Analyzing popular music from a musical, rather than a sociological or political viewpoint, this book examines the nineteenth-century split between classical and popular music and surveys all styles of Western popular music to uncover the musical language uniting them.
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"Will have reprecussions not only on the study of popular music, but on those debates about cultural identity which are centred on blues and jazz....The range of scholarship here is extraordinary and, in its combination of available materials, unprecedented....A major intervention in the study of American popular music, and should be known not only to musicians and musicologists, but to anyone interested in the sociology of American culture."--Journal of American Studies
"Exposes many fascinating facets of popular music and provides a clear insight into jazz' formative years."--JazzTimes
"Contains a wealth of ingenious speculations....He seems to have an uncanny knack for drawing out musical patterns from an extraordinaryly diverse repertory....Anyone interested in exploring the musical syntax of popular genres would do well to take advantage of the insights presented so cogently here."--American Music
"This ground-breaking study examines the split between 'classical' and 'popular' Western music in the 19th century...and imparts fascinating insights about the derivation of blues types, classic ragtime, and parlor music....A truly original contribution....Strongly recommended for both college and public libraries."--Choice
"What an interesting book! Van der Merwe has raised fundamental questions about twentieth-century music and has dealt with them provocatively, thoroughly, and, in some cases, conclusively. His discussion of the origins of the blues form alone is invaluable."--Martin Williams
About the Author
Peter van der Merwe is at Natal Society Library.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very informative book,
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This review is from: Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Clarendon Paperbacks) (Paperback)
This book is great because it traces the origins of many musical techniques and a few genres, includes a great glossary and many examples in notation, and a lot of information about harmony and melody in popular and classical music.
Contents (just the top level): Part One. The Historical Background Part Two. The Theoretical Foundation Part Three. The Blues Part Four. Parlour Music and Ragtime
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Musicological History Of American Music,
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This review is from: Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Clarendon Paperbacks) (Paperback)
This book examines the influences on the American music of the 20th century from a musicological rather than a sociological perspective. But actually there is a fair bit of historical and cultural background included as well. For me this was a good thing, because I am a music fan rather than a musician and sometimes found all the talk of pendular thirds, eight bar patterns and the diatonic scale going over my head. But even here I found enough discernible to hold my interest.
The primary emphasis is on how African musical forms and European musical forms, especially those of the British Isles, interacted in the American South to create blues, jazz, country, ragtime, bluegrass and many other significant musical genres. The author finds some suprising similarities between traditional African music and the folk music of Europe in both instrumentation and style. He says this makes sense because both continent's music had been previously influenced by "The Old High Culture" music which had first developed in ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and later been brought over to both Africa and Europe by Arab Muslims. This argument might at first seem a bit far fetched. But Van Der Merwe does make a very good case for it. The latter part of the book focuses almost exclusively on musicological topics, not all of which were entirely comprehensible to me. But I did enjoy the examples of some classic blues and folk lyrics that were included along with the musical notation. So even for a non-musician like me there was still plenty to appreciate here.
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