Modern Music (M&D page 264)

[Alan Westrope]

On Tue, 27 May 1997, Toby Levy <tlevy at borg.com> wrote:

>Was anyone else struck by Cherrycoke's audience's discussion of "Modern
>Music" in chapter 26?

>"hast heard the Negroe Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti,
>-- 'tis there sings your Revolution."

>Now I'm no musician, but isn't the flatted fifths what identifies Blues,
>and thereby Jazz, the only truly original American music?

Yeah, TRP's clearly alluding to Blues, Jazz, Spirituals, etc., here,
though it would be a few more decades until the creators of this Musick
had *their* Revolution.  Ethnomusicologists might pick nits and say
that Blues are also identified by flatted thirds and sevenths.  The
flatted fifth became identified with bebop when a reporter asked Eddie
Condon about the difference between bop and the music he played, and he
replied, "They flat the fifth -- we drink it."  But flatted fifths
were in use long before bop to give a "bluesy" inflection.

Another jazz-tinged nanospoiler for pp. 669-70:


























Euphrenia describes being "oblig'd to keep Starvation off my Sill, by
pretending to be an Automaton Oboe player."  The technique she used
is clearly "circular breathing" as employed by numerous jazz horn
players -- a few who come to mind are Harry Carney, Clark Terry, Phil
Woods, Roland Kirk, and Bruce Fowler.  It's not used by "classical"
wind instrument players, to my knowledge, and was certainly unknown
in the days of Euphrenia and her beloved Hautbois.

-- 
Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop

PGP 0xB8359639:   D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43   7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23