StudySpace: The Enjoyment of Music: Essential Listening Edition

Key Points

• Jazz drew elements from African traditions and from Western popular and art music. Its roots are in West African music and in nineteenth-century African- American ceremonial and work songs.
• Ragtime developed from an African-American piano style characterized by syncopated rhythms and sectional forms. Scott Joplin, often considered the "king of ragtime," is the first African-American composer to win international fame.
• Blues is an American genre of folk music based on a simple, repetitive, poetic-musical form with three-line strophes set to a repeating harmonic pattern of twelve bars.
• Louis Armstrong (trumpet) was first associated with New Orleans-style jazz, characterized by a small ensemble of players improvising simultaneously.
• The 1930s saw the advent of the swing era (or big band era) and the brilliantly composed jazz of Duke Ellington.
• In the late 1940s, big band jazz gave way to smaller group styles, including bebop, cool jazz, and West Coast jazz.
• Later jazz styles include third stream jazz, which combined elements of art music and jazz, as well as fusion, Neoclassical style, free jazz, and new-age jazz.
• Many art and popular music composers have been influenced by ragtime, blues, and jazz, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and George Gershwin.

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