Category: Music
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Jazz Latitutde
After jazz first emerged in New Orleans in the early 1910s, it spread across the country. A 1922 New York Times Magazine article documented how the genre had by then gone global, summing it up in a single 242-word sentence: Jazz latitude is marked as indelibly on the globe as the heavy line of the […]
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Putting the Music Into the Jazz
In 1922, bandleaders like Paul Whitehead were transforming jazz from an art form some considered unrefined, into more classical-infused symphonic jazz like Rhapsody in Blue, the iconic piece Whitehead commissioned two years later. Racial subtext was at play here, with “unrefined” and “refined” often serving as euphemisms for what was really going on: jazz originated […]
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“Jazz ‘er Up!”: Broadway’s Conquest of Europe
Jazz, that uniquely American art form, was beginning to take Europe by storm in 1921. In Paris and a score of other European centres of gayety the words “fox-trot” and “one-step” have become so much a part of the local language that natives have to think twice to remember that the words were originally imported […]
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Conspiracy of Silence Against Jazz
By September 1919, jazz was really starting to permeate the country. Some were not thrilled, as in this article which described the genre as “that negation of rhythmical sound and motion.” The close-up dancing offended the sensibilities of many, such as the article’s author Robert J. Cole: If there is one thing the dance of […]
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No German Music — Lest We Forget
Eleonora de Cisneros, a major opera singer in 1919, argued that April of that year was too soon to enjoy German music, coming so soon after WWI: There are 800,000 Germans in New York City who want German music! But you men and women who listened to that music, if you have a drop of […]
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An International Anthem — Britain and America
This attempt for a joint anthem between the United Kingdom and the United States, written in 1913, never really caught on. Why not? Surely it wasn’t the music, because the tune was the same as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” which everybody still knows today. Likely people just preferred the lyrics to a singular national […]
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Teaching Uncle Sam’s Fighters to Sing
The War Department (later renamed the Defense Department) in 1916 placed “song leaders” in the training camps for the military. Why? “‘A songless army,’ says Major Gen. J. Franklin Bell, commander of Camp Upton, ‘would lack in the fighting spirit in proportion as it lacked responsiveness to music. There is no more potent force in […]
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‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as Nation’s Anthem
The Francis Scott Key song, though written in 1814, was not fully recognized as the American national anthem until patriotic fervor struck upon involvement in World War I in 1917. The Star-Spangled Banner would not be officially declared as the American national anthem until 1931, and would not even be played at a sports game […]
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American Song Makers Seek War Tune of the ‘Tipperary’ Kind
No particularly notable or well-recognized patriotic songs had been composed in the months America’s involvement in World War I, lamented this June 1917 article. That problem was clearly rectified by 1918, when Irving Berlin composed God Bless America, even if the song did not truly take off until World War II a few decade later. Today, it […]
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City’s Summer Music Problem Solved at Last
An article about the then-recent attempts in 1916 to have low-priced opera and orchestral concerts for the New York City public. This sentence in particular illustrates just how long ago this was: “When you get something like 8,000 persons at a concert in New York it means something!” Later today as of this writing, Bruce Springsteen is […]
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