scholarly journals Establishing Italian Jazz on the International Scene 1960-1980

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-157
Author(s):  
Francesco Martinelli
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Complex Situation ◽  
Early American ◽  
International Image ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Breaking Work

This paper sheds new light on the developments in Italian jazz in the two decades 1960-1980. It opens by touching on context and antecedents: the relationships with Italian musical traditions in early American jazz, the acceptance and refusal of jazz by Italian cultural institutions and movements before 1960, and the late '50s key developments both in jazz and arts/media. In the early '60s, Italian jazz was characterized by two small scenes with marked differences in Rome and Milan and with a few further relevant events. An active and well rooted specialist magazine (Musica Jazz) provides relatively good documentation on these beginnings, quite detached from other general movements in music. By the end of the decade several ideological, cultural, political ruptures will have changed this panorama, and while Italian jazz was active in these changes, its exponents also had to deal with the complex situation they created from the point of view of artistic challenges, working conditions, and relationships with the recording industry. In order to discuss these changes and the different strategies adopted by musicians, four case studies will be examined to gain a better understanding of the process. Nunzio Rotondo, while almost unknown outside of Italy, was one of the first Italian musicians to successfully perform internationally after the war. He subsequently worked within the Rome jazz scene, with limited exposure both live and on record. Giorgio Gaslini's ground-breaking work of the late 50s, his training in ‘classical' music, and his unflagging commitment to exploration made him a personality similar to Portal and Gulda. However, his artistic successes did not close the chasm between ‘serious' music and jazz in Italy. Enrico Rava took the opposite road to Rotondo, widely performing abroad and paying dues in Buenos Aires, New York, and Paris before gaining acceptance worldwide and in his own country. He has been instrumental in the creation of an international image of Italian jazz and even of an Italian sound, opening the doors to many others. Perigeo was a ‘jazz-rock' group of the early 70s. Their recordings are still extremely popular. The reaction to their music by the jazz establishment and then their curt dismissal by the industry led to their disbanding, after which the single members—Franco D'Andrea, Claudio Fasoli, Giovanni Tommaso—produced and still produce some of the most exciting Italian jazz.

Steve Reich

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Steve Reich ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Musical Traditions

Steve Reich (b. 1936) is an American composer who, alongside Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, is considered an originator of musical minimalism. His compositions consist primarily of instrumental pieces for various ensembles, ranging from solo instruments with prerecorded tape to pieces for full orchestra. The most frequent configurations make prominent use of melodic percussion instruments, attesting to his training as a percussionist. Reich engaged periodically with disparate musical traditions throughout his early career—technological experimentalism in the 1960s, African drumming and Hebrew cantillation in the 1970s—and has since forged a compositional idiom distinguished by its attention to pattern and pulsation. Born and raised primarily in New York City, Reich studied philosophy at Cornell University and music at Juilliard before moving across the country in 1961 to study at Mills College with Luciano Berio. Moving within the Bay Area’s experimental art scenes, Reich discovered the process of phasing when working with tape loops, leading to his first acknowledged pieces: It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). After relocating to downtown New York in 1965, Reich translated this phasing process into instrumental music, resulting in works such as Piano Phase and Violin Phase (both 1967), as well as his influential manifesto, “Music as a Gradual Process.” In the early 1970s, Reich’s palette expanded to encompass new timbres and processes of pattern and repetition. The large-scale Drumming (1970–1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976)—both conceived for his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians—are exemplars of his mature minimalist style and helped establish his reputation both within and outside of the classical music world. By the early 1980s, Reich’s music began a process of legitimation within academia and performance institutions: Tehillim (1981) and The Desert Music (1983), for instance, were composed for major orchestras. Both reveal a rekindled interest in voice, text, and speech which found new expression in Different Trains (1988), a string quartet which utilized speech fragments of Holocaust survivor testimonies as generative melodic and harmonic material. Reich continued to explore this technique in large-scale documentary music video theater works (The Cave [1990–93] and Three Tales [2000–03]), as well as chamber works such as City Life (1995) and WTC 9/11 (2010). By the end of the millennium, Reich was widely regarded as America’s foremost living composer; his Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Double Sextet (2007) seemed a belated affirmation of this perspective.

Beérkezett könyvek

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-770
Author(s):  
Csaba Pléh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
New Science ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Oxford University Press

Danziger, Kurt: Marking the mind. A history of memory . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008Farkas, Katalin: The subject’s point of view. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008MosoninéFriedJudités TolnaiMárton(szerk.): Tudomány és politika. Typotex, Budapest, 2008Iacobini, Marco: Mirroring people. The new science of how we connect with others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du vrai, du beau, du bien.Une nouvelle approche neuronale. Odile Jacob, PárizsGazzaniga_n

Shaping Jazz

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damon J. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Long Run

There are over a million jazz recordings, but only a few hundred tunes have been recorded repeatedly. Why did a minority of songs become jazz standards? Why do some songs—and not others—get re-recorded by many musicians? This book answers this question and more, exploring the underappreciated yet crucial roles played by initial production and markets—in particular, organizations and geography—in the development of early twentieth-century jazz. The book considers why places like New York played more important roles as engines of diffusion than as the sources of standards. It demonstrates why and when certain geographical references in tune and group titles were considered more desirable. It also explains why a place like Berlin, which produced jazz abundantly from the 1920s to early 1930s, is now on jazz's historical sidelines. The book shows the key influences of firms in the recording industry, including how record labels and their executives affected what music was recorded, and why major companies would re-release recordings under artistic pseudonyms. It indicates how a recording's appeal was related to the narrative around its creation, and how the identities of its firm and musicians influenced the tune's long-run popularity. Applying fascinating ideas about market emergence to a music's commercialization, the book offers a unique look at the origins of a groundbreaking art form.

scholarly journals »Heimat im Koffer.« – »Oder über das Emigrantendasein. (Falls nicht zu traurig).«

Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

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