What is the American Music Aspect? — find some answers from African American
From my personal experience, whenever I asked my American friends about their favorite American food, they answered “I don’t know what should I call “American” food. Is there an American food?” This might be natural reaction because America has had various immigrants and the mixed culture from various countries such as the UK, France, and Mexico. As it is hard to find an American food, defining American music is also complicated. What would the American Music sound like? You might think of Jazz, Blues, Pop music or Hip-hop, but what about the classical American music? Like French chanson, Polish dance music, Hungarian or Romanian folk music, Mexican or Spanish guitar music, and Scotland’s bagpipe, does America have its own musical aspect? Well, as we have American style pizza or pasta, I’m sure there’re the American music aspects, and we were able to find some good examples of pieces composed by African American composers in the discussion of 20th-century music class.
The most famous African American composer who is also a pioneer in the field is William Grant Still. As I mentioned in my previous post, he was the first composer whose symphony was performed by a major philharmonic orchestra, who conducts a major orchestra, and who have an opera produced by a major operatic center. His most famous composition is Afro-America symphony. In the piece, the composer composed the first movement with bluesy aspect of rhythm and melody which I think brilliant mixture of blues and classical orchestration. Also, in the third movement, he included festival and parade sound of music. In both cases, Still used nice brass sound for the primary melody. One more example I found was posted on my previous post with the title: Old California
Another example was written by a female African American composer, Florence Price. Her Symphony No. 1 has a lot of folk element. The pentatonic element in the first movement gave me some oriental feeling with her own view on American nationalism which is I think the grand scale of orchestration and powerful, distinct character. Her contribution was also praised in the Plaindealer.
Moreover, she composed and included Scandinavian-like color in the the symphony. The most distinct character is appeared in the fourth movement. If you listen to the music, you would think of the Scandinavian dancing of whole village’s people with joy and clapping like one of the scenes from Tangled.
In this post, I was focusing only on African American composers point of view on American elements. Like Still and Price add their own interpretation on American music as a African American, there are various opinions (by Mexican American, Asian American, or White composers) on American music. Of course, I need to research more on the complicated topic, but today’s my opinion is that the acceptance of different opinion and respectful manner is American element. American who I met in the US was always thoughtful, kind, a good listener, and not picky about something (in general!), which is the reason I think American is good at embracing the various cultures and recreate their own color of music.
