THE NEW MUSICI The new music was built out of materials already in existence: blues, rock’n’roll, folk music. But although the forms remained, something wholly new and original was made out of these older elements — more original, perhaps, than even the new musicians themselves yet realize. The transformation took place in 1966-1967. Up to that time, the blues had been an essentially black medium. Rock’n’roll, a blues derivative, was rhythmic, raunchy, teenage dance music. Folk music, old and modern, was popular among college students. The three forms remained musically and culturally distinct, and even as late as 1965, none of them were expressing any radically new states of consciousness. Blues expressed black soul; rock, as made famous by Elvis Presley, was the beat of youthful sensuality; and folk music, with such singers as Joan Baez, expressed anti-war sentiments as well as the universal themes of love and disillusionment. In 1966-1967 there was a spontaneous transformation. In the United States it originated with youthful rock groups playing in San Francisco. In England it was led by the Beatles, who were already established as an extremely fine and highly individual rock group. What happened, as well as it can be put into words, was this. First, the separate musical traditions were brought together. Bob Dylan and the Gefferson Airplane played folk rock, folk ideas with a rock beat. White rock groups began experimenting with the blues. Of course, white musicians had always played the blues, but essentially as imitators of the Negro style; now it began to be the white band’s own music. And all of the groups moved towards a broader eclectism and synthesis. They freely took over elements from Indian ragas, from jazz, from American country music, and as the time went on from even more diverse sources (one group seems recently to have been trying out Gregorian Chants). What developed was a protean music, capable of an almost limitless range of expression. The second thing that happened was that all the musical groups began using the full range of electric instruments and the technology of electronic amplifiers. The twangy electric guitars was an old-country western standby, but the new electronic effects were altogether different — so different that a new listener in 1967 might well feel that there had never been any sounds like that in the world before. The high, piercing, unearthly sounds of the guitar seemed to come from other realms. Electronics did, in fact, make possible sounds that no instrument up to that time could produce. And in studio recordings, multiple tracking, feedback and other devices made possible effects that not even an electronic band could produce live. Electronic amplification also made possible a fantastic increase in volume, the music becoming as loud and penetrating as the human ear could stand, and thereby achieving a “total” effect, so that instead of an audience of passive listeners, there were now audiences of total participants, feeling the music in all of their senses and all of their bones. Third, the music becomes a multi-media experience; a part of a total environment. In the Bay Area Ballrooms, the Tillmore, the Avalon, or Pauley Ballroom at the University of California, the walls were covered with fantastic changing patterns of light, the beginning of the new art of the Answer the following questions light show. And the audience did not sit, it danced. With records at home, listeners imitated these lighting effects as best they could. Often music was played out of doors, where nature — the sea or tall redwoods — provided the environment.
I I The “new” music is a quarter of a century old, give or take a little. A whole generation of youth has grown up accustomed to its hard beat, liberated emotionalism, and diverse social messages. A whole new life-style has been evolved, if not because of it, certainly in intimate interaction with it.One can not imagine the culture of op, pop, psychodelics, underground press, social protest, and the like without the new music pulsing through it all. This music has changed forms frequently and followed many paths of development since its birth in the fifties. It was in 1954 that the disk-jockey Alan Freed started broadcasting the Negro rhythm-and-blues records to a white teenage audience. Freed called it Rock-and-Roll, a name he took from the old blues “My Baby Rocks Me with a Steady Roll”. Until that time, rhythm-and-blues records were aimed exclusively at blacks. Mostly small southern companies turned them out for local consumption and for export to the northern city ghettos. The success of this music had a double impact. On one hand, white musicians hearing this music for the first time began to imitate it. The big money of Tin-Pan Alley also got the message and rushed in to take a lion’s share of the profits. On the other hand, the black musicians were stimulated by the new market and the threat of competition from such an unexpected source. The small companies were anxious to maintain the head start they had acquired in what was quickly becoming a race for survival. The first white rhythm-and-blues number ever recorded was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. His group, the Comets, followed the black style almost to the letter. The heavier blues beat gave way to a lighter, swifter, hillbilly kind of thing. The big white stars of this moment were Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Presley was particularly well financed. Some of the white audience, having tasted the authentic rhythm-and-blues, remained faithful to it; the Negroes probably didn’t take the Presleys and Haleys too seriously anyway. There was, then, a sufficiently large audience for black music to afford it an independent life and growth of its own. As it grew, however, it began to change. The blues rose to an all-time high popularity with the advent of Little Richard, certainly the greatest blues musician to emerge after the birth of rock-and-roll. While his musical style underlined and reinforced the characteristic racial qualities of the blues — its heavy sensual beat, for instance —his music also spoke the new language of the emerging rebellious black youth. Evolving in a totally different direction was the other great Negro musician of that time, Ray Charles. He was probably the more important of the two. This was due not to the superior quality of his music (such absolute and different artistic entities should not be compared), but to his important historical innovation: the synthesis of rhythm-and-blues and Gospel music. Until Ray Charles came along, blues and Gospel music were as segregated as an old-time Birmingham bus. Blues had its origin in Storyville, grew up in speak-easies, and flourished in night clubs. It had its feet firmly on the ground. Gospel, on the contrary, was the child of the Negro Spiritual. It had its eye on the heaven to come, the joy of the life beyond the grave. Blues were forbidden in the church. As if on cue, performers and composers set to mixing the formerly unmixable — the delta blues, hill-billy, Dixieland jazz and boogie-woogie piano with Gospel. The potent mixture was to be. known as “Soul”. The commercialisation of such a successful formula was inevitable. While all this was going on in Black America, Rock-and-Roll had jumped the Atlantic where it had taken Europe by storm. Not the least of the enthusiastic young imitators of Chuck Berry arid Little Richard was a group out of Liverpool, England, who called themselves the. Beatles. They understood perhaps better than anyone else the tendency of the new music to gather together and unify diverse and seemingly disparate elements. To the Beatles must go the credit for the intellectual profundisation of rock and its acceptance by older age groups. They quickly left the strict imitation behind, incorporating. new and heretofore unheard of musical elements into the popular culture that had begun to flourish around them. They borrowed from almost everything that appealed to them: modes and melodies of 16th century England, 19th century string orchestrations, baroque trumpets and Hindu Ragas —all dominated and held together by the rock beat we know so well. As they experimented they grew, and far from dragging the youth down the path of. culture regression as early observers had feared, the Beatles were involving the whole generation in an unprecedented cultural awakening, rescuing them from the stale beer Tin Pan Alley had distracted their elders with.
· Answer the following questions. 1.Of what materials was the new music built? 2. What kind of music was made out of these older elements? 3. When did the transformation take place? 4. What were the blues up to that time? 5. What was rock’n’roll? 6. What kind of music was popular among students? 7. What did these culturally distinct music forms express? 8. When was there a spontaneous transformation? 9. Where did it originate? 10. By whom was it led in Britain? 11. With what did it originate? 12. What happened first? 13. What did Bob Dylan and the Gefferson Airplane play? 14. In what way did white rock groups begin experimenting with the blues? 15. What was the general tendency displayed by all of the groups? 16. What elements did they use? 17. What kind of music did they develop? 18. What was the second thing that happened? 19. How different were the new electronic effects? 20. What were the new sounds like? 21. What did the electronics make possible? 22. What effects were made possible in studio recordings? 23. What was the result of electronic amplification? 24. What was a “total” effect? 25. What was the third thing that happened? 26. What was the light used? 27. Did people now only listen to the music? 28. What did listeners do at home? 29. Where was music often played? 30. What provided the environment now? · What were the three culturally distinct sources of the new music? · What were the three factors that changed the character of music? · Make a short summary extracting the necessary information from both texts.
¯ Read the following essay and answer the questions that follow.
Contemporary American Popular Music:
|
