music Days uses the universal language of music to spread a message of hope and unity across cultural divides. By simply including a dedication from the stage or in the program of your upcoming performance, you will reaffirm your commitment to international friendship and take a stand against the divisive forces that took Danny’s life. As a member of this global network of concerts, your music will inspire your audiences with a sense of unity and purpose.

World Music Days is an “awareness raiser,” not a fundraiser. There is no financial obligation to participate.

Some other links and resources below ...





http://community.beliefnet.com/forums/showthread.php?p=771656
copy of flier we got at Worship & Music Committee meeting

O Day of Peace (711 ELW), text by Carl Daw and tune by Hubert Perry

In Christ there is no East or West (359 LBW), African American spiritual arr. Harry Burleigh

Choir anthem "Instruments of Your Peace" by Kirk and Debi Dearman, arranged by Phil Perkins. Lyrics at http://www.higherpraise.com/lyrics/love/love200685.htm Dearman's MySpace page at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=310406047

HUM 223: 'Blackface' minstrel shows

Here are links to some current resources on minstrel shows, including supporting material for the documentary on Stephen A. Foster we watched in class. There's a good overview of Blackface Minstrelsy with comments by historians and musicians linked to a directory page. Be especially sure to read how historian Eric Lott and rock music critic Ken Emerson answer the question, "What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll?" Several people are interviewed for this feature, and they give varied but thoughtful critiques of the racial and artistic issues it raises. A very good history of ministrel shows and vaudeville by John Kenrick on the "Musicals101.com" website

Questions to ask yourself as you read about the shows: (1) Does the music of the ministrel shows transcend boundaries of race and culture? (2) Do Stephen Foster's songs, like "My Old Kentucky Home" or "Oh Susannah" hold up 150 years later in the 21st century, or are they sentimental and dated? (3) How should we approach American works of art, like the minstrel show songs or Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," that reflect racist attitudes?

What were the early minstrel shows like? Joe Bethancourt performs an minstrel tune called "Juba" on a fretless banjo made of a gourd. The lyrics, in their entirety, are:

Juba this, and Juba that
Juba stole my yellow cat.

The banjo is like the instruments that were developed by African Americans from several West African antecedents. Little else about the song shows African influence. "Old Dan Tucker" was a very popular song from the minstrel shows. I've linked to several files on the Internet that suggest how widespread the song got to be, especially after it went back into oral tradition as a fiddle tune.

• Original lyrics, as they were published in 1843, played by Japher's "Original" SANDY RIVER MINSTRELS, show the typical nonsense lyrics of the ministrel shows without some of the more egregious racial stereotyping.
  
• Old-time string band musicians jam on "Old Dan Tucker" at the 2006 Early Banjo Gathering in the barn of the Pry House Field Hospital Museum at Antietam Civil War battlefield. They're in period clothes (except for the guy with the white ballcap), playing fiddle, banjo and bones -- or spoons, which jug bands often use instead of castanets.
  
• "Old Dan Tucker" was a favorite during the Civil War. Played at a slightly slower tempo, it made a good march. Here historical reenactors of the Excelsior Brigade Fife and Drum Corps play it during a Mardi Gras parade in 2007 in Brockport, N.Y.
  
• Spanish television broadcasts Bruce Springsteen and a band he assembled for a toots music albumcalled "The Seeger Sessions" playing "Old Dan Tucker" (and, later, part of "John Henry") when they played in Madrid in 2006. Also Springsteen talks (in English) about the "raw democracy" he finds in American roots music. Notice his band combines the instrumentation of an oldtime string band (fiddle, banjo, guitar) with the brass instruments of a Dixieland jazz band. We've seen clips from these concerts before, and we'll see more as we go along.

How did the shows change when black people got involved with them? John Kendrick's history of ministrel shows and vaudeville on "Musicals101.com" takes them up into the 20th century. (Did you know the first popular "talking picture show," or movie with sound on film, featured a white blackface singer named Al Jolson?) Be sure to click through to Kenrick's discussion of how black vaudville performers changed the art form.

Vaudeville did much to to teach audiences of different ethnic and social backgrounds to get along. Defying the racist norm that dominated American society, vaudeville had black and white performers sharing the same stage as early as the 1890s. But managers had to deal with the legal and social realities of their time. Most southern states did not allow blacks and whites to sit in the same theatre, and even most Northern cities barred blacks from the best seats as late as the 1920s.

The TOBA Circuit ("Theatre Owners Booking Agency," which performers re-named "Tough On Black Asses") were the only venues below the Mason-Dixon Line that welcomed "colored" customers in the early part of the 20th Century, offering all-black bills for all-black audiences. For midnight performances on Saturdays, some TOBA houses allowed whites to sneak into the balcony.

This discussion on "Musicals101.com" is much better than what we have in our textbook. You may want to bookmark it so you can consult it when you write your midterm.

Dance. Song and dance was an important part of the legacy of the minstrel shows. As early as the 1840s, William Henry Lane, a black dancer who went by the stage name of Master Juba, was an international success. He combined Irish and African American steps, and is credited as the person who invented tap dance. A London theater and dance troupe recently toured the United States with a tribute to Master Juba that told his story. Years later, at the turn of the 20th century, a dance known as the Cakewalk became a nationwide craze. It is said to have originated with slaves mocking the "high-falutin' airs" of their masters (without the masters realizing it). A very early motion picture, filmed in 1903, shows a professional dance troupe doing the cakewalk on stage and amateurs cakewalking in the surf along a beach. Note the bathing suits!

We can gain perhaps the best feel for what these stereotypes were like and the profound influence they had on the American entertainment industry from a documentry on blacks in vaudville that shows clips from old movies. As the documentary indicates, the stereotypes lasted well into the 1900s. But they also allowed African American artists to gain a foothold and shape the entertainment industry into what it is today.

Military band music -- a couple of clips

Military band music was one of the very important influences on American popular culture from colonial days to New Orleans jazz (often first played on surplus instruments from Civil War regimental bands, according to one theory) to halftime shows at today's football games.

We'll hear a couple, just to demonstrate the continuity. Do you hear anything like this today?

The Old Guard drumline plays and performs 18th-century parade ground evolutions at the Saratoga muster of Revolutionary War and other reenactors. The first tune is an old Irish air sometimes known as "Minstrel Boy," and the second is a version of "Soldier's Joy." The Old Guard Fife & Drum Corps is part of the 3rd U.S. Infantry (known as "The Old Guard"), according to Wikipedia, and is the only unit of its kind in the armed forces. They're wearing red coats, by the way, not because the original fife and drum line was British but because band members in Gen. George Washington's army wore red so they'd stand out in the smoke of battle.

This clip from the movie "Gods and Generals" reenacts a minstrel-type performance of "The Bonnie Blue Flag" in a Confederate camp early in the Civil War. It's overdone by modern standards, and the movie was was a failure both with the critics and at the box office, but 19th-century audiences routinely saw worse acting than this. The song, related to the fiddle tune "Coleman's March," has Irish antecedents going back to the 1700s.

Reenactors playing as the 7th Cavalry regimental band perform "Garry Owen" Custer State Park's annual Buffalo Round Up festivities. The song was a favorite of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, and legend has it "Garry Owen" was played as the regiment rode out to the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876.

HUM 223: mid

Humanities 223: Ethnic music
Springfield College – Benedictine University
Midterm Exam · Fall Semester 2008

Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two to four pages (500-1,000 words) on the 50-point essay and one to two pages (250-500 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. That adds up to three essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, and on the specific detail you cite in support of your analysis. I am more interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points than in whether you like or dislike a particular piece of music. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. Due in class Tuesday, Oct. 7.

1A. Essay (50 points). African American religious music began with spontaneous congregational preaching and singing, what Shane White and Graham White called the “hollers, stories, prayers, sermons, work songs and, yes, spirituals" of 19th-century slaves. In Nashville, the Fisk Jubilee Singers turned the spirituals into a very popular art form with classical overtones. And musicians including African American opera star Paul Robeson and English composer Sir Michael Tippett made them into classical music. Do religious songs lose anything when they go from “fairly close-knit homogeneous communities possessing a strong sense of group solidarity” (one definition Daniel Kingman, author of our textbook, gives for folk music) to being sung by popular singers and by classically trained musicians? Do the songs gain anything when they cross over from folk to popular or art music? Or is it a trade-off?. Does the music transcend the specific cultural and religious norms of the people who sing it? If so, how? Be specific.

2A. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about American roots music in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

2B. Short essay (25 points). In class I will play a version of Bruce Springsteen and his Seeger Session Band playing the African American folk ballad “John Henry” as recorded live on BBC-4 television -- available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2evoXZ-xgd0. Write your response to the song, asking yourself: (1) What about this work stands out in my mind? 2. What in my background, values, needs and interests makes me react that way? 3. What, specifically, about the performance makes me feel that way? Is there anything in the song that transcends cultural boundaries?

Psalmodikon pix

Pictures taken yesterday, Sept. 27, of the psalmodikon on display in the Steeple Building at Bishop Hill. We visited with Debi's family during the Jordbruksdagarna (ag days) festival. Click on pix to enlarge.



Swedish books visible in the display case, from left, are: A bible, open to a foreword to the book of Psalms; a book by Erik Jansson, founder of the Bishop Hill colony; the 1819 Wallin psalm book used in services; and a copy of Luther's Small Catechism: Doct. Mårten Luthers Lilla Catechis, med Förklaring af Doct. Ol. Swabelius (1858).

A volunteer at the museum in the Steeple Building, which is maintained by the Bishop Hill Heritage Society, said a visiting scholar from Purdue took measurements of the instrument several years ago and said it is in unusually good shape. No living tradition of playing it in the area, but it would have been used in rural Lutheran churches.



A SAD NOTE. The Red Oak, one of the restaurants in town, had a flier up in its plate glass window saying, "State closings do not affect this business." I hope they don't!

HUM 223: Fisk Jubilee Singers and spirituals

One of the great American stories tells of a group of black college students from Nashville, Tenn., who in the 1870s took a musical tradition with its origins in plantation life, transformed it into a form of sophisticated art music and in the 1890s attracted the attention of one of the foremost European composers of the time.

They were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the musical tradition was the black spiritual, or "Negro spiritual" in the language of the day.

Starting in the 1870s, African American arrangers and composers took folk melodies and rewrote them as popular audience using the same kind of harmonies and dynamics as European classical or art music, and they brought the spirituals to the same level of musical sophistication as the lieder (songs) of Schubert or Brahms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Others took up the music. One was Anton Dvorak, the Czech composer, used the spirituals as thematic material for his New World Symphony (Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, 1893). Another, whose work we will hear a little of, was the British composer Sir Michael Tippett. Dvorak was especially important, since he was a famous European composer and thus brought a feeling of legitimacy to Americans who had a kind of inferiority complex about their own art and music.

(Do you ever wonder why I put things in red sometimes on the blog? Do you think they might turn up on the midterm exam? Just askin'.)

In the beginning, African American spirituals grew out of "ring shouts" and ceremonies that were essentially religious, involving both singing and dance. Their history is sketched in briefly at the Spirituals Project website, a project of the University of Denver. More background, including sound files, is available from the Spiritual Workshop of Paris, France. (Be sure to listen to "Heaven” by JoAnne Stephenson, accompanied by Lorna Young-Wright, to hear some pretty fine left- and right-hand syncopation in a classical piano style.) All the sound files on the Paris website show how African American music was adapted to the styles of art music, but Young-Wright's playing has a "swing" to it you just don't get in a Schubert art song.

Central to the flowering of the black spirituals were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who took their polished arrangments on the road during the 1870s to raise money for their school, Fisk University. They suffered poverty, ill health and initially hostile audiences, but they sang before Queen Victoria and they won over the musical intelligensia of their day. They are still around, and their website tells their story. A slightly more detailed history is available on the Primarily A Cappella Singers.com website. It is as dramatic as a romance novel, but the story is true.

W.E.B. DuBois, who studied at Fisk in the 1880s, was especially stirred by the spirituals. "Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past," he said. DuBois called them the "sorrow songs," and in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he said of them:

... by fateful chance the Negro folk-song — the rhythmic cry of the slave — stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

In the 1890s, Dvorak taught at a conservatory of music in New York City, and there he learned of the spirituals from Harry Burleigh, a student of his, whom he asked to sing them repeatedly. Burleigh went on to arrange "Deep River," which may have served as a theme for Dvorak's New World Symphony, and compose his own art songs. He wrote in 1917 of the values in his artistic arrangments of the spirituals:

Success in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling. The voice is not nearly so important as the spirit; and then rhythm, for the Negro's soul is linked with rhythm, and is an essential characteristic of most all Folk Songs.

It is a serious misconception of their meaning and value to treat them as "minstrel" songs, or to try to make them funny by a too literal attempt to imitate the manner of the Negro in singing them, by swaying the body, clapping the hands, or striving to make the peculiar inflections of voice that are natural with the colored people. Their worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through all these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man - every man - will be free.

I haven't been able to find Dvorak's article on American music online, but a University of Texas feature story on the New World Symphony quotes from it:

[Dvorak] reveled ... in African American music, such as spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the likes of which he had never heard before. In fact, Dvorak recognized in black music the future music of America, and his prediction was borne out in the ragtime, blues and jazz that would be so central to the music of the 20th century.

“In the [N]egro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music,” he wrote. “They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will…. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.”

Most of the influence of black American music has been in blues, jazz and rock. But I think it's important to remember some of it was sung before the crowned heads of Europe and flourished at the highest artistic levels, too.

Compare Sir Michael Tippett's arrangements in the 1941 opera "A Child of Our Time" of "Go Down Moses" as performed at England's Royal Festival Hall; and "Deep River" conducted by Somtow Sucharitkul with the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok and the Siam Philharmonic. Tippet's opera was about the persecution of German Jews leading up to the Holocaust, and he was attracted to black American spirituals because they "came out of another time of great oppression with slavery during the 19th century and before."

HUM 223: Folk, popular and art music

Here's a link to my Aug. 23, 2007, blogpost on the definitions of folk, popular and classical music in the second edition of our textbook "American Music: A Panorama." Or, as we've been calling it in class, back-porch, front-porch and art music.

It's worth knowing because: (1) we'll be dealing with these concepts all semester; and (2) there's a very, very good chance it'll be on the midterm. I'm going to highlight some things I think might be especially important as we prepare for mids.

Folk music. "... evolves within fairly close-knit homogeneous communities possessing a strong sense of group solidarity. It is music known to and enjoyed by a large proportion of the community, who identify it as 'their music,' made by and for themselves. Many of the members of the community … perform the music themselves, with varying degrees of skill." Used to be rural and geographically isolated, but this is no longer always true. Conventional in style. Catchy melodies. Often easy to sing. Emphasis is on the song and not the singer. Other the music has a purpose in daily life beyond making pretty sounds -- e.g. work songs, dance tunes, reglious music used in worship. In the past learned by oral tradition instead of written music, "but this must now include by extension radio, recordings, television, and film." Often the community is defined by ethnic identity. But not always -– e.g. protest songs, labor songs, other types of music sung by close-knit groups with a common purpose. A lot of sacred music started out as folk music.

Popular music. “… created for and enjoyed by the vast majority of the people, undefined by region. No specific ethnic background is requisite to fully appreciate or identify with it. It is primarily (though not exclusively) music for entertainment, and as such it makes only modest demands on its listeners’ musical knowledge and experience. It tends to adopt sounds from both folk and classical music that have become sufficiently familiar to the wider public.” Played by skilled professionals. [p. xvi] It's commercial, sold as sheet music in the old days, now radio, sound and video recordings. Is gospel popular music or folk music? Or both?

Art music (which the 2nd edition calls “classical”). Has been around longer than pop music, and includes music from earlier periods. Says Kingman (main author of the 2nd edition), “As cultivated music it rewards a certain degree of musical experience in the listener, though its devotees are not defined by any intellectual, social, economic, regional, or racial classification.” I like calling it “art music,” as the 3rd edition does instead of classical), because it includes both classical music and a lot of jazz. However, art music often uses techniques and conventions borrowed from classical music -- symphonies, concertos, operas, requiem Masses, etc. The online Wikipedia encyclopedia says art music “primarily refers to classical traditions (including contemporary as well as historical classical music forms), focuses on formal styles, invites technical and detailed deconstruction and criticism, and demands focused attention from the listener.” It also tends to demand a very highly skilled, totally focused performer (most of us can't sing opera). So are the members of a good techno band like classical musicans? Are they art musicians?

HUM 223: Work songs, field hollers, prison songs and the roots of jazz

A lot of secular folk music in the African American tradition evolved out of the practice of singing at work. Two very brief clips on YouTube that illustrate it ...

The first is a French video on the "genesis of jazz" (my translation) that shows still shots of slaves dancing in Congo Square in New Orleans, where they were allowed to gather on Sundays. Elsewhere dancing was banned as a result of Protestant beliefs that dancing is evil, but in originally French "catholique et permissive Louisiane," it wasn't. Listen for the drums in the background.

[For more information on Congo Square and a dance called the bamboula that was set to piano by classical composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, see the description in Sonny Wilson's StreetSwing.com website. A MIDI file of Gottschalk's "Bamboula, Danse des Nègres" (opus 2) is available on the German-language Kunst der Fugue (Art of the Fugue) website. We'll come back to it -- several times -- as we return to New Orleans and the city's profound influence on American music.]

The rest of the video deals with field hollers and work songs that people would sing in the fields. The rhythm of the songs would set the rhythm for a group of laborers swinging hammers, hoes, axes or other tools in unison. People had sung as they worked in Africa, too, and these songs were an important way that African musical traditions were transmitted to America.

The second video was filmed by folksingers Pete and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson at a Texas prison in 1966. The first clip shows inmates swinging axes in time to the singing.

We'll also listen to selections from our textbook, pages 23-27, and music mentioned in the book "Sounds of Slavery" linked below.

HUM 223: 'Sounds of Slavery'

We can't go back in time, and we don't have sound recordings before the early 20th century. But we can get a feel for what early African American music would have sounded like from a book called "The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech" written in 2005 by two Australians, Shane White and Graham White.

If you want to read the first chapter, follow the link to the PDF file on Beacon Press' website. It explains the role of music in the daily life of African American slaves. Gena Caponi Tabery, former professor of American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a church pianist in Austin, Texas, says in a review in Christian Century magazine, compares it to the role of music in today's society. She says:

Thanks to our individual, portable, downloadable personal stereo units, we are the most aurally privatized society that has ever lived. More than ever we work, walk and drive to the beat of different drummers. We create our own soundtracks.

That makes it difficult for us to get into a culture in which ".. there was a continuity of the sacred and secular, of work, worship, leisure and play, so that no part of daily life was too lofty or too trivial to be excluded from the commonest work chant or song of praise." DIfficult, but not impossible.

White and White wrote their book around a collection of "recorded hollers, stories, prayers, sermons, work songs and, yes, spirituals" dating from the early days of sound recordings. They were sung by the children and grandchildren of slaves, but they give us the only window we'll ever have into the actual sounds of slavery.

We'll listen to some of them in class.

Missouri Harmony at Menard old settlers' meet

[Email from Mark Johnson, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, July 30, 2008]

Hello Peter,


Here is the bit about Missouri harmony being used at an old settler meeting:

Aug. 9, 1884

"--Old Settlers, hark! Don't fail to bring out your Missouri harmonies for the reunion on the 14th. All who have such laid away, hunt them up so that we can have some old-fashioned glee singing. E.M. Goff." [Petersburg Observer, 8/9/1884, 3:2]

HUM 223: Polyrhythms to particle physics

It was bound to happen. The new Large Hadron Collider recently tested by CERN has been commemorated by a rap video.
(CERN is an acronym for the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, and the collider is the newest and largest particle accelerator used to study the nature of subatomic particles. A story on the video appeared in the online scientific newsletter Vunet.com published in England. And the video is available on YouTube.

Reports Iann Thompson, for Vunet.com:

The video explains what the LHC is and will do to a background beat and features white coated scientist[s] dancing in the collision chamber. It has become a hit on YouTube, logging over 2.5 million hits in less than two weeks.

“Twenty seven kilometers, a tunnel underground, designed with a mind to send protons around,” the song goes.

"A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France, sixty nations contribute to scientific advance.”

The video was shot by Kate MacAlpine - rap name Alpinekat - who is a trainee at CERN.

The science is good. McAlpine holds degrees in physics and writing from Michigan State, and she collaborated with other scientists on the video. The music is OK.

HUM 223: African roots - polyrhythm

Polyrhythm is just a $13.95 word for playing two (or more) rhythms at the same time, as the sound clips in Wikipedia make clear. Lorenzo Candeleria and Daniel Kingman, authors of our textbook, say African music is marked by "the dominance of rhythm, manifested in ... the sense of an inexorably steady pulse governing the music [at the same time as] a high degree of rhythmic complexity and diversity" (18) Listen for it in the clips we play in class, including the "Music in Praise of a Yoruba Chief" discussed in the textbook as well as selections by West African drummer Baba Olatunje and an African American church congregation in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia singing "Sheep, Sheep, Don't You Know the Road." Candeleria and Kingman speak of the same "steady pulse governing the music" as in the instrumental piece, with "the basic 'drumbeat' is present in the foot tapping that is steadily followed by a clap of the hands ... on what is called the offbeat (or backbeat)." They also note "call-and-response singing" in church. "In call-and-response we typically hear a lead vocalist 'call out' a statement, or even a question, that is followed by a 'response' from a group of participating singers" (10). We will hear both again and again.

On YouTube today we'll watch several extended video clips. As we do, listen carefully for the rhythms. Do you hear what Candeleria and Kingman hear? Polyrhythms or other complex patterns? Any call-and-response?

First we'll watch schoolchildren in Tanzania learning a variety of traditional dances at secondary schools funded by the WildiZe Foundation.

African influence isn't limited to the United States. Listen for polyrhythmic music in this performance of a dance called the Cutumba by Ballet Folklórico Cutumba de Santiago, Cuba. And a steel drum band from Trinidad and Tobago playing in London's Trafalgar Square.

We hear it in reggae as well. We'll hear a couple of sound clips from a Chicago roots reggae band called Waterhouse. And we'll watch a performance by Bob Marley of his song "Exodus" live In Dortmund, Germany.

Finally, we'll see videos of Michael Franti and Spearhead singing "Hole In The Bucket"(1994) and "Hello Bonjour (2007). It was shot on location in Africa, so in a sense the music has come full circle, from Africa to the U.S. and back to Afruca -- and the rest of the world.

Online fakebook w/ MIDI files of old-time, Anglo-Celtic fiddle tunes

What I've always needed! Call it an electronic fakebook with sound files Hetzler's Fakebook is "a web based MIDI fakebook of traditional fiddle music" with 550 American old-time, Celtic, English and Welsh fiddle tunes. explains Ed Hetzler, creator of the website:

Traditional paper Fakebooks consist of simple melody lines in standard notation sometimes with chords. Fakebooks enable musicians to access a larger repertoire of tunes. Hetzler's Fakebook goes one step farther. In addition to creating simple melody lines in standard notation when used with Notation Musician, you can hear the tune, adjust the tempo and play along.

Hetzler's Fakebook helps you improve rhythm, phrasing, and intonation. It helps you learn new tunes. It helps you practice tunes you already know. All tunes are in the public domain and arrangements are simplified for learning.

For those of us who play by ear, it has the advantage you can hear the tunes you want to learn.

HUM 223: 'Soldier's Joy' and 'Arkansas Traveler'

Two fiddle tunes --

One's mentioned in the book, at page 13. As I play it, listen for the "high strain" and the "low strain," each played twice. You can see why they're called that by watching the sheet music as I project it on the screen.

"Soldier's Joy" is an old, old fiddle tune that continues to reinvent itself in different eras and different genres of music, as this webpage from the Library of Congress makes clear. Andrew Kuntz, whose Fiddler's Companion is an indispensible online source on fiddle tunes, traces it back to the 1700s ... with versions in Scotland, England, Ireland, as far afield as Denmark and, of course, the United States. (Link to http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/SO_SOR.htm and scroll down.) Kuntz quotes the English novelist Thomas Hardy (1895):

'Then,' said the fiddler, 'I'll venture to name that the right
and proper thing is 'The Soldier's Joy' ‑ ... ‑ hey, my sonnies,
and gentlemen all?' So the dance begins. As to the merits
of 'The Soldier's Joy', there cannot be, and never were,
two options. It has been observed in the musical circles
of Weatherbury and its vacinity that this melody, at the
end of three‑quarters of an hour of thunderous footing,
still possesses more stimulative properties for the heel
and toe than the majority of other dances at their first opening.

Earlier this year it provided contradance music at a Victorian fancy-dress ball (in Carrboro, N.C.?). And Civil War reenactors calling themselves the the 7th South Carolina play the song here in a camp tent on instruments like those used in the mid-1800s.

"Soldier's Joy" is a staple of American folk music. In 1933 newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt heard Bun Wright's Fiddle Band in Warm Springs, Ga., playing "Soldier's Joy."

And the song just never goes away. Here's an up-tempo version by the band Old Crow Medicine Show. Originally from New York state and now based in Nashville, they have played what they call "their own brand of American roots music with a rock and roll attitude" at festivals including Bonnaroo and Telluride Bluegrass Festival. This week they're touring Great Britian, with concerts tonight (Thursday) in Edinburgh and this weekend in London.

Another old fiddle tune is "Arkansas Traveler," which dates to the 1840s. Listen for the low part, played twice, followed by the high part, also played twice. You can see them in the sheet music for an 1880s piano version. The story behind the song is explained by the Little Rock visitors' center. Here two Civil War reenactors play it on banjo and "bones," an African American percussion instrument we'll meet again when we study the ministrel shows.

Like most fiddle tunes, "Arkansas Traveler" is a dance tune. Here a group of English dancers perform an American clog dance to the tune. Notice the similarity to Irish step dancing, but also notice their arms are held more loosely. Here, at a festival in Kentucky, is a southern Appalachian clog dance in something more like its native habitat, at this year's Hillbilly Days festival in Pikeville, Ky.

One of the great southern Appalachian fiddle players was Tommy Jarrell, who plays "Arkansas Traveler" and other tunes, and talks about moonshining, in a segment from a 1980s television show narrated by Scottish fiddle player Aly McBeal, also a virtuoso performer in his own right. Jarrell has been named to the Old-Time Fiddlers Hall of Fame. Notice how English, Scottish and old-time American string band traditions are interconnected in all of these clips.

HUM 223: Three questions to ask yourself

Here are some quetions that are designed to get you thinking about your response to a piece of music ... or any other piece of art. Ask yourself:

1. What about this work stands out in my mind?
2. What in my background, values, needs and interests makes me react that way?
3. What specific things in the work trigger that reaction?

We'll ask ourselves variations on these questions all semester. Please note: If you were taught in English class never to say "I" in a paper for school, you're off the hook in HUM 221! There's no way you can write about these questions without saying "I." One would guarantee it. I guarantee it.

Keep these three questions in the back of your mind. We'll keep coming back to them.

Here are links to earlier posts I put on "Hogfiddle" about how to write about music and on the literary theory the questions are modeled after, which is called reader response and which works just as well for music as it does for literature.

HUM 223: Irish folk roots, popular music

Many of the deepest roots of American popular music are Anglo-Celtic, and we can hear some things in Irish traditional music that we'll meet again in America. We'll trace one or two of them by watching some Irish folk music and seeing how some of its features show up in 21st-century popular music. What changes as the music crosses from folk to popular styles? What remains? What is lost? What is gained?

First, this YouTube clip of a young Irish girl singing a Gaelic song in the "sean nos" (old style) manner shows how our vocal music began. Notice how matter-of-fact and unemotional her expression is, like that of a ballad singer, and listen for the quality of her voice. Sean nos singers tense up the mouth as they sing, and their throat muscles are tight. This is the authentic style of traditional Irish singing as it has come down over hundreds of years. Notice how proud the older man (her grandfather?) is that this young kid is carrying on the tradition. The language is Gaelic.

A more popular Irish singer is Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh (her name is pronounced like Murin Nick'olive) of the band Danu. Link here to her home page and to her MySpace page. In this clip from the Comhaltas traditional music website she sings “An Spealadóir” (a West Kerry song) and plays two reels, “The Caucus” and “The Wind That Shakes The Barley.” She is backed by Michelle Mulcahy on accordion and Billy McGlynn on bouzouki. Do the two instrumental numbers remind you of American old-time string band music?

A review in the electronic magazine Rootsworld says Nic Amhlaoibh has "steered [her band] in a more accessible, if less daring, direction" and "possesses a clear, pleasant, and steady voice suited to both traditional and MOR soft rock tunes." In other words, she's a crossover artist. She sings in folk and popular styles alike. Compare her singing to the descriptions of folk and popular music in the handout from Daniel Kingman I gave you in class.

Another band that has made Irish traditional music very popular is called the Chieftans. In this YouTube clip they play the "Dublin Reels" for Irish step dancers. This is a very traditional combination of music and dance, although the movie and dance troupe Riverdance crossed over into pop music several years ago. Notice how stiff the dancers' upper bodies are and how intricate the footwork is.

Thursday:

Another type of Irish traditional music is featured by Sinead O´Connor, seen here with the Chieftans rehearsing "The Foggy Dew," a song of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, for an album released in the 1990s. Click on "More info" to see the lyrics. Since O'Connor is singing in English, you can hear another feature of sean nos singing -- the way she bends words like "city" so it sounds like "c-i-i-ty" or "Their armed lines" like "The-ir ar-r-med lines." It's called ornamentation, and you'll hear it again in American singing. How does O'Connor's singing style compare with Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh's? With the traditional sean nos singer we heard first? Is she more emotional? More expressive?

Finally, we'll listen to Emmylou Harris and The Chieftains singing an Irish lyric song called "Lambs on the Green Hills" in concert in Nashville, Tenn. (It's also on the CD "Further Down the Old Plank Road," an album featuring the Chieftans and U.S. country musicians in Nashville.) Click here for the lyrics as printed in Padraic Colum, ed. "Anthology of Irish Verse" (1922). Harris is an accomplished professional whose songs have been on the country, folk and alt. country charts more more than 30 years. How does her style compare to a more traditional folk singer's? Listen for ornamentation, expressiveness, emotion

HUM 223: 'Saints' and madrigals

Harry Belafonte once said if it weren't for the African-American contribution to U.S. music, a quintessentially American song like "When the Saints Go Marching In" might have sounded like an old English madrigal -- one of those songs with a lot of "tra la la's" that sound like old-fashioned Christmas carols. It was a joke, but I think there's something to it. And it's central to what we'll be studying in Humanities 223.

To get into the spirit of Belafonte's joke, let's first watch some buskers (street musicians) in New Orleans playing "The Saints" on April 28, 2007, in the old French quarter of New Orleans. (Notice the people who stop and put money in the trumpet player's basket. That's how buskers make money.) We'll also see Louis Armstrong playing it during a 1959 festival in Stuttgart, Germany. The song, like so much of American music, got its start from New Orleans street musicians a lot like the ones we see playing here. And Armstrong was one of the most famous jazzmen of the 20th century worldwide. Even from an old TV screen grab, we can see why.

Then, to get a sense of what Belefonte joked that "The Saints" would have sounded like, we'll hear an authentic English madrigal as performed in the fall of 2007 by the Herndon High School Madrigals in Herndon, Va. The song is "Now is the Month of Maying" by Thomas Morley (ca. 1558-1602). How does it differ from the versions of "The Saints" we heard? How is it the same?

Finally, we'll listen to Belafonte's version of "The Saints" in class, on a scratchy old LP of mine. It's a perfectly respectable version, backed up (unnecessarily, in my opinion) by a 47-piece Carnegie Hall orchestra in 1959, but the main thing I want you to listen for is Bellefonte's intro to the song. It's joke, sure, but ... think about it. What would American music have sounded like without the contribution made to it by black artists?

HUM 223: Extra Credit -- Blues and BBQs Sat.

While blues had its greatest popularity as an art form during the mid-20th century, we have a good opportunity this weekend to hear some blues. It's at the "Blues and BBQs" festival in downtown Springfield. For extra credit, you can go to the festival and write a journal on it. Shoot for 750 to 1,000 words, if you can get it that long (that's three to four pages typed). Here's a link to the writeup in STLBlues.net, an electronic magazine ("eZine") in St. Louis. Here's the main details:

SPRINGFIELD, IL – This year’s Old Capitol Blues and Barbecues music lineup should please the tastes buds of all kinds of blues fans. Some rock, Chicago-style, gospel, jump, and country blues are all on tap for Old Capitol Blues & BBQs on Saturday, August 23, on Fifth and Washington Streets, downtown Springfield.

Festivities get underway at noon with a baby-back rib cook-off and continue through the evening until midnight. Admission is $5 with children 12 and under free. Twenty BBQ vendors will serve dishes such as smoked chicken, pulled pork, pork chops, ribs, brats, beef brisket, Creole pan BBQ shrimp, chicken wings, catfish nuggets, kabobs, potato salad, slaw, chips, fries and fruit parfait — for prices ranging from $1-$6. Miller beer and Coca-cola products will be available to quench any thirst.

I'm making this assignment for extra credit, since I don't feel right about making anyone spend money for class credit. But I recommend this highly, even if you don't especially care for blues. Especially if you don't much care for blues!

Here are some tips for writing about music that I posted to this blog before the blues festival two years ago. For writing my response to any work of art, I like a "cookbook" or "fill-in-the-blanks" outline that goes like this:

Circumstances. Give a one- to three-paragraph introduction to your essay (and it can go longer for a term paper). Start by describing the concert, or if you're reacting to a recording by saying what's on your mind, where and why you're listening to the work - or listening to it again - what your first reaction was, how you feel about it now, what you had for dinner, what the weather's like, anything that sets the stage. In the case of "Blues and BBQs," I'd describe the scene.

Background. Here's where you give the necessary information about the piece. Title, artist, style of music. In this case, I'd quote from STLBlues.net article.

Analysis. As always, argue a thesis. Support your thesis by quoting passages from the lyrics and analyzing the music. Check those suggestions from Dartmouth again. They'll tell you what to look for. Find some reviews on the internet and quote them. Agree with them, or disagree with them. And say why. Remember, in college-level writing, an unsupported thesis is sudden death!

HUM 223: An English madrigal

Chia-Fen Wu and Dirk Moelants playing Thomas Morley's madrigal "It was a lover and his lass" in Ghent on the Sept. 14, 2007.

Rowdy Irish band w/ good Sean-Nós singer

The band is Danú, and the lead vocalist is Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, whose name, according to her Wikipedia profile, is pronounced MWI-ren Nick OWL-eve.

Other members of Danú are Tom Doorley on flute; Dónal Clancy (son of Liam Clancy), guitar; Oisin Mc Auley, fiddle; Éamon Doorley, bouzouki and fiddle; Donnchadh Gough, bodhran and uillean pipes; and Benny McCarthy, box accordion.

Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh's MySpace page has downloads of "Isle of Malachy" and "Western Highway," plus several in Gaelic. There's a five-minute clip on the Comhaltas wensite that shows her singing "An Spealadóir" (a song from her native West Co. Kerry), and playing flute on two reels, "The Caucus" and "The Wind That Shakes The Barley." She's accompanied by Michelle Mulcahy on accordion and Billy Mc Glynn on bouzouki. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann describes itself as "a non-profit cultural movement with hundreds of local branches around the world" that promotes "the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music."