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Admittedly, this class went off on a few tangents, the major three I will list below:

1. Beats – a continuation: I apologize for leaving off my last post so unfinished, however the beginning of this class discussion was essentially a continuation. We began to discuss beats within measure. For any musically inclined people, this next statement will be irrelevant. Every measure has FOUR beats. If you listen closely, you can always count to 4 before the measure is put in repeat. Even the swing beat has a four count, if you count the silence before the measure resumes. What we discussed today is how to manipulate a beat: Moving the dot in the middle further away from the center to create different sounding music. Pushing the beat forward (the dot is moved to the left if you read it like a typical book) causes music to sound aggressive, like rock music. This is generally classified as “white” people music, as we have a tendency to like a faster and louder beat. The other option is to play behind the beat (sending the dot to the right edge of the circle and playing a little later than the central beat demands). This creates a more “sexy” and relaxed beat, most commonly associated with “black” people.
2. Migration – rural to urban beats: The second part of class talked mostly about specific artists (Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman) and the migration of people from the country to the city. Due to the Great Depression, many people were driven from their homes because of the poor economic state. Most moved to the big cities: NYC, Cincinnati, Chicago, LA, Atlanta, etc. in order to find jobs and make a living. This is where the concept of American “folk” music came into being, as many new musicians from the countryside tended to create music with the combined feelings of homesick nostalgia with city life enthusiasm. The reason the word folk has quotation marks above is because most of this American “folk” music was greatly exaggerated within the song.
3. Lastly, there was King records. In the fall of WWII, segregation is at an all time high: separate neighborhoods, separate schools, separate bathrooms, bus seats, doors… nothing was exempted from this separation, including music. In an earlier post, I mentioned that a white person to go to the black section of a record store was forbidden, because of the segregation. King records decided to work towards this problem of society, while also trying to make a buck. In a time when public facilities were segregated and intermarraige was prohibited by law, this music record company blatantly marketed itself as an interracial company, with both whites and blacks working together. While this seems nice and all, the catch is that each song was performed twice. In the King Record’s view, by spreading the same song in both markets, there was double the chance of hitting big and getting double the money typically earned for a song. Black musicians would sing a song, and then white musicians would adapt that same song into the popular style of their market and perform the same lyrics, and vice versa.

This last comment will lead into my next post on the book Segregating Sound; literally the segregation of sound continued.

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