Music Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Since 1950 there have been many styles of music and large numbers of important musicians who have influenced people throughout the world. It has also been a period where—although concerts continued to be held—for many people, music was heard on the radio, television, played on record players, tape recorders, video players, CD players, and also on Walkmans, MP3 players, and iPods. The use of juke boxes has gradually fallen from favor; “musac” was installed in many hotels, shopping centers and supermarkets, and during the 1990s there was the emergence—initially in Japan, and later elsewhere— of karaoke. Many of the major companies—HMV, Sony, CBS, and others—have been quick to move with the changes in technology. With large numbers of countries becoming independent, there has also been the composing of many national anthems, and the active encouragement of local music, both traditional and contemporary. The period from 1950 also saw the emergence of film music by many famous film music composers, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), and also other musicians and singers. There have also been more developments, including the increasing importance of music in schools, with most primary and secondary schools around the world teaching music, and many millions of students learning to play musical instruments, with the mass production of quality instruments reducing the costs of acquiring a good instrument.

Classical And Stage Music

Classical music during this period has remained strong, with the well-known musical works from early periods—by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and others—remaining popular; indeed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” has become the European anthem. In addition there have been new classical composers, such as Benjamin Britten (later Baron Britten of Aldeburgh; 1913– 1976), then Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975), with George Gershwin (1898–1937) contributing “classical jazz.” There have also been many great classical soloists of the period, with a few to remember being violinists Yehudi Menuhin (later Lord Menuhin of Stoke d’Abernon; 1916–99), David Oistrakh (1908–74), Alfredo Campoli (1906–91), and Nigel Kennedy (b. 1956); cellists Jacqueline du Pres (1945–87), Pablo Casals (1876–1973); Mstislav Rostropovich (1927, 2007); flautist James Galway (b. 1939); and classical guitarist John Williams (b. 1941). There were also some others such as pianist Richard Clayderman (b. 1953), who sold tens of thousands of recordings. In addition there have been important conductors of classical music such as Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) of the Vienna State Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim (b. 1942); Andre Previn (b. 1929), Antal Dorati (1906–88); Vladimir Askenazy (b. 1937), Zubin Mehta (b. 1936); Raphael Kubelak (1914–96), and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who was also a composer of West Side Story (1957) and much else.

Mention should also be made of miminalist compositions during the 1960s made by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, with early 21st-century composers being Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, and Michael Daugherty.

Singing, which had been very popular before the 1950s, had a resurgence of interest with the Eurovision Song Contest and other events. The Australian-born operatic soprano and concert singer Joan Sutherland (b. 1926) is internationally acclaimed for her coloratura roles; and the New Zealander Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (b. 1944) is also a popular opera singer. Other operatic singers who have been famous include the Three Tenors: Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007); Placido Domingo (b. 1941); and José Carreras (b. 1946). Singers include British duos Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson, and Lennie Peters (1939–92) and Dianne Lee (b. 1950). There has also been a revival of interest in musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s (b. 1948) Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Evita (1978), Cats (1981), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986) playing to packed audiences. Cats became the longest-running musical in the history of British theater, and it only closed on Broadway, New York, in 2000 after 7,485 performances. Composer Richard Rodgers (1902–79) and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960) were extremely influential. Famous singers include Bing Crosby (1903–77); Cliff Richard (b. 1940), who operated with the backing band “The Shadows”; Frank Sinatra (1915–98); Tommy Steele (b. 1936); Liberace (1919–87); singer and songwriter Barry Manilow (b. 1943); Elton John (b. 1947), who was also a pianist and one of the most popular entertainers of the late 20th century; and American Eartha Kitt (b. 1927), who became famous for her sultry vocal style.

Protest music has had an important role, with many lyric writers and singers having a major political message. They include the Australian Peter Garrett (b. 1953) of Midnight Oil, now a politician, and Raul Alarcon, who led the “No Waltz” in a protest against the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, adapting music from Blue Danube by Strauss. Others include American singer Joan Baez (b. 1941), who protested against the Vietnam War, and Irish “mouth musician” Sinead O’Connor (b. 1966). Some protest groups came together at Woodstock, New York, in 1969. Folk music has long been popular throughout the world and has had a revival, with traditional folk music from Bob Dylan (b. 1941) and other singer-songwriters attracting large audiences.

Fusion

The early 1950s saw country and bluegrass music come into the mainstream. At the same time, rock and roll was taking shape from the musical intersection of blues, rhythm and blues, and some injections of that same country music. Though at times the listeners and marketers of country and rock music would seem demographically and geographically different, as the decades progressed musical creativity would spark lively interconnections and fusions between the styles.

With each new generation of musicians and listeners through the latter half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, country and rock would each return to their beginnings in the music of earlier days. In the 1950s and 1960s much of that earlier music was being brought back to popular attention by the artists of the folk music revival.

Artists such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and Lead belly—who had taken up music as a tool of social protest during the Great Depression and World War II—would inspire newer generations of singers, songwriters, and players. These musicians would find in music a tool not only for political comment but for personal introspection.

Though it is often of a much rawer and rowdier nature, such personal emotional expression is a defining factor in the blues. Many folk revival musicians of the 1960s revered blues heroes such as Son House and Robert Johnson. A decade earlier in the Mississippi Delta, where that music had its genesis, a white singer had started making records that would cross the boundaries of country, blues, pop, and folk in a way no one had done before. His name was Elvis Presley.

Presley grew up poor in rural Mississippi. He was working as a truck driver in Memphis when he stopped by Sun Studios one day to record a birthday song for his mother. Studio owner Sam Phillips heard in Presley’s style something he’d been on the lookout for: a white singer who had the sound of the black Delta in his voice. Presley’s first single, released in 1954, was a textbook exercise in fusion and changes to come: The A side was “That’s All Right Mama,” written by blues musician Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, while the B side was bluegrass giant Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Presley’s early recordings are some of the strongest bridges between folk, blues, country, pop, and rock and roll. His voice, too, remained distinctive, however far from the energy of those roots he sometimes strayed.

An occasional drop-in at Presley’s early Memphis sessions was another singer with a distinctive voice who would go on to become a towering and long-lived presence in country, folk, gospel, and rock and roll. Johnny Cash’s authentic yet mysterious image as The Man in Black was as unique as his music, and his troubled life as well as his religious commitment drew listeners on both sides of that divide to his music, which ranged from the folk-tinged “Folsom Prison Blues” to the fiery “I Walk the Line” to the roots-rock hybrid “Get Rhythm.” That fusion of blues, country, rock, and gospel with an up-tempo danceable beat appealed to teenagers across the country and across the races in the 1950s, but by the end of that decade it had begun to die off as a style. It would be a temporary lull, though, as San Antonio native and California transplant Rosie Flores and others would revive it beginning in the 1980s.

Another singer with a memorable voice and strong writing style had a far briefer career than either Presley or Cash, but his music did as much as theirs to intermingle the rivers of sound that flowed from country, rock, and folk during that decade and beyond. Hank Williams fused blues and longing and honky-tonk country melodies so successfully that his rural-themed images helped his music cross over to pop and rock listeners. Songs such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Hey Good Lookin’” became standards in the 1950s and remained so well into the 21st century, for audiences across pop, bluegrass, and country.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw country music become sugar-coated with strings and choral arrangements, in what was called the Nashville sound. Producers there were going after a pop market that was mired in productions that valued sound over substance. These producers had their successes, and some good or at least interesting music came out of them—Patsy Cline crossed over to pop success, as did Roger Miller and Jeannie C. Riley—but it was not long before restless offshoots of both country and pop began taking the sounds in new directions. In pop, the motor city of Detroit saw the birth of the Motown sound and the popularity of artists such as Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, and the Supremes, and the beginning of musical integration as white listeners came in droves to hear black artists. In Memphis, Stax records and Booker T and the MGs proved vital forces.

The Songwriter

Many artists drew from the folk music revival and expanded on it. The strongest of these were the evolution of the folk songwriter from a balladeer who told stories of events or history to one who wrote and sang powerfully of his or her own emotions, and the parallel return of musician as social rebel and commentator on social injustice.

The decade of the 1960s saw the emergence of the songwriter as a major and lasting force in country and popular music. Record buyers and concert goers began to notice and remember who wrote the songs. The time was filled with good, passionate, and original tunesmiths such as Tom Paxton and Ian and Sylvia Tyson, as well as with singers and players whose gift was to interpret the songs of others.

Bob Dylan’s poetic, iconoclastic imagery was for many the defining music of the decade. Although Dylan was not a powerhouse singer himself, the power of his ideas nonetheless drew people to buy his records and come to his concerts. Fellow artists covered his songs as well, with the top three women artists of the folk music revival, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Carolyn Hester, among those who made Dylan’s songs an integral part of their work.

The Minnesota-born Dylan counted dust-bowl folk troubadour Woody Guthrie as an essential hero, and like Guthrie, Dylan was not willing to be bound by some-one else’s idea of who or what he should be as an artist. In 1965 he played an electric guitar onstage at the famed Newport Folk Festival. That shook things up at the time and raised questions about the limits and bounds of folk, rock, and country that still prompt vital discussion today.

Gram Parsons was another songwriter of the 1960s with a legacy as a writer and as a performer who blurred the boundaries between rock and country, a legacy that has endured despite his early death. Raised in Florida and Georgia, the Harvard dropout found his way out to California not long after Dylan’s tradition-breaking set on the stage at Newport. Parsons joined the Byrds, a rock band that quickly became more folk and country oriented under Parsons’s influence. The list of songs Parsons had written already included the country and folk classics “Brass Buttons” and “Luxury Liner.” The Byrds’ 1968 release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, contained another, “Hickory Wind,” which is perhaps the song that best shows Parsons’s love for and understanding of traditional country.

Country music was a door Parsons opened for Emmylou Harris, who was his duet partner during the last years of his life. Harris was singing at folk clubs in the Washington, D.C., area when Parsons first heard her. A year later, with a recording contract for his solo debut in hand, he hired her to sing on the project. Two years later, a return to the drug and alcohol abuse he thought he’d conquered led to Parsons’s death.

While Harris was forging ways to stay true to her vision of country music, rocker Bruce Springsteen was moving closer to folk, and country artists such as Uncle Tupelo, the Tractors, and singer-songwriter Marty Stuart—who got his start in bluegrass—were moving toward rock rhythms and styles. The lines between roots rock and alternative country in band settings continued to blur, defined more by volume and dress, and occasionally by lyrical content, than by differences in melody. Singers and songwriters like Stuart, Gretchen Peters, and Mark Selby, while rooted in country, also found chart success with songs recorded by pop, blues, and rock artists.

Peters, a thoughtful songwriter and gifted singer who made the move from Colorado to Nashville in the mid-1980s, just about the time Marty Stuart was scoring chart hits, wrote music that found her equally at home performing at the Folk Alliance convention, co-writing with rocker Bryan Adams, and seeing her tunes cut by country new traditionalist Patty Loveless, blues rocker Bonnie Raitt, and pop country superstar Shania Twain.

Though she recorded one of Gretchen Peters’s songs on her first release, Shania Twain soon turned to making recordings of songs she wrote herself or with her husband, rock producer Robert John Lange. The more rock-laced they got the more controversy followed her country music career, but it was a clearly a combination that fueled millions of dollars in music sales and brought many listeners into the country section of record stores who had never ventured there before.

Alison Krauss, known for the clarity of her voice and her wide-ranging song selection, might have seemed to be going in a far different direction than Twain, but the two had more in common than sharing a stage. Twain reached pop and rock audiences with a blend of lyrics and style that crossed both those boundaries. Krauss built her foundation on traditional bluegrass and continued to play it, but took her listeners to true bluegrass versions of pop and rock songs they would likely not have encountered.

It is a characteristic that has marked all the artists who have been involved in the fusion of country music and rock: a musical imagination that can see and hear beyond borders, and an understanding of what can be changed and what can remain the same, where the heart of the music lies. The period since 1950 has seen a massive increase in popular music, or “Pop Music,” as it has come to be known. The earliest type was probably the blues, evolving from African-American traditions and gaining popularity in the United States during the 1930s, with jazz taking over as an art form characterized by blue notes and improvisation. By the 1950s, records of jazz music were sold throughout the world. Jazz musicians from 1950 include many who played from the 1920s and 1930s: Louis Armstrong (1901–71), Count Basie (1904–84), and Duke Ellington (1899–1974). There have also been a number of major political figures who have played jazz in public, including Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, King Rama IX (Bhumibol) of Thailand, and former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

Popular Styles

Country music, often known as country and western music, officially started in Tennessee in 1927 with Jimmie Rodgers, and became popular with the increased sale of records. This style of music remained popular in the United States and in Australia. Australian country musicians include Slim Dusty (1927–2003); Australian country and western music enthusiasts meet regularly at Tamworth, New South Wales, each year.

Although the rock and roll period is usually regarded as the late 1950s and the 1960s, some of the traditions go back to the late 1920s. Nevertheless, most of the important rock and roll musicians date from the 1950s: Chuck Berry (b. 1926), Fats Domino (b. 1928), and Elvis Presley (1935–77) being three of the earliest well-known names in this style, with Presley’s title of “King of Rock and Roll.” He recorded over 450 original songs, not least “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956), “Jailhouse Rock” (1958), “Little Sister” (1961), “Viva Las Vegas” (1964), and “Suspicious Minds” (1969). The Beatles, which included Paul McCartney (b. 1942), John Lennon (1940–80), George Harrison (1943–2001), and Ringo Starr (b. 1940), was the most famous of the early bands. Jim Morrison (1943–71), of The Doors, used tempo and lyrics that had the ability to tap the mood of American youth in 1967. He left the United States in 1971 to move to Paris, where he died three months later.

Other pop groups include Abba, Adam and the Ants, the Boomtown Rats, the Dead Kennedys, NXS, The Osmonds, The Rolling Stones, the Spice Girls, U2, and The Who. The British television series Top of the Pops helped promote many of the groups, and also a large number of prominent pop stars including Bono (b. 1960) from U2, Bob Geldof (b. 1951), Boy George (b. 1961), Gary Glitter (b. 1944), rock guitarist and singer Jimi Hendrix (1942–70), Michael Jackson (b. 1958), Mick Jagger (b. 1943), Jonathan King (b. 1944), Madonna (b. 1958), and Marilynn (b. 1962). Geldof became even more famous with his Live Aid (1985) musical recordings, which raised money for his Ethiopian famine appeal; and Madonna has been involved in songwriting, acting in films, and many other parts of the entertainment industry. Progressive rock came about largely from the 1960s in Britain and also in Europe, with bands such as Alice Cooper, led by Alice Cooper (b. 1948), Pink Floyd (made famous with “Dark Side of the Moon”), and Genesis.

The mid-1970s saw the emergence of punk rock, with hard rock music played at fast speeds with simple lyrics and fewer than three chords. The groups include Television, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols—the latter with Sid Vicious (1957–79) and Johnny Rotten (b. 1956) gaining notoriety. These generally used electric guitars, electric bass, and drums—with other subtypes developing, such as grunge, with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (1967–94), pop punk; Emo (emotionally charged punk rock); and Gothic rock.

There were also heavy metal groups, which tended to have aggressive and driving rhythms, with the music highly amplified and distorted, and grandiose lyrics, with many of the audience involved in “head banging.” Groups included A.C./D.C., Aerosmith, Black Sabbath (starring Ozzy Osbourne, b. 1948), Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Meatloaf, and The Sisters of Mercy.

Other types of music of the period from 1950 include funk, hip hop, salsa, soul, and disco. Some early developments in African-American music included gospel and also, in the Caribbean, steel bands. Funk music originated from African Americans, with the most famous musician in this style being James Brown (1933–2006), the “Godfather of Soul.”

Hip hop music tends to have rapping and largely came about with disc jockeys trying to repeat the percussion rhythms of funk or disco songs. Salsa music largely came from the Caribbean and became popular in many Latin countries in Central and South America and in the Mediterranean. It is also very popular among Cuban exiles in the United States. Soul music grew out of the African-American gospel singing and blues tradition from the 1950s, with musicians such as Aretha Franklin becoming well known.

Disco music, for dance, essentially drew from funk, salsa, and from the Caribbean soul music, being popular in night clubs. Reggae music, some associated with the Rastafarian movement, has also become popular in Britain and other places with large expatriate West Indian communities. The most famous reggae musician, Bob Marley (1945–81), incorporated a rock-influenced hybrid, making Marley an international superstar.

In the 1990s, there was a development of New Age music, representing some form of connection to Mother Earth or Gaia. This included the sound of animals, as well as quiet songs that had the idea of aiding meditation and helping energize yoga sessions, having a calming influence, and representing essentially a cultural backlash and alternative to punk rock and heavy metal. This has also been reflected in a rise in interest in choir music by the King’s College Choir from Cambridge, England; the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from Utah; Welsh male voice choirs; and British marching bands from the coal mines in the north. There has also been a resurgence of the massive Estonian choirs, and renewed interest in Australian Aboriginal music, with the Yothu Yindi band being probably the best-known group. There has, similarly, been a revival of Zulu and other African chants, and also music from remote places such as harp music from Paraguay and Tibetan music.

There has also been much music around the world often collectively known as world music, for instance, in Greece, Nana Mouskouri (b. 1934). There have also been many internationally acclaimed African singers and musicians, the most famous probably being Ali Farka Touré (1939–2006) from Mali. There have also been many Algerian and Egyptian singers. In India, music played on a sitar by Ravi Shankar and others has been popular in its own right and in Bollywood films.

In China, Chinese operatic music has remained, in spite of China becoming communist—although there were major changes in Chinese music during the Cultural Revolution from 1966, with Jiang Qing (Madam Mao) taking part in promoting new revolutionary themes in music. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Gamelan music in Java and Bali continues, and there has been much interest in pop music, with “45” records of the music of Sim Sisamouth of Cambodia and others being popular during the early 1970s.

Bibliography:

Hartog, Howard, ed. European Music in the Twentieth Century. London: Kegan Paul, 1957;
Kennedy, Michael. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1980;
Westrup, J. A., and F. L. I. Harrison, Collins Music Encyclopedia. London: Collins, 1988.

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