On Mar 11, 2005, at 11:40 AM, Daniel Wolf wrote:
In the US, pop music is essentially a vocal genre. Instrumental pop successes are novelty or niche items (what instrumentals have made the top ten in the past fifty years? Herb Alpert, disco-fied Beethoven, and---?) . But American popular song has roots in both European and African-American Art musics, often via the theatre. But why the present divorce between "serious" instrumental music (whether Jazz or classical) and "popular" song? I have lots of small ideas (for example, the musicians' union strike from recording during WWII) but no grand ideas to explain this.
When did this "divorce" take place? Was it not at roughly the same time the microphone was introduced? If so, it's probably not a coincidence.
Most "serious" singers are accustomed to singing in a way that they could be heard in a reasonably large hall (very large, in some cases) even without a microphone. The microphone opened up the possibility of a different style of singing which would barely be audible at all without it. The two types of singing have different requirements in terms of how they are performed, what orchestration can go with them, etc., and different styles of music have evolved around them.
mdl
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
