Developing An Appreciation of Classical Music

Prehistoric Art ... The very earliest human artifacts showing evidence of workmanship with an artistic purpose are a subject of some debate; it is clear that such workmanship existed by 40,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic era. From the Upper Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic, cave paintings and portable art such as figurines and beads predominated, with decorative figured workings also seen on some utilitarian objects...

Swing Era ... The many avenue's of black, white, latin, american, and european music influences merged together when Swing arrived... In 1932, early in the jazz, and the sweet music style's of the American music scene - worked on new, often unheard of musical arraingement's that were emphasized toward a more polished song with a bounce... Several factors led to the demise of the swing era: the recording ban from August 1942 to November 1944 (The union that most jazz musicians belong to told its members not to record until the record companies agreed to pay them each time their music was played on the radio), the earlier ban of ASCAP songs from radio stations, World War II which made it harder for bands to travel around as well as the "cabaret tax", which was as high as 20%, the change in music taste and the rise of bebop...

Ragtime ... Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered... The album won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Billboard's Top Classical Album of 1974... Historical context Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century, descending from the jigs and march music played by black bands...

Jazz ... From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music... As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music...

Music Of Mesopotamia ... Sumerian music The discovery of numerous musical instruments in royal burial sites and illustrations of musicians in Sumerian art show how music seemed to play an important part of religious and civic life in Sumer... Music and dancing were a part of daily celebration and temple rites-music was played for marriages and births in the royal families... Singers probably expressed intense and withdrawn emotion, as if listening to themselves, as shown by the practice of cupping a hand to the ear (as is still current in modern Assyrian music and many Arab and folk musics) (van der Merwe 1989, p...

Chord (music) ... There are four common ways of notating or representing chords in western music other than conventional staff notation; Roman numerals, figured bass, much used in the Baroque era, macro symbols, sometimes used in modern musicology, and various systems of symbols and notations such as are typically found in the lead sheets, fake books and chord charts used in popular music to lay out the harmonic groundplan of a piece so that the musician may improvise, "jam", "vamp", "busk" or "head arrange" a part...

Bebop ... In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians created a new style that came out of the 1930s' swing music... They partially strived to counter the popularization of swing with non-danceable music that demanded listening... These forerunners of the new music (which would later be termed "bebop," or "bop"-- although Parker himself never used that term, feeling it demeaned the music) began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords and chord substitutions...

New Age Music ... New Age music includes both electronic forms, frequently relying on sustained synth pads or long sequencer-based runs, and acoustic forms, featuring instruments such as flutes, piano, acoustic guitar and a wide variety of non-western acoustic instruments...

Letter Notation ... History The earliest known letter notation in the Western musical tradition appear in the textbook on music De institutione musica by the 6th-century philosopher Boethius... For example, after capo 3, most music sheets will write A to indicate a C chord, that is, they give the chord shape rather than its pitch, but some specify it as C, others give two lines, either the C on top and the A on the bottom or vice versa...

Baroque Music ... Baroque music forms a major portion of the classical music canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to... Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre...

Kathak ... The name Kathak is derived from the Sanskrit word katha meaning story, and katthaka in Sanskrit means he who tells a story, or to do with stories. The name of the form is properly कत्थक katthak, with the geminated dental to show a derived form, but this has since simplified to modern-day कथक kathak...

Swara ... The basic mode of reference is that which is equivalent to the Western Ionian mode or major scale (called Bilawal thaat in Hindustani music, Dheerasankarabharanam in Carnatic). All relationships between pitches follow from this...

Ancient Music ... Ancient music refers to the various musical systems that were developed across various geographical regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, China, Greece and Rome... Mesopotamia Anne Draffkorn Kilmer from the University of California at Berkeley published in 1986 her decipherment of cuneiform tablet from Nippur dated to about 2000 BCE, demonstrating that it represents fragmentary instructions for performing music and that the music was composed in harmonies of thirds, and that it was also written using a diatonic scale (Kilmer 1986)... Hurrian music Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are some of the oldest known instances of written music, dating from c.1400 BC and including one substantially complete song...

Minimal Music ... Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century... The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, and later John Adams) emerged to become publicly associated with American minimal music... In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener exhibits minimalist traits...

Art ... Many definitions of art have been proposed by philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science"...

Tablature ... Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used in notating rock, pop, folk, ragtime, bluegrass, and blues music...

Solfège ... There are two methods of applying solfege: fixed do (used in China, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Russia, South America and parts of North America, Japan, and Vietnam) and movable do (used in the United Kingdom, Germany, Indian classical music, and the United States). Etymology Italian "solfeggio" and French "solfège" ultimately derive from the names of two of the syllables used: so and fa...

Film Industry ... Typically of commercial cinemas, its heart is a highly developed star system, which in this case also features substantial overlap with the pop music industry...

1990s In Jazz ... 1990 Album releases John Zorn: Naked City (February 16) Franz Koglmann: The Use of Memory Matthew Shipp: Circular Temple Don Pullen: Random Thoughts Gerry Hemingway: Special Detail Michael Formanek: Wide Open Spaces Geri Allen: Nurturer Marty Ehrlich: Emergency Peace Marilyn Crispell: Overlapping Hands David Ware: Great Bliss Charlie Haden: Dream Keeper Bobby Previte: Empty Suits Butch Morris: Dust To Dust Jazz Passengers: Implement Yourself Myra Melford: Jump Danny Gottlieb: Brooklyn Blues Mark Helias: Attack the Future David Liebman: The Tree Elements: Spirit River Hank Roberts: Birds Of Prey Music Revelation Ensemble: Elec Jazz Kenny Wheeler: Music for Large and Small Ensemble Bill Frisell: Is That You ICP Orchestra: Bospaadje Konijnehol II Phil Woods: All Bird's Children Philip Catherine: I Remember You Ray Anderson: What Because Muhal Richard Abrams: Blu Blu Blu Gerry Hemingway: Down To The Wire Terence Blanchard:...

History Of Video Games ... In 1949–1950, Charley Adama created a "Bouncing Ball" program for MIT's Whirlwind computer. While the program was not yet interactive, it was a precursor to games soon to come...

Neoclassicism (music) ... Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall, 1980), but Prokofiev himself thought that his composition was a 'passing phase' whereas Stravinsky's neoclassicism was by the 1920s 'becoming the basic line of his music' (Prokofiev 1991, 273)...

Theatre ... Modern Western theatre derives in large measure from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre scholar Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general...

Contemporary Classical Music ... Some of these composers (Cage, Cowell, Glass, Reich) represented a new methodology of experimental music, which began to question fundamental notions of music such as notation, performance, duration, and repetition, while others (Babbitt, Rochberg, Sessions) fashioned their own extensions of the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg...