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Expressionism Versus Jazz Essay

Decent Essays

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 …show more content…

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

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