MusiC

Modern American music emerged in the years between 1900 and 1930 as a product of diverse cultural influences. From western European formal composition and the music of eastern European Jews to the broad influences of African-American gospel and blues music, both popular and classical music took on different sounds in these years. Innovations in the technology of music such as the mass marketing of machine recordings and the widespread adoption of radio changed the cultural economy of music as did the influence of Tin Pan Alley music publishers in New York, the national tours of vaudeville acts and Broadway musicals, and the movie industry. While New York and Chicago became music centers during the period, several other cities, such as New Orleans, Memphis, and Los Angeles, became important both in the development of new musical styles and in the diffusion of music to the national market. The new genres of blues and JAZZ and the development of modern classical music incorporated vernacular music from rural and immigrant communities into distinctive American sounds.

At the turn of the century, the music publishing industry of Tin Pan Alley launched songs that became commercial bestsellers and hallmarks of the era. Crossing the line of strict Victorian morals to erotic suggestion, songs like “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” (1900), “In the Good Old Summertime” (1902), “Sweet Adeline” (1903), “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” (1904), and “Wait ‘Til the Sun Shines, Nellie” (1905) were but a few of the anthems that sold millions of copies of sheet music. The popularity of this music cemented the reputation of New York as the capital of popular culture. Later, composers such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin started their careers plugging songs at music stores, in restaurants and saloons, and after shows. Audiences were eager for fare as diverse as arias from operas and operettas, folk songs, and spirituals.

Tin Pan Alley linked popular music to the developing musical stage. By the early 1900s, the musical stage, in particular vaudeville and operetta, was the vehicle for new music. With contemporary language, energetic choruses, and sweet melodies, the operetta took off in popularity. The 1907 production of Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow spun off several road companies that performed the show more than 5,000 times between 1907 and 1908. Sheet music, wax cylinders for phonographs, and piano rolls carried the show songs to a broad national audience. Between 1907 and 1914, operetta held sway on the musical stage. The work of Rudolph Friml (Rosemarie [1924] and The Vagabond

King [1925]) and the prolific Victor Herbert (who wrote 40 operettas during his long career) in Babes in Toyland (1903), The Red Mill (1906), and Naughty Marietta (1910) attracted large followings. African-American musical theater also made a showing with the production of Will Marion Cook’s In Dahomey in 1902. Eubie Blake contributed his own shows throughout the 1920s. Broadway musicals also provided material for popular music tastes from such composers as Gershwin, George M. Cohan, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter.

African-American music made its way to Tin Pan Alley in the form of dance music such as the cakewalk and the two-step, dances that further evolved into the Bunny Hug, the Fox Trot, and the Grizzly Bear. Ragtime, which had its origins in the 1890s, continued to have a popular appeal that influenced much of the music coming out of Tin Pan Alley. Ragtime’s greatest composer, ScOTT JoPLiN, popularized its rhythms in “Maple Leaf Rag,” “Gladiolus Rag,” and “The Entertainer.” Its influence also appeared in show music such as Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” published in 1911. The syncopation of ragtime provided the impetus for innovation in music, first through the sweet sound of Dixieland jazz and later in modern jazz music.

In the period between 1910 and 1920, blues began to gain in popularity. W. C. Handy, considered “the father of the blues,” was trained as a professional musician but was first exposed to folk blues when playing with a band in Cleveland. Drawing on the folk tradition, Handy composed his own melodies, notably “St. Louis Blues” (1914). By 1910, blues had begun to develop distinctive regional styles; some retained a down-home blues style, accompanied chiefly by slide guitar, and others an urban style (Chicago and Memphis) that relied on a wider range of instruments, including piano, and had a narrative shape not found in folk blues. Urban blues often featured female vocalists, among them Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith. Mamie Smith made the first blues recording with her “Crazy Blues” in 1920, which sold 75,000 copies in a few months. The recording industry capitalized on blues popularity in the African-American community with “race records” of both down-home and urban blues.

Influenced by ragtime origins and blues melodies, along with European-style elements, jazz emerged in the late 1910s as a distinctive style. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white band from New Orleans, made the first jazz recordings in 1917. Jelly Roll Morton’s piano compositions were first recorded at about the same time. Hotter jazz, the result of introducing blue notes into ragtime’s syncopation and incorporating solo improvisations, developed by the 1920s. First heard in the recordings of Chicago-based “King” Oliver’s band, with its talented trumpeter Louis Armstrong, jazz quickly spread to Harlem and contributed to the Harlem Renaissance revival of African-American cultural forms.

Classical music similarly showed vitality at the turn of the century. Major cities spent the decade cultivating classical music by organizing orchestras and building concert halls. In New York, Carnegie Hall was completed in 1891. Boston followed with Symphony Hall in 1900, and Chicago built Orchestra Hall in 1904. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia established orchestras in the same period of time. Playing largely European music, symphony orchestras and opera companies spread its popularity while encouraging the development of American music. In the early years of the century, academic composers such as Horatio Parker and Charles Cadman added to the operatic and symphonic repertoire. With the spread of phonograph technology, classical music came into average homes. The music industry tapped artists such as maestro Arturo Toscanini and opera singer Enrico Caruso for recordings that made classical music available to listeners from all classes. The new medium of radio and national broadcast networks also created new audiences for what had previously been restricted to the affluent and the professional.

Enrico Caruso (Library of Congress)

The first modern composer in the United States was Charles Ives (1874-1954), whose use of modern techniques of composition predated the two most important European modernist composers, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Dissonant harmonies, use of vernacular music, and major-minor tonal structure characterized some of his most important work. A talented musician, Ives gave up professional music and worked in the life insurance industry. After a heart attack caused him to retire in 1918, Ives self-published his early work, including his Concord Sonata for piano and flute and his 114 Songs, an idiosyncratic anthology with a range of musical styles. By 1925, however, Ives stopped composing original work and withdrew from the public. It was only in 1939 when his Concord Sonata was performed that his work attracted a wide following among composers and listeners. Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1947.

The abstraction of Charles Ives’s atonal music had little appeal for classical audiences of the time. A more fruitful and popular path came in the work of George Gershwin, who brought together his own mastery of vernacular music with classical composition. His Rhapsody in Blue (1924) showed the influence of both popular song and the rhythms ofjazz. An American in Paris (1928) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935) showed Gershwin’s virtuosity in moving back and forth across cultural and artistic lines. His marriage of folk and classical themes set the stage for the later work of composers Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Leonard Bernstein. Copland’s own career took off with the publication of his Music for the Theatre in 1925 and his Piano Concerto in 1926.

Beyond the classical realm, there were three important developments in music during the 1920s. First, the sheet music industry centered in Tin Pan Alley began to decline, due to a drop in sales and to rising costs of production. Wartime paper shortages and printers’ strikes had driven up the price of sheet music. Sheet music sales also began to fall due to another development. Radio broadcasts, first local and then on the new national networks of NBC and CBS, began to supplant sheet music as a means of reaching the popular audience. Third, sound motion pictures, which were produced beginning in 1927, substituted for touring Broadway productions as a means of introducing songs to the public. In dance clubs, speakeasies, and concert halls, new music, influenced by ragtime and blues, was spread to an ever-widening audience.

African-American music gained in popularity throughout the 1920s. Jazz and urban blues made their “mainstream” cultural breakthrough in the period. New recordings made the transition from “race records,” sold to a small segment of the market, to major-label recordings, as Black Swan and Okeh gave way to RCA Victor and Columbia Records. Singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters sang of urban love and trouble in songs such as “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “Prove It on Me Blues.” Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and other blues greats could be heard on the airwaves and phonographs singing songs of chain gangs, poverty, and misfired love, and Louis Armstrong made his classic Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-28) featuring his dazzling solo improvisations. Fletcher Henderson and Edward “Duke” Ellington started jazz orchestras during the 1920s and built audiences for “hot” jazz (later called swing) in Harlem at the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn and the Plantation Club and the Roseland Ballroom uptown. At the same time, white musicians such as Paul Whiteman and his orchestra were able to translate jazz music by sweetening the music with softer tones and formal arrangements designed to appeal to white middle-class listeners.

The cultural character of modern American music had its origins in the decades prior to the Great Depression. By the end of the 1920s, jazz, once exclusively linked to African-American musicians, became the preferred music for up-and-coming white musicians, and vernacular gospel and blues music invaded the realm of high art in the classical compositions of Gershwin and Copland. Modernism in music, like modernism in art and literature, challenged the strict formalism and cultural segregation of the 19th century to produce an art representative of the broad cultural range of urban industrial society.

See also ENTERTAINMENT, POPULAR; YOUTH.

Further reading: Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life; A History (New York: Norton, 2001); D. Nicholls, ed., The Cambridge History of American Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); I. Sablosky, American Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Arnold Shaw, Jazz Age; Popular Music in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).