There is also a great deal of American classical music. Don't believe me? Ask Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, William Grant Still, Florence Price, Leroy Anderson, Amy Beach, Samuel Barber, George Whitefield Chadwick, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Morton Gould, Charles Ives, Bernard Herrmann, Alan Hovhaness, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, John Philip Sousa, . . .
Or if you have a problem with "music by dead guys," there's always John Williams, Morten Lauridsen, Bill Conti, David Newman, Ellen Taffe Zwillich . . .
^ That's kinda irrelevant. The statement isn't saying that other musical genres aren't performed by Americans so much as made by them.
To flip the table, if you said the best jazz artist in the universe was from Australia, that wouldn't jazz "an Australian form of music" for the sake of this discussion.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
No, jazz performed by an Australian artist would not make all jazz Australian. But his or her original jazz would, at least by default, be Australian jazz, just as (to give a concrete example) German jazz organist Barbara Dennerlein's original stuff is, at least by default, German jazz (whether she's playing on tonewheels or on real pipes).
Commercial popular music, as a whole family of genres (including country-western, rock, and dozens of others) that originated (back in the "tin pan alley" era) for the purpose of selling thousands of copies of printed scores, then evolved to mass-produced piano rolls, and then mass-produced sound recordings, is arguably an American invention. Western classical music (itself actually a whole family of genres) is a European invention. Does that mean that, for example, Aaron Copland wrote European music? Or that The Beatles (all of them Brits) wrote American music?
Just because opera (and by extension all musical theatre) originated in Italy, does that make all musical theatre, including German Singspiel, French Grand Opera, Victorian British Operetta, and the American Broadway Musical, Italian?
To say that music belongs to the country of it's genre's origin (or even worse, to say that it, and its genre, belong to the country where the relevant family of genres originated) is absurd. Copland, Ives, and Gershwin wrote quintessentially American classical music (completely different styles, yet all profoundly American), just as Couperin, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy wrote quintessentially French music (again, completely different, yet all profundly French), and Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven wrote quintessentially German music.
The Beatles, The Police, and The Rolling Stones are British. Nobody could mistake them for Americans (and certainly nobody could ever imagine The Sex Pistols were anything but British). ABBA is Swedish.
It wasn't a rock
A lot of what's on here is redundant to the indexes of the various subgenres within, so should we just make this into an index of subgenres, as well as a description of a history of rock?
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (all editions) progress: 426/1089 (39.12%)
"Rock is one of the three main American forms of music, along with Jazz and Hip-Hop"
So... you've airbrushed out possibly the most significant form of black American music, probably ten times more important than hip-hop.... Soul.
Motown, Philly sound, et c.
I might rewrite that opening sentence as "Rock is one of the three main American forms of music, along with Jazz and Soul". come to think of it - if you add Country and Western, distinctly American and significant genre, that makes four schools of American popular music.
Rock is one of the four main American forms of music, along with Jazz, Country & Western, and soul."
Hip-hop is a later thing, a derivative, not a primary genre, modern black American music, which was probably born out of the soul music their parents and probably grandparents listened to.
Edited by AgProv Male, early sixties, Cranky old fart, at least two decades behind. So you have been warned. Functionally illiterate in several languages. Hide / Show Replies