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Music Of The World: From Jazz To Hip-Hop, Michael Young

Masters Theses

In this ever-changing world of popular music, we grasp hold of what we enjoy or have delight in. In this document we discuss the highlights of music from the early Jazz era to Hip-hop music in the 21st century. Within general music education we are shifting from the traditional class setting-from where the teacher is imparting knowledge to students to the students teaching students. The classroom instructor is now a facilitator. A new and exciting way for this to happen is through music and popular musics, or music that was deemed popular. Music education-based curricular materials can illustrate the social, …

Prescribed Freedom, Proscribed Freedom: Compositional And Improvisational Balances In Jazz, Andrew W. Saliba

Masters Theses

Jazz is a recent and flexible art form, rooted in the twin musical strains of occidental canon and folkloric African-American music. From its genesis, jazz musicians have had the difficult task of reconciling these seemingly opposite musical parents while simultaneously building a new musical canon that respects and upholds its past, even as it celebrates new individual voices. Like any multifaceted challenge this balancing of elements has not always gone smoothly, and attempts to codify the delineation and categorization of jazz remain controversial even now. There is additional challenge in defining the nature of “free” improvised music. While free music …

The Boundaries Of Modern Jazz Composition: Interaction Between Tango And Jazz Music, Evgeniya Kozhevnikova

Masters Theses

The history of jazz music is not very long in comparison to the history of music in general – from the end of the 19th century until present. This period, however, is very dense in terms of musical influences and became especially denser recently because of globalization.

Several researchers explored the jazz influences in the music of Astor Piazzolla, whom renovated traditional tango. While Piazzolla is considered a tango composer, some jazz bands use Piazzolla’s music as jazz standards and create compositions with traditional elements of jazz, such as improvisation. There are also composers influenced by tango music who write …

Stifling The Subversive Swing: An Austrian Perspective On The Nazi Jazz Ban, Colin J. Rensch

Masters Theses

This research investigates the rationale behind the Nazis’ suppression of jazz music during the Second World War. Existing scholarship explains the circumstances surrounding this suppression, but it does not explore why the Nazis did not completely eradicate jazz. The goal of this research is to reveal which aspects of jazz the Nazis particularly disdained and why they allowed this music to continue while they so vehemently suppressed other forms of art that they deemed undesirable.

In order for the arguments to be viewed in their proper context, the thesis first discusses the rise of jazz in Austria and the Austrian …

A Proposal For The Inclusion Of Jazz Theory Topics In The Undergraduate Music Theory Curriculum, Alexis Joy Smerdon

Masters Theses

The demands of the twenty-first century require musicians to be more stylistically versatile since there are more opportunities for performance when musicians are familiar with not only classical but also jazz and popular music. Understanding the theory behind jazz and pop styles will help prepare the musicians for these opportunities. Since all music students take music theory, it is in the students’ best interest for teachers of theory to include jazz theory topics in the classical music theory curriculum. The purpose of this thesis is to propose the inclusion of jazz theory topics in the undergraduate music theory curriculum. To …

Saving Jazz: Applied Ethnomusicology And America's Classical Music, Christopher Long

Masters Theses

In his 2009 article, Can Jazz Be Saved?, Wall Street Journal columnist Terry Teachout asserted that the American audience for jazz music performances was both shrinking and aging. Saving Jazz: Applied Ethnomusicology and America's Classical Music explores this jazz audience problem and finds that over the last thirty years the overall American audience for live jazz performances has not shrunk as has been widely reported, but is essentially unchanged in size. During that same period, though, there is no question that the median age of the audience has changed dramatically. Data collected by the National Endowment for the Arts and …