Listening Journal Week 4

The music from this weeks listening recordings represents the styles of American Music after the second world war. From Doo Wop to Rock n'Roll the music of the late 1940's through the 1950's brought "enormous changes to American popular music"( Satrr Waterman p.240) After the second world war, Frank Sinatra becomes a popular singer and leads his big band to great success. Like some of his other hits from the Swing Era, Frank Sinatra's "Nancy" follows an AABA form, however, in this song we hear new instrumentation with the dominant instruments being string instruments. We can contrast this piece with Sinatra's contemporary Nat King Cole, and his recording of Nature Boy. Using mainly just the piano, and string instruments. Cole's treatment of the voice is much more deliberate than Sinatra's and each note is treated as it's own entity. Sinatra has always been a favorite of mine. Having not listened to a lot of Nat King Cole, I like his more deliberate style and freedom with the melody. However, I also love the way Sinatra connects the melodic line syncing the notes with the textual meaning. During this time we still see Dance influencing our music. We are given two examples of the Mambo here and I can just see Ricky Ricardo and his band playing music similar to this on the I Love Lucy Show. I am used to the Dean Martin version of Mambo Italiano and was pleasantly surprised to hear it sung by Rosemary Clooney. The rubato of the tempo was well delivered with the text, almost as a recitative in an opera. Mambo No. 5 Without text here, it is easier to see the dance sequence play out in my head each little section representing a different part of the dance. Also during this time we see the emergence of R&B. Like the blues we have seen before, these songs play out life and tell a story. I love the deep raspy voice ofBig Mama Thornton. The a a a b form represented in the R&B music reminds us of the 16 bar blue form with few variations. Country music during this time was also changing. Some country musicians fought to make country music more mainstream, while others, like Bill Monroe fought to keep the traditional backwoods style in focus. Bill Monroe's bluegrass music uses influences from black and white music of the Appalachian mountains. Another popular star of Country music of this time is Hank Williams. One of my husbands favorites, Hank Williams music was perhaps more mainstream as he had 10 top 10 records between 1947 and 1953. These songs follow a more strophic structure of verse refrain verse refrain. Also, much like the blues music and country music we've heard before, these songs talk of despair and tell a story. Each of the listenings in this section had different style and it is hard to imagine all of these different styles happening at the same time, however, if we think about it there are many different genres happening now simultaneously giving different people different styles of music to enjoy.