Топик: Английская музыка

The band singer period ended in September 1942. When Sinatra went out on as a soloist, it was to join the stock company of vocalists on the weekly "Lucky Strike Hit Parade." But there was buzz in the air about Sinatra, and it burst wide open when in 1943 when he was booked as a supporting act to Goodman at the Paramount Theater. Goodman introduced him, turned to kick off his band, and before he could lower his arm heard an ear-shattering scream of 3,000 mostly female fans explode behind him. "What they hell is that?" Goodman muttered.

During the bobby-sox years, Sinatra recorded for Columbia and turned out a steady flow of romantic ballads backed by Stordahl's tasteful orchestrations. But nothing as intense as the Sinatra phenomenon of the '40s could sustain indefinitely. The energy ran out of the Sinatra boom and by the 1952, it is said, he was washed up.

With the '40s behind him, however, the stage was set for his golden age. Capitol Records signed him up and concentrated on marketing him to young adults through carefully planned long playing albums organized around a mood, an idea, a feeling, a concept. In the Wee Small Hours , crafted by Nelson Riddle, became the matrix for his recording career from then on. Among the ballad albums, All Alone , arranged by Gordon Jenkins in 1962, stands in a class by itself for its stark sense of melancholy.

After Wee Small Hours , Sinatra turned to develop a side of his musical personality that had never been exploited -- the swinging Sinatra doing upbeat tempos against jazz-styled big band charts that caught some of the feeling that the new Count Basie band was generating on the instrumental side.

The albums and a string of successful films took Sinatra into the '60s at the top of his fame and form. He played the Newport Jazz Festival in the '60s, recorded with the Basie and Ellington, and played the Chairman to a colorful Clan that included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and other chums. Talent was the admission ticket.

Yet, the force of youth movement and rock music in the late '60s and early '70s seemed to shake his own confidence in his own hipness, and he tried to embrace some of the new material. But after a period of retirement and a few false starts in the recording studio, he returned to form doing the kind of music that told stories worth telling. In the '90s his stubbornness paid off. The youth icons of the '60s and '70s finally came to him to sing his song on his terms. Duets may have received mixed critical reaction, but once again Sinatra was king of the hill, scoring the largest album sales of his career.

Sinatra received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983. He died May 14, 1998, at the age of 82.

In 1998, Sinatra was elected by the Readers into the Down Beat Hall of Fame.

From the times of the Pilgrims American people have liked music and made it a part of their lives. They have played and sung and fashioned their own songs for all occasions.

There were, however, no European courts for the cultivation of art music and opportunities were rare for the training and development of individual talents. When sufficient number of professional musicians had arrived to establish centers of serious musical culture American role as a backward province of European music was firmly established. I was only natural that the foreign arbiters of taste would regard any deviations from European musical thinking as deplorable savagery to be resolutely put down.

Small wonder, then, that a serious dichotomy developed in the field of American composition. American educated young people, fresh from French or German influences, did their loyal best to write good German or French music. For subject matter they turned to “remote legends and misty myths” guaranteed to keep them from thinking about the crudities of the land, which they found so excruciating upon their return from abroad. They did, however, bring back with them a professional competence, which was to be their significant contribution to the American scene.

Meanwhile the uneducated creator, finding good stuff about him, carried on a rapidly developing music speech, which was a blend of European folk music, African rhythm, and regional color, and discovered that the public the public liked his music and was ready to pay for it handsomely. As a result via the minstrel ballad, through ragtime into jazz, a genuine popular American music made its appearance and was given every encouragement by the entertainment industry. European musicians were quick to recognize the originality and value of this music and, beginning with Debussy, accepted it as a new resource.

The American serious group, however, anxious to preserve their new-found dignity, nervously dismissed this music as purely commercial (a lot of it was and is), and until it was made respectable by the attention paid to it by Ravel and Stravinsky there were only occasional attempts to borrow from its rhythms and melodies. The highly successful popular group, on the other hand, has developed the notion that the technique of composition is not only unnecessary but an affectation. Such needs as may arise for their concerted numbers, ballets, and orchestrations they can well afford to pay for from the hacks (the underprivileged literate musicians). Gershwin’s contribution to the American scene is significant beyond his music itself in that he was able to reconcile the two points of view and achieve popular music in the large traditional forms.

Americans are ex – Europeans, to be sure, and as such have responsibilities to the preservation and continuance of European culture, but American are also a race – and a vigorous one – and it is increasingly evident that we are capable of developing cultural traditions of our own.

As for Russian music it is impossible to describe its contribution to the world musical culture, and will be difficult to estimate it. Of course, the great musical occurrence is the Russian classical music, and I would like to tell about my favorites Russian composers.

Sergei Procofyev was five when his mother gave him his first piano lesson. At the age of six he was already composing and actually writing small pieces for the piano and a few years later he write an opera to his own libretto called The Giant . Procofyev graduated from the Conservatoire in the spring of 1914. Taking his final exams as a pianist, he won the highest distinction: the Anton Rubinstein gold medal and prize.

Procofyev worked for nearly fifty years in all spheres and genres of music. His powerful and original talent has won universal recognition. His best works – and these are not few – have enriched the legacy of world musical culture.

Procofyev belonged to the older generation of Soviet composers who entered upon the scene before the October Revolution. He was a pupil of Rimsky – Korsakov and Lyadov who educated the young composers of their time in the spirit of the finest Russian classical traditions, which they strove to protect from modernistic influences.

Procofyev was a man of independent thinking who traveled his own way. He was one of the greatest masters of the new, Soviet period in the history of the Russian music. Never satisfied with his achievements, Procofyev was forever probing, forever working on new ideas. The development of music in the first half of this century is unthinkable without him.

Operas and ballets held an important place among the works he created. The opera Love for Three Oranges was written in1919 and has become very popular. Procofyev wrote another opera in the twenties – The Flaming Angel , but did not live to see it on the stage. No more than two fragments of it were performed in his lifetime.

Ballet music appealed to Procofyev even more than the opera. Besides his Buffoon he wrote three other ballet scores while abroad – The Age of Steel, The Prodigal Son , and On the Dnieper . The Fourth Symphony , the last to be written abroad, was the most interesting.

Procofyev’s best works, written after his return to the Soviet Union are: the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935 - 1936), the symphonic fairy – tale Peter and the Wolf (1936), the heroic cantata Alexander Nevsky (1938 – 1939), the opera War and Peace (1941), the Fifth Symphony (1944), the ballet Cinderella (1944).

The last five years of his life brought such important works as the Seventh Symphony, the oratorio On guard of peace, the symphonic suite Winter Fire and the ballet The Stone Flower. Unforgettable are Procofyev’s sonatas and concertos for violin and many other compositions revealing the finest qualities of his tremendous talent.

Other greatest Russian composer is Igor Stravinsky.

Stravinsky was a pupil of Rimsky – Korsakov, but his reputation was made by the music he wrote for the Diaghilev Ballet in Paris (The Firebird, Petrouchka, The Rite of Spring). This period is marked by interest in Russia folk song and brilliant orchestral coloring. The most varied rhythms are used for percussive effects to accentuate the brutally harsh sonorities, and a highly dissonant harmony results from the use of polytonality.

About 1920, Stravinsky struck out in directions that were new, partly in technique and partly in the kinds of subjects and mediums employed. His technique showed a new restrained, a less dissonant and more tonal style, and greater clarity of form; in short, a tendency toward the neoclassic style. His material was typically drawn from the classics of the eighteenth century. The great variety of the musical types after 1920 is astonishing: oratorios, chamber music, concertos, ballets, symphonies, pieces for a piano, and so on. Every work of Stravinsky’s has a special individuality, and in each he achieves a uniqueness of style and solves a problem to which he seldom returns. Directly after first World War, Stravinsky wrote a number of works marked by economy of means and expression, using a few solo players (The Soldier’s Tale; The Wind Octet ). Later, in his “third” period, he returned to the larger forms of the symphony (Symphony in Three Movements, 1945). Stravinsky’s early interest in American jazz rhythms dates from Ragtime (1918). A more ambitious work , Ebony Concerto (1945), for jazz band, appeared after he had settled permanently in the United States.

On the whole, Stravinsky’s style is essentially anti-romantic. The elasticity and primitive vigor of his rhythms was calculated to represent his non-romantic subject matter, and his melodies, especially in later works, are deliberately matter – of – fact, dry, and occasionally commonplace, as a reaction to the expressive melodies of Romanticism.

Stravinsky uses the tonal material of the diatonic (seven – tone) scale, sometimes combined with the old modes. His early polytonality is replaced later by clearer tonality, but his dissonant harmony is often the result of the combination of polyphonic voices. A special feature of his style is parallel dissonant chords or intervals.

Stravinsky was always a virtuoso orchestrator. A fondness for the dry brilliant sonorities of the woodwinds and particularly the percussion instruments tended to relegate the strings to the background. To individualize the voice parts of chords, Stravinsky often used instruments of different timbre.