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American music began with the Native Americans, the first people to populate North America. With the colonization of America from European countries like France, Spain, Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales came Christian choirs , musical notation , broadsides , as well as West African slaves.
The First New England School is usually considered the first uniquely American invention in music. The most characteristic feature was that the voices, male and female respectively, doubled their parts in any octave in order to fill out the harmony; this generated a texture of close-position chords that was unknown in European traditions.
The first music of this type in America were the psalm books, such as the Ainsworth Psalter, brought over from Europe by the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. [1] The first music publication in English-speaking North America — indeed the first publication of any kind — was the Bay Psalm Book of 1640. [2]
W. S. B. Matthews' A Hundred Years of Music in America is the first attempt at a history of "popular and the higher music education" in the country; it hails Lowell Mason as the founder of American music. [24] [56] The first African American woman to compose a produced opera is Louisa Melvin Delos Mars, with Leoni, the Gypsy Queen. [57]
Following the Civil War, minstrel shows became the first distinctively American form of music expression. The minstrel show was an indigenous form of American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, usually performed by white people in blackface.
William Billings' The New-England Psalm-Singer is the first compilation of entirely American music and the first compiled by a native-born American to be published, [102] first major publication by a singing master, [101] and the first tunebook in the country dedicated to
Early 1820s music trends The Boston 'Euterpiad becomes the first American periodical devoted to the parlor song. [5]The all-black African Grove theater in Manhattan begins staging with pieces by playwright William Henry Brown and Shakespeare, sometimes with additional songs and dances designed to appeal to an African American audience. [6]
In Louisiana, drums remained legal well into the 19th century. There, African slaves, many from the Caribbean islands, danced in large groups, often in circle dances.As of 1817, dancing in New Orleans had been restricted to the area called Congo Square, which was a hotbed of musical fusionism, as African styles from across America and the Caribbean met.