Judge of Music

Genre of the Week > Playlist

“Ragtime” (alternately spelled rag-time) is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or “ragged”, rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music. The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the “Maple Leaf Rag” and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s. For at least 12 years after its publication, the “Maple Leaf Rag” heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric patterns.

Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public’s imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since as the music has been re-discovered. First in [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“Disco” is a genre of dance music whose popularity peaked during the middle to late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disco was a reaction by New York City’s gays as well as black and Latino heterosexuals against both the domination of rock music and the demonization of dance music by the counterculture during this period. Women embraced disco as well, and the music eventually expanded to several other popular groups of the time. In what is considered a forerunner to disco style clubs, in February 1970, the New York City DJ David Mancuso opened The Loft, a members-only private dance club set in his own home. Most agree that the first disco songs were released in [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“Drum and Bass” (commonly abbreviated to “D&B” or “DnB”, occasionally “DaB”) is a type of rave music which emerged in the mid 1990s. The genre is characterized by fast breakbeats (typically between 160–190 bpm, occasional variation is noted in older compositions), with heavy bass, sub-bass lines, and occasional infra-bass lines. Drum and bass began as an offshoot of the United Kingdom rave scene of the very early 1990s. Over the first decade of its existence, the incorporation of elements from various musical genres led to many permutations in its overall style.

History

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a growing nightclub and overnight outdoor event culture gave birth to a new electronic music style called Rave music, which, (similarly to hip-hop, combined sampled syncopated beats or breakbeats, other samples from a wide range of other musical genres, occasionally samples of music, dialogue and effects from films and television programmes, strong bass sounds and a faster tempo than that of house music, typically around [Read more...]

Musical Instrument > Playlist

The “Cello” (pronounced CHEL-oh; plural cellos or celli) is a bowed string instrument. The word derives from the Italian violoncello. A person who plays a cello is called a cellist. The cello is used as a solo instrument, in chamber music, and as a member of the string section of an orchestra. It is the second largest bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, the double bass being the largest.

Description

The name Cello is an abbreviation of the Italian violoncello, which means “little violone”,or referring to the violone (“big viol”), the lowest-pitched instrument of the viol family, the group of string instruments that were superseded by the violin family. Thus, the name carries both an augmentative “-one” (“big”) and a diminutive “-cello” (“little”). By the turn of the twentieth century, it had grown customary to abbreviate the name violoncello to ‘cello, with the apostrophe indicating the six missing prefix letters. It now is acceptable to use the name “cello” without the apostrophe and as a full designation. Cellos are tuned in fifths, starting with C2 (two octaves below middle C) as the lowest string, followed by  G2, D3, and A3. It is tuned the same way as the viola, but an octave lower.

The cello is most closely associated with [Read more...]

Music Artist > Playlist

“Tupac Amaru Shakur” (June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), known by his stage names “2Pac” (or simply “Pac”) and “Makaveli”, was an American rapper. Shakur has sold over 75 million albums worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists in the world. Rolling Stone Magazine named him the 86th Greatest Artist of All Time.

In addition to his status as a top-selling rap artist, he was a promising actor and a social activist. Most of Shakur’s songs are about growing up amid violence and hardship in ghettos, racism, problems in the society and conflicts with other rappers during the East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry. Shakur was initially a roadie and backup dancer for the alternative hip hop group Digital Underground.

Violence was a theme, not only in his art, but in his life. In November 1993 he was indicted on charges of sexual assault and subsequently sentenced to one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in prison. In September 1996, Shakur was shot in the Las Vegas metropolitan area of Nevada. He was taken to the University Medical Center, where he died of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest 6 days later.

Early life

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City. He was named after [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“Minimalist Music” is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting. Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and, less visibly if more seminally, La Monte Young—emerged to become publicly associated with it in America. In Europe, its chief exponents were Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener. The term “minimalist music” was derived around [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“Ambient Music” is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an “atmospheric”, “visual” or “unobtrusive” quality.

History

The roots of ambient music go back to the early 20th century. In particular, the period just before and after the first world war gave rise to two significant Art Movements that encouraged experimentation with various musical (and non musical) forms, while rejecting more conventional, tradition-bound styles of expression. These art movements were called Futurism and Dadaism. Aside from being known for their painters and writers, these movements also attracted experimental and ‘anti-music’ musicians such as Francesco Balilla Pratella of [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

A “Ballad” is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later North America, Australia and North Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and the term is now often used as synonymous with any love song, particularly the pop or rock power ballad.

The origin of ballads

The ballad probably derives its name from medieval French dance songs or ‘ballares’ (from which we also get ballet), as did the alternative rival form that became the French Ballade. In theme and function they may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“Cumbia” is a Colombian musical genre and folk dance that is considered to be representative of Colombia, along with Vallenato. Cumbia originated from the Caribbean coast of eastern Colombia, with folkloric variants in Panama. Cumbia began as a courtship dance practiced among the African slave population that was later mixed with European instruments and musical characteristics. Cumbia is very popular in the Andean region and the Southern Cone and was until the early 1980s more popular in these regions than the salsa.

Origins

It is often asserted that Cumbia is a variant of Guinean cumbé music. However, it should be noted that the rhythm of Cumbia can be found in music of Yoruba (more specifically, the rhythm is associated with the god Obatala), and in other musical traditions across West Africa. Cumbia started in the northern coast of South America, what is now [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

“A cappella” (Italian for In The Manner of The Church) music is solo or group vocal or singing without instrumental sound, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. A cappella was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato style. In the 19th century a renewed interest in Renaissance polyphony coupled with an ignorance of the fact that vocal parts were often doubled by instrumentalists led to the term coming to mean unaccompanied vocal music. In modern usage, a cappella often refers to an all-vocal group performance of any style, including barbershop, doo wop, and modern pop/rock. Today, a cappella also includes sample/loop “vocal only” productions by [Read more...]

Musical Instrument > Playlist

The “Tuba” is the largest and lowest pitched brass instrument. Sound is produced by vibrating or “buzzing” the lips into a large cupped mouthpiece. It is one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra, first appearing in the mid-19th century, when it largely replaced the ophicleide. Tuba is Latin for trumpet or horn. The horn referred to would most likely resemble what is known as a baroque trumpet.

History

Prussian Patent No. 19 was granted to Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Carl Moritz on September 12, 1835 for a “basstuba” in F1. The original Wieprecht and Moritz instrument used five valves of the Berlinerpumpen type that were the forerunners of the modern rotary valve.

The addition of valves made it possible to play low in the harmonic series of the instrument and still have a complete selection of notes. Prior to the invention of valves, brass instruments were limited to [Read more...]

Music Genre > Playlist

A “March”, as a musical genre, is a piece of music with a strong regular rhythm which in origin was expressly written for marching to and most frequently performed by a military band. In mood, marches range from the moving death march in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to the brisk military marches of John Philip Sousa and the martial hymns of the late 19th century. Examples of the varied use of the march can be found in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, in the Marches militaires of Franz Schubert, in the Marche funèbre in Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor, and in the Dead March in Handel’s Saul.

Marches can be written in any time signature, but the most common time signatures are 4/4, 2/2 (alla breve, although this may refer to 2 time up until the time of Johannes Brahms, or cut time), 6/8, and 3/4; however, some modern marches are being written in 1/2 time. The modern march tempo hovers around 120 beats to the minute (the standard Napoleonic march tempo); however, many funeral marches conform to the Roman standard of [Read more...]

Music Artist > Playlist

“Janis Joplin” born Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer, songwriter and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist. Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin number 46 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004, and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Early life: 1943–1965

Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas on January 19, 1943, to Seth Joplin (1910–87), an engineer at Texaco, and Dorothy (née East) Joplin (1913–98), a registrar at a business college. She had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. The family attended the Church of Christ. The Joplins felt that Janis always needed more attention than their other children, with her mother stating, “She was unhappy and unsatisfied without receiving a lot of attention. The normal rapport wasn’t adequate.”

As a teenager, she befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by African-American blues artists Bessie Smith and Leadbelly, whom Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing in the local choir and expanded her listening to blues singers such as Odetta and Big Mama Thornton.

Primarily a painter while still in school, she first began singing blues and folk music with friends. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she stated that she was mostly shunned. Joplin was quoted as saying, “I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I didn’t hate niggers.” As a teen, she became overweight and her skin broke out so badly she was left with deep [Read more...]