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Afro-American Symphony
''Afro-American Symphony'', also known as Symphony No. 1 ''"Afro-American"'' and ''Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major'', is a 1930 composition by William Grant Still, the first symphony written by an African American and performed for a United States audience by a leading orchestra. It was premiered in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and later published in 1935. It is a symphonic piece for full orchestra, including Celesta, celeste, harp, and tenor banjo. It combines a fairly traditional symphonic form with blues progressions and rhythms that were characteristic of popular African-American music at the time. This combination expressed Still's integration of black culture into the classical forms. Still used quotes from four poems by early 20th-century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as epigraphs for each symphonic movement. The symphony is about twenty-four minutes long. History Still composed the ''Afro-American Symphony'' over 3 months, during which he had no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Grant Still By Carl Van Vechten
William is a male given name of Germanic languages, Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of England in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will (given name), Will, Wills (given name), Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill (given name), Bill, and Billy (name), Billy. A common Irish people, Irish form is Liam. Scottish people, Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie or the play Douglas (play)#Theme and response, ''Douglas''). Female forms are Willa, Willemina, Wilma (given name), Wilma and Wilhelmina (given name), Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the given name ''Wilhelm'' (cf. Proto-Germanic ᚹᛁᛚᛃᚨᚺᛖᛚ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theme (music)
In music, a subject is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based. In forms other than the fugue, this may be known as the theme. Characteristics A subject may be perceivable as a complete musical expression in itself, separate from the work in which it is found. In contrast to an idea or motif, a subject is usually a complete phrase or period. The ''Encyclopédie Fasquelle'' defines a theme (subject) as " y element, motif, or small musical piece that has given rise to some variation becomes thereby a theme". Thematic changes and processes are often structurally important, and theorists such as Rudolph Reti have created analysis from a purely thematic perspective. Fred Lerdahl describes thematic relations as "associational" and thus outside his cognitive-based generative theory's scope of analysis. In different types of music Music based on a single theme is called 'monothematic', while music based on several themes is ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fanfare
A fanfare (or fanfarade or flourish) is a short musical flourish which is typically played by trumpets, French horns or other brass instruments, often accompanied by percussion. It is a "brief improvised introduction to an instrumental performance". A fanfare has also been defined in ''The Golden Encyclopedia of Music'' as "a musical announcement played on brass instruments before the arrival of an important person", such as heralding the entrance of a monarch; (The term honors music for such announcements does not have the specific connotations of instrument or style that ''fanfare'' does.) Historically, fanfares were usually played by trumpet players, as the trumpet was associated with royalty. Bugles are also mentioned. The melody notes of a fanfare are often based around the major triad, often using " roic dotted rhythms". By extension, the term may also designate a short, prominent passage for brass instruments in an orchestral composition. Fanfares are widely used in op ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I Got Rhythm
"I Got Rhythm" is a piece composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and published in 1930, which became a jazz standard. Its chord progression, known as the "rhythm changes", is the foundation for many other popular jazz tunes such as Charlie Parker's and Dizzy Gillespie's bebop standard "Anthropology (Thrivin' on a Riff)". Composition The song came from the musical ''Girl Crazy'', which also includes two other hit songs, "Embraceable You" and " But Not for Me", and has been sung by many jazz singers since. It was originally written as a slow song for ''Treasure Girl'' (1928) and found another, faster setting in ''Girl Crazy''. Ethel Merman sang the song in the original Broadway production and Broadway lore holds that George Gershwin, after seeing her opening reviews, warned her never to take a singing lesson. The four-note opening riff bears a striking resemblance to the opening melody of the third movement of William Grant Still's ''Symphony No. 1,'' "Afro-A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variation (music)
In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these. Variation techniques Mozart's Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" (1785), known in the English-speaking world as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" exemplifies a number of common variation techniques. Here are the first eight bars of the theme: Melodic variation Mozart's first variation decorates and elaborates the plain melodic line: Rhythmic variation The fifth variation breaks up the steady pulse and creates syncopated off-beats: Harmonic variation The seventh variation introduces powerful new chords, which replace the simple harmonies originally implied by the theme with a prolongational series of descending fifths: Minor mode In the elaborate eighth variation, Mozart changes from the major to the parallel minor mode, while combining three techniques: count ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Functional Harmony
In music, function (also referred to as harmonic function) is a term used to denote the relationship of a chord"Function", unsigned article, ''Grove Music Online'', . or a scale degree to a tonal centre. Two main theories of tonal functions exist today: * The German theory created by Hugo Riemann in his ''Vereinfachte Harmonielehre'' of 1893, which soon became an international success (English and Russian translations in 1896, French translation in 1899), and which is the theory of functions properly speaking."It was Riemann who coined the term 'function' in ''Vereinfachte Harmonielehre'' (1893) to describe relations between the dominant and subdominant harmonies and the referential tonic: he borrowed the word from mathematics, where it was used to designate the correlation of two variables, an 'argument' and a 'value'". Brian Hyer, "Tonality", ''Grove Music Online'', . Riemann described three abstract tonal "functions", tonic, dominant and subdominant, denoted by the letters T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chromatic
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, especially when applied to contrasting features of the common practice music of the period 1600–1900. These terms may mean different things in different contexts. Very often, ''diatonic'' refers to musical elements derived from the modes and transpositions of the "white note scale" C–D–E–F–G–A–B. In some usages it includes all forms of heptatonic scale that are in common use in Western music (the major, and all forms of the minor). ''Chromatic'' most often refers to structures derived from the twelve-note chromatic scale, which consists of all semitones. Historically, however, it had other senses, referring in Ancient Greek music theory to a particular tuning of the tetrachord, and to a rhythmic notational convention in me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spiritual (music)
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs," work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature (but not continuation) of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres emerged from the spirituals songcraft. Prior to the end of the US ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epigraph (literature)
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document, monograph or section thereof. The epigraph may serve as a preface to the work; as a summary; as a counter-example; or as a link from the work to a wider literary canon, with the purpose of either inviting comparison or enlisting a conventional context. A book may have an overall epigraphy that is part of the front matter, or one for each chapter. Examples * As the epigraph to '' The Sum of All Fears'', Tom Clancy quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war:Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears. * The long quotation from Dante's ''Inferno'' that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. * The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's ''Ragtime'' quotes Scott Joplin' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
