Reflection Activity: Expressionist Music and Jazz
Expressionism is an artistic movement that stresses intense and subjective emotion. Artists that use expressionism usually focus on their inner feelings instead of depicting outward appearances. Expressionism is an art concerned with social protest. Some characteristics of expressionist music are that it is episodic with a fragmentary form. It involves a great emotional magnitude. Also, it is discontinuous. Most expressionist works stress harsh dissonance and fragmentation. They also take advantage of extreme registers and unusual instrumental effects. Some examples of expressionist compositions are Pierrot lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw also by Arnold Scheonberg, the
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In contrast to the New Orleans style, a typical swing band had about fourteen or fifteen musicians grouped into three sections, which are saxophones, brass instruments, and rhythm. The rhythm consisted of piano, percussion instruments, guitar, and brass. Because this band was consisted of a lot more people, it needed music that was more composed and improvised. It also needed music that was arranged which means it was notated in written-out parts for each musician to read. The main melody of a swing band was usually accompanied by saxophones playing sustained chords, or by saxophones and brass instruments playing short, repeated phrases called riffs. The arrangers used a rapid acceleration of brass and sax riffs to create tension and excitement. Swing’s harmonic vocabulary was richer and more varied than that of New Orleans jazz. An 8-bar phrase was used in swing style. An example of swing jazz is Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues.
Expressionist painters, writers, artists, and musicians use deliberate distortion to assault and shock their audience, to communicate their tensions and anguish of the human psyche. It conveyed the anguish felt by the poor and the oppressed.
The main function of early jazz music was to entertain. It was used in opera, chamber music, folk music, popular music, dance music, and even sacred music. Jazz was usually for bands to play to an audience as loud as they could. It was for people to dance to. Bebop was a
Expressionism sought to give shape to emotions through stylized visuals, particularly using high contrast lighting and exaggerated colors, lines and shadows, most of the examples given before. The style combines moral values and emotional expreience. It is a unique and very different style of art.
The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What made Jazz such a different perspective of traditional music was its act of improvising. There was a widespread use of improvisation often by more than one player at a time. Songwriters would write the music down on a piece of paper, and then the Jazz musicians would try their best to play the music. Usually in a Jazz piece, musicians would use the song as a starting point to improvise around. Jazz musicians would play a familiar song to the audience, and by the time they were done with the piece they would stir up a totally different feeling away from the
Art of the Egyptians and Africans express ………………………..In art, style is a characteristic, or a number of characteristics that we can identify as constant, recurring, or coherent.(Art Terminology 1) Artists express their emotions through their art-making, their finished product will reflect that emotion. They might also create a piece of art that makes the viewer create an emotional response. Emotion is any strong agitation of the feelings actuated by experiencing love, hate, fear, etc.(Dictionary 1)
Expressionism can be described as a movement in the fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than realistic portrayal, looking to obtain not objective reality, but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Several characteristics of expressionism are distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy. “The Green Table,” a ballet by Kurt Jooss, 1932, is an ideal example of expressionism because it depicts the choreographer’s personal interpretation of war through the use of movement, music by Fritz Cohen and lighting by Hermann Mankard.
Jazz music was a huge change in America. The music brought together many different people and opened up clubs mainly in the city. Jazz music allowed many new artists to emerge and become well known all throughout the country.
When listening to jazz, people hear it different ways. Some people like the physical level and others use more intellect. Many keep score, make lists of names, and guess the outcomes of the music. People listen to recordings or attend live performances. Listening to recordings is not even close to being at a performance. Recordings are usually only a few minutes long, but performances can last an hour or longer. There has to be an interaction between the performers and the audience to get the full effect of jazz. Jazz was performed wherever there was space and demand. The music first came about and still is popular in nightclubs. Small clubs were the places where jazz musicians came to maturity. Clubs in New York City were the center of jazz activity. Although New York City was a main location of jazz, New Orleans has more recognition
Jazz is a music genre that has complex characteristics and history of development and thus many musicians and scholars face troubles in defining what jazz is. In general, jazz is believed to have born in New Orleans. Jazz developed for the pleasure of the social dancers. According to the “Understanding Jazz: What Is Jazz?” of John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts, Jazz was created mainly by Afro-Americans, and had elements of European and Afro-American culture. Also, it emphasizes few elements of Jazz, which are swing-feel, syncopation, and improvisation. These different culture and elements of jazz may be explained by how jazz
Jazz is a style of music that began and has been revolutionized within the United States. Jazz music first appeared in the city of New Orleans and eventually moved onto Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New York City. Jazz unites different elements of African, African- American, religious, brass brand, and blues style of music. The music of Jazz, and its changes through the years, is now a form of music that is known and respected throughout this nation and the world.
Art has evolved and regenerated itself many times during our human existence. These differences are defined through changes in styles under various theories. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a style known as Expressionism became popular. During this movement the artists were trying to use their artwork as a tool of expression toward life. It was mainly dominant in the nonrepresentational arts, such as abstract visual arts and music. It also was probably one of the most difficult movements to understand because the whole point of the piece lay within the artist. Not only was it a movement, it defined the act of art as a whole. From the beginning of time, each work of art, excluding replicas, show a way of expressing
band in New Orleans. The first jazz bands were usually made up of one or two
Pbs.com Ken Burns states that just like all music jazz went through it trial era of music. The swing era was very popular through the early 1930’s into the late 1940’s. The swing style type of music consist of large number of band member featuring at least three to four saxophones, two or three trumpets, two to three trombones, a piano guitar and a bass violin. Not including the lead vocalist of the groups. Swinging was a life style that lifted anyone
Swing was the dominant idiom of the 1930s and much of the 1940s. Basically, it was a form of dance music played by a large band, and was the medium through which most white Americans first heard Jazz (Schuller,1989). Although the decade 1935-45 was called the Swing Era, swing arrangements had been played by large bands beginning in the 1920s. Bandleader-arrangers Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and, later, Count Basie, worked out arrangements for their 10 to 12 piece bands, which, unlike traditional jazz bands, were divided into instrumental sections.
Munch had a series of paintings that were exhibited in a major art show in Berlin. The series was entitled The Frieze of Life, all six of these paintings caused such shock that the show was forced to shut down. Munch had so much feelings, passions, anguish, stress, sorrow, and pain in his paintings that people just didn't understand what was going on. He thought that people were just afraid of the truth. Munch had let his feelings out, not through rage or anger, but through art, some people that attended the show saw more than just art they saw one mans feelings. Munch's painting began having a big part in German Expressionism.
world as did in the Paris to New York shift of the 1940's and 1950's.
Modernism has found new expressions in art which in turn have changed how people critic and understand art, in this essay I am going to focus more on abstract expressionism. Debates in this movement have gone as far as influencing many artists and the two well-known critics who have made this movement more remarkable and have changed the art world completely are Clement Greenberg and Ronald Rosenberg. On the writings of these two gentlemen about art I will try to draw out the differences in the idea of what abstract expressionism is and what it is supposed to be, compare and outline the similarities and the differences between the two critics.