From Spirituals to Hip Hop:
American Music of the African Diaspora
(MUS 113)
SUNY Broome Department of Music
and Theater Arts
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell

  • 4’33”

    In John Cage’s 1952 piece 4’33”, the performer is instructed NOT to play his/her instrument for the duration of the piece. Here are some images from the score. The musical term “tacet” is an instruction to the performer to keep his/her instrument silent. Cage specified that 4’33” could be played by any instrument or combination of…

  • Pulse

    Can you feel a pulse or beat in this music? Or this? On the other hand, as this Malinke elder notes, EVERYTHING comes from rhythm.

  • Tonality

    Let’s start at the very beginning. This song is in the natural minor. Harmonic minor sounds vaguely Middle Eastern: composers use it to create an “exotic” or mysterious atmosphere. Quarter-tone notation: Some pieces for microtonally-tuned piano: Turkish guitar music that uses microtones: The music of the Second Viennese School in the early twentieth century used…

  • What Do All Great Conductors Have in Common?

    Conductor jokes.

  • Shifting Meters

    Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), 1913, by Igor Stravinsky. The orchestral score is transcribed for two pianos here. Note the changing meter: What instruments do you recognize, even if you can’t see them? The ballet, performed with the original choreography by Vaslav Nijinksy: Another score by a modernist Eastern European composer, based on…

  • Elements of Music: Pitch, Melody, Key, and Rhythm

    4’33” by John Cage. Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67, by Ludwig van Beethoven. What instruments are playing? How long are the held notes? Can you hear variations between loud and soft? Overtones: Is this music? Is this? Is this? Is this?

  • More Unusual Scores

    Near Eastern notation used from c. 1200 to 1800, and still used in the Armenian Orthodox Church today. Brian Eno’s score for Music for Airports: Which sounds like this: “Miniwanka” by R. Murray Schafer: Voice Piece for Soprano by Yoko Ono: Which sounds like this: One composer saw this: and heard this: What does this sound…

  • What is a Score?

    A score is a representation of sounds using visual symbols. Learning to read and write music is no different from learning to read and write a foreign language. Music notation is a sonic blueprint, like this blueprint that tells a shipbuilder how to build a ship: Or you can think of it as a sonic…

  • Black Men Play (with) the Classics

    More cross-cultural encounters: The great jazz pianist Jason Moran (above right) plays one of the late piano works of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), the Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2, with his trio, the Bandwagon.  Listen to what happens. The piece as Brahms wrote it:

  • Poem: “Black Boys Play the Classics”

    (Photo: Johannes Brahms, 1833-1897.) Another example of “complicating” the repertoire. Is this poem about cultural appropriation or cross-cultural encounter? Black Boys Play the Classics BY TOI DERRICOTTE The most popular “act” in Penn Station is the three black kids in ratty sneakers & T-shirts playing two violins and a cello—Brahms. White men in business suits…

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