Duke ellington camp grant chant

Music in America: Jazz and Beyond

As we have observed a number of times in this book, in the nineteenth century a rift opened between popular music and the music we now call classical. Nowhere has this rift been more apparent than in the United States of America, the most populist of all nations.

“Popular” and “classical” are fuzzy terms, however; think of the popularity of the Three Tenors, singing opera excerpts in stadiums around the world; think how broad the application of classical and the related classic can be, from the “classical antiquity” of Greece and Rome to “classic rock.” For music in America, the terms “cultivated” and “vernacular” have proven to be more illuminating. To cultivate means to nurture, as microorganisms are cultivated in a petri dish in a laboratory, or orchids in a greenhouse. Vernacular, on the other hand, refers to one’s native language. Cultivated music, then, is music that has been brought to this country and consciously developed, fostered at concerts, and taught in con­ servatories. Vernacular music is music we sing and hear as naturally as we speak our native tongue.

There is a bitter twist to this terminology as applied to American music. The word vernacular comes from the Latin word vernaculus, which is itself de­ rived from verna: and “verna” meant a family slave. The heritage of African American music was and is central to the story of American music.

1 Early American Music: An Overviev^ Long before European settlers and African slaves arrived here. Native Ameri­ cans had their own musical styles. (We touched on one of these in discussing sacred chant; see page 75.) As Native Americans were pushed farther and far­ ther west, however, their music played little role in the development of Euro­ pean American and African American music.

The history of music among the early European settlers and their descen­ dants is not a rich one. The Puritans disapproved of music; they thought it was frivolous, except for its supporting role in religion. In Puritan church services, rhyming versions of the psalms were sung like hymns, but when the words of the psalms were printed in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640—the first book ever printed in North America — the music was not included, because just a few tunes, known to everyone, were used for all 150 psalms. In succeeding years.

392 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

much of the energy of early American musicians was devoted to the composi­ tion of new psalm and hymn tunes, and to the teaching and improvement of church singing.

William Billings (1746-1800) of Boston is often mentioned as our first composer. He wrote hymns and fuguing tunes, which are simple anthems based on hymns, with a little counterpoint. (An anthem is a choral piece in the ver­ nacular for use in Protestant services.) When sung with spirit, fuguing tunes sound enthusiastic, rough, and gutsy.

Billings’s more secular-minded contemporaries enjoyed the Classical music of the era. Benjamin Franklin, who tried his hand at most everything, also tried composing. But without well-established musical institutions, there was not much support for native composers outside the church. The problem in those years is hardly that of distinguishing between cultivated and vernacular music. The problem is finding written music to listen to and talk about at all.