American Music I INTRODUCTION American Music, the folk, popular, and classical music of the United States--created by American-born or American-trained composers, or originating in American culture, or written primarily for American audiences.

American Music I INTRODUCTION American Music, the folk, popular, and classical music of the United States--created by American-born or American-trained composers, or originating in American culture, or written primarily for American audiences. II COLONIAL ERA THROUGH 1820 The colonial roots of American music are British. The first book printed in the American colonies was the Bay Psalm Book. Its ninth edition (1698) contained 13 psalm tunes, all of them from Europe; some, including "Old Hundred," are still sung. After 1750 native-born composers in New England established a distinctive religious music. Spread through singing schools (informal courses of musical instruction), Yankee hymnody--with its angular melodies and open-fifth chords--was unconventional by European standards. A favorite form was the fuguing tune, a four-part piece that began like a hymn and ended like a round. The most famous of the New England "tunesmiths" was William Billings, whose collection The New England Psalm Singer (1770) marked the appearance of the new style. His colleagues included Oliver Holden and Daniel Read. Some early American religious sects--such as the Ephrata Cloister, the Shakers, and the Moravians--also produced original music, but it had little influence beyond their communities. One Shaker melody ('Tis the Gift to Be Simple) became famous when it was used by the composer Aaron Copland in his ballet Appalachian Spring (1944). The Moravians, who were musically the most prolific and sophisticated of these sects, re-created in their chamber and church music the instrumental music of their Old World German culture. The three string trios written about 1780 by the Moravian composer John Antes were the first chamber works composed in the colonies. Political songs, broadsides (one-page song sheets), dance music, and piano music--largely reflecting British models or imported from England--were also published during this era. Among such tunes of English origin are "The Star-Spangled Banner" (1814), with words by the American lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key; "Yankee Doodle" (published about 1780); and "America" (1831), with words by the American clergyman and poet Samuel F. Smith. The lawyer, author, and politician Francis Hopkinson was one of the first Americans to compose secular music; he is best known for his Seven Songs for the Harpsichord (1788). Professional European-born musicians resided in several of the larger American cities. Among them were the English-born James Hewitt in New York City and the German-born Alexander Reinagle, a composer of ballad operas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Virginia planter and politician Thomas Jefferson was an avid amateur musician, and his collection of music scores became the basis of the music holdings in the Library of Congress. III EARLY 19TH CENTURY After the American Revolution (1775-1783), European taste reasserted itself in church music. The music of the New England tunesmiths was scorned as "unscientific" by such composers as Thomas Hastings and William Batchelder Bradbury. The dominant figure was Lowell Mason, who had a profound influence on 19th century musical life in America. Besides establishing music education by introducing music into the schools of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1838, he composed more than 1,200 hymns--most notably, "Nearer, My God, to Thee" (1856)--and compiled five major collections of church music, the most important being The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music (1822). Several of Mason's protégés and descendants became performers and teachers of music, as well as builders of pianos and organs; grandson Daniel Gregory Mason was a respected composer of impressionistic and romantic music, and his pupil and distant relative Luther Whiting Mason helped establish music education in Japan. See also Mason (family) Traditional New England religious music migrated to the South, where a new kind of folk hymnody emerged from the camp meetings of the religious revival movement. Close to modern gospel tunes in their repetitious, catchy refrains, the revival hymns and spirituals include such well-known examples as "Amazing Grace" and "Wayfaring Stranger." Southern folk hymns were taught in singing schools and typically printed in "shape notes," an easy-to-read system of notation in which the notes had different shapes to represent the seven syllables of the scale. The shape-note collection of greatest and most lasting popularity was The Sacred Harp (1844) of Benjamin Franklin White and E. J. King. Touring European performers of opera and immigrant German instrumentalists dominated American classical music during this period. The most noteworthy classical composer was Bohemian-born Anthony Philip Heinrich, a romantic who wrote several descriptive symphonies and a massive collection of songs and piano pieces, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (1820). As pianos and sheet music became more affordable, Americans bought increasing numbers of Italian opera arias and German orchestral selections arranged for parlor performance. IV MID-19TH CENTURY THROUGH THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR The first African influence in American popular music surfaced in the blackface minstrel show. Its characteristic white, four-man troupe was defined in the 1840s by the Virginia Minstrels, performing on banjo, tambourine, bone castanets, and fiddle. The banjo virtuoso Daniel Decatur Emmett was the outstanding composer of minstrel songs; his best-known work is "Dixie" (1859). For the first time, a form of American music acquired tremendous appeal in Europe and elsewhere. By midcentury the first black performers began to appear in minstrel shows. Genuine African American music was already established in oral tradition by the beginning of the 19th century. The first published collection of it, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. The collection includes the famous songs "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" and "Roll, Jordan, Roll." After the Civil War (1861-1865), the fundraising concerts of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers made such spirituals the first African American folk music to reach a national and international audience. Parlor songs modeled on popular English, Irish, and Scottish melodies overflowed with sentiment, lavished on the ordinary aspects of domestic life. One example is "The Old Arm Chair" (1840) by the English singer Henry Russell, who barnstormed the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Russell's American successors included the Hutchinson family, who espoused in song such causes as abolition and woman suffrage. The greatest songwriter of the period, and perhaps of the century, was Stephen Collins Foster. Foster composed songs for the famous Christy Minstrels, such as "Oh! Susanna" (1848), "Camptown Races" (1850), "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River," 1851), and "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), and parlor songs, such as "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854) and "Beautiful Dreamer" (1864). Foster's songs were the first to be called distinctly American. He was immortalized by his sympathetic lyrics, folklike melodies, and ability to combine Anglo-Irish and African American idioms with those of Italian operatic song. Notable composers after Foster were Henry Clay Work, George Root, and James Bland. In classical music, touring European musicians--such as the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, the conductor Louis Jullien, and the Germania Orchestra--still prevailed. The first great American piano virtuoso, the New Orleans-born and Paris-trained Louis Moreau Gottschalk, became an international celebrity. The best of his salon music for piano--such as "La Bamboula" (the name of a dance) and "Le Banjo"--blended an exotic mixture of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, Creole melodies, and romantic pyrotechnics. The country's first permanent orchestra was the New York Philharmonic Society, founded in 1842. Among the first symphonic and operatic composers the most prominent was William Henry Fry, who composed the first opera by an American (Leonora, 1845). Fry is best remembered, however, for four symphonies written in the 1850s and 1860s. George F. Bristow wrote the first opera on an American theme; his Rip Van Winkle was performed in New York City in 1855. Town bands, a popular form of community music-making since the Revolution, performed sometimes-elaborate arrangements of popular and classical melodies for festivals and holidays. During the Civil War, thousands of musicians served in regimental and brigade bands in the armies of both the North and the South. V LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES Bessie Smith The classic blues sound of Bessie Smith was used by the early recording industry to present rural country blues to urban audiences, especially to white listeners. Smith, known for her smooth, sultry voice wrought with pain and emotion, is considered one of the greatest blues singers in history. This example is from the song "St. Louis Blues," written by American composer and trumpet player W. C. Handy in 1914 and recorded by Smith in 1925. "St. Louis Blues" performed by Bessie Smith, from The Riverside History of Classic Jazz (Cat.# Riverside RB-005) Riverside Records under master license to Fantasy, Inc. All rights reserved./Frank Driggs Collection/Archive Photos In the decades after the Civil War, classical music came of age in the United States. Conservatories were founded (Peabody Institute, 1860; Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, 1865; New England Conservatory, 1867); opera houses and concert halls were built (Metropolitan Opera, 1882; Carnegie Hall, 1891); and orchestras were established in more cities, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891), led by the first American virtuoso conductor, Theodore Thomas. In many cities, women formed music clubs to further the teaching, composition, and performance of classical music. Towns great and small throughout the country built 'opera houses' for touring musicians, as well as for productions of plays and musical theater. The music of the German romantics Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms formed the model for most American composers of the late 19th century, of whom the largest number belonged to a New England-based circle known as the Boston Group. Members of the group included John Knowles Paine; Arthur Foote; George Chadwick, known for his Symphonic Sketches (1907) and his opera Judith (1901); Horatio Parker, whose cantata Hora Novissima (1893) was widely performed; and Amy Cheney Beach, generally referred to as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, whose Gaelic (1896) was the first symphony written by an American woman. The most prominent composer of American classical music during this period, however, was not part of this New England school. Edward MacDowell sought his own inspiration in the "new German school" represented by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the German composer Richard Wagner. MacDowell's works, written between 1880 and 1902, are mainly for piano. They include 2 piano concertos and 16 collections of character pieces. His single most famous work is "To a Wild Rose," from Woodland Sketches (1896). The next generation reacted against the Germanic cast of MacDowell and of the New England school. Some composers used indigenous folk music; among them, Arthur Farwell drew on Indian music, and Henry F. Gilbert utilized African American music. Influences of the French impressionists and of the composers of the Russian School, particularly Aleksandr Scriabin, appeared first in the music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes, in such compositions as Tone-Images (1912-1915) and Four Impressions (1912-1915, published 1970). The most original American classical composer, and the one whose music is most often heard almost a century later, was Charles Ives, whose use of polytonality and dissonance made him a modernist prophet. In such works as Three Places in New England (1903-1914) for orchestra; the Second Piano Sonata, Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860 (1909-1915); and the choral work General Booth Enters into Heaven (1914), Ives combined quotations of gospel, ragtime, and parlor music with complex symphonic and chamber structures. The most prominent American musician at the end of the century was John Philip Sousa, the leader of a large concert band and a world-famous figure. Known as the March King, Sousa composed about 140 marches, including "Semper Fidelis" (1888) and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (1897). Bands became popular at colleges as an adjunct to sporting events and vied with glee clubs and mandolin societies as favorite campus pastimes. See also Band Popular music--fueled by an influx of Jewish musicians from Eastern Europe--became big business in the 1890s, especially after the sheet music to Charles K. Harris's "After the Ball" (1892) sold millions of copies. Music publishers clustered their offices around Union Square in New York City, nicknaming it Tin Pan Alley. In the following ten years two African American styles, ragtime and blues, demonstrated their commercial potential. Ragtime, which evolved from minstrel songs, was a heavily syncopated music; its greatest composer was Scott Joplin, one of whose piano pieces, "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), started a national craze. Joplin, who had had some training in classical music, later wrote a ragtime opera, Treemonisha (1911). It met with no success, but was revived with great acclaim in 1975. In the first two decades of the 20th century, blues, in the hands of singers such as Bessie Smith and composers such as W. C. Handy, reached a wide audience as popular rather than folk music. In the theater, echoes of the Viennese style could be heard on Broadway in the operettas of Victor Herbert. Together with the vaudeville spectaculars of Florenz Ziegfeld, Herbert's operettas were the forerunners of the musical, or musical comedy. The music of the theater and of Tin Pan Alley reached a home audience through sheet music, and beginning in the late 1890s through new mechanical devices: the player piano and the phonograph. VI WORLD WAR I TO WORLD WAR II Jazz Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke Born in Iowa in 1903, cornet player Bix Beiderbecke was the first white jazz musician to rank among the pioneers of early jazz. However, his playing style was just outside the norm established by top innovators of the form such as King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Beiderbecke's style was impressively fast and more abstract than those of his blues-inspired counterparts, yet he was a great student and lover of the New Orleans jazz Oliver and Armstrong had unleashed on popular music of the time. He made his first recording, titled "Fidgety Feet," at age 20 with a Dixieland-style group called the Wolverines. Beiderbecke later went on to head up the Sioux City Six and Bix and His Rhythm Jugglers, where his unique harmonic innovations and highly personal tone quality helped usher in a new era for jazz. Frank Driggs/Archive Photos/"Tiger Rag" from Bix Beiderbecke and the Chicago Cornets (Cat. # MCD-47019-2) (p)1992 Fantasy, Inc. All rights reserved. The 1920s marked the realization of a distinctive American modernist movement in classical music. Its pioneers were Henry Cowell, who introduced the tone cluster; Carl Ruggles; Ruth Crawford-Seeger; and Edgard Varèse, whose compositions, not dependent on melody or harmony, had great influence on later 20th-century music. Varèse's percussion piece Ionisation (1929-1931) is a landmark. Louis Armstrong In the 1920s jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong formed his first groups and helped establish a new style of jazz rhythm known as swing. Armstrong's high notes and creative sonorities electrified audiences, while his confident playing style set new standards for jazz improvisation. In this historic excerpt from "Potato Head Blues" (1927), Armstrong improvises by varying melodic phrases and rhythms while maintaining the original chord structure of the piece. "Potato Head Blues" composed and performed by Louis Armstrong, from Louis Armstrong: Hot Fives and Sevens, Volume 2 (Cat.# JSP Records JSPCD 313) (c) MCA Publishing (p) JSP Records. All rights reserved. /CORBIS-BETTMANN Often called "the jazz age," the 1920s saw the emergence of a distinct style of music, separate from its roots in ragtime and blues. In the hands of its major composerperformers, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington, jazz remained popular through the 1940s. The 1920s "roared" with popular song as well, and a number of composers produced small masterpieces within the limits of the 32-bar song form. Among the finest were Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. The works of George Gershwin encompassed both popular and classical forms, such as the piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue (1924), the Concerto in F (1925), and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Jazz Pianist Jelly Roll Morton Creole jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton developed his New Orleans style of piano in the early 20th century, playing in Southern honky-tonks, barrelhouses, and gambling joints. Diverging from the more composed form of ragtime that was then popular, Morton incorporated elements of New Orleans brass-band music and early Dixieland jazz, as well as the spontaneity of improvised jazz. Morton is heard here in a 1927 recording of his composition "Hyena Stomp." CORBIS-BETTMANN/"Hyena Stomp" composed and performed by Jelly Roll Morton, from Jelly Roll Morton (Cat.# Bluebird 07863, 66103-2) (c) M.P.L. Edwin H. Morris & Co. Inc. (p) BMG RCA/Bluebird. All rights reserved. The new medium of radio, and the ability to make sound recordings through an electric microphone rather than a horn, changed performing styles and brought the sounds of singers such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby into people's homes. The invention of sound film in 1927 (the first 'talkie' was The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson) brought many of the Tin Pan Alley composers and Broadway musical performers from New York to Hollywood. George Gershwin American pianist and composer George Gershwin helped to bridge the worlds of jazz and classical music. With the immediate public and critical acceptance of Gershwin's composition Rhapsody in Blue (1924), a so-called jazz concerto, classical music increasingly incorporated jazz influences, while jazz music began to embrace classical music devices. Gershwin also brought jazz influences to popular song, solidifying his position as one of the most important figures in American music. Globe Photos, Inc. The Great Depression of the 1930s stilled the young champions of "new music." An Americanist trend, a self-conscious search for a musical identity, characterized the classical music of the next two decades. Aaron Copland, the most famous composer of the second quarter of the century, abandoned the acerbic language of his Piano Variations (1930) for an accessible melodic style of clear tonality, permeated by American folk music. His ballet scores Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944) are among his best-known works. Kindred composers included William Grant Still and Roy Harris, who quoted folk music in their symphonies. Virgil Thomson gave a modern treatment to older styles of music, as in his whimsical opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein). Jazz Composer Duke Ellington American composer, bandleader, and pianist Duke Ellington endures as perhaps the most important pioneer in big-band jazz. Ellington and his orchestra shared a special interdependent relationship: Using the band as his musical workshop, Ellington derived his orchestra's tone coloring from the unique sound qualities of the group's individual players. This particular style was later dubbed the "Ellington Effect" by jazz arranger Billy Strayhorn, who also wrote one of the band's signature tunes, "Take the A Train" (1941), heard here. "Take the A Train" (Billy Strayhorn) from The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts January 1946 (Cat.# Prestige 2PCD-24074-2) (c) Tempo Music - ASCAP (p)1977 Prestige RecordsFantasy, Inc. All rights reserved./CORBIS-BETTMANN Other composers rose to prominence with music that was international rather than nationalistic. Some, perhaps inspired by the work of the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky during the 1920s and 1930s, were energized by neoclassicism. Among them was Walter Piston, who often used baroque textures and genres. Piston, like Thomson, Harris, and Copland, had studied composition in Paris, the postwar center of music study, with the influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger. Three notable neoromantics were Howard Hanson, Samuel Barber, and Gian-Carlo Menotti, the latter well known for his Christmas fantasy opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951). Colleges and universities, many of which had offered courses in music appreciation for decades, began forming music departments, often led by scholars who had fled from Nazi-occupied regions of Europe. Music became a standard part of a liberal arts education. After World War II (1939-1945) more and more American musicians received their training at U.S. conservatories such as the Juilliard School in New York City and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and at the country's top universities. VII WORLD WAR II THROUGH THE LATE 20TH CENTURY Blues Singer Koko Taylor Koko Taylor got her start sitting in with some of the greats of Chicago blues during the 1950s, including Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Taylor developed a distinctive rough vocal style and had a huge hit in 1966 with Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle." Her long career and many awards earned her the title, "the Queen of the Blues." "Put the Pot On" performed by Koko Taylor, from Force of Nature (Cat.# Alligator ALCD 4817) (c) Eyeball Music (p)1993 Alligator Records. All rights reserved./Robin Visotsky Photography The leading European composers who fled fascist oppression to the United States brought an international modernism that superseded Americanist tendencies in the late 1940s and 1950s. Foremost among them was the Austrian-born Arnold Schoenberg, whose twelve-tone system was adopted as a way of organizing new music by many Americans, including Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions, Copland, and David Diamond. It was expanded theoretically and artistically by Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, who developed it into systematic serialism that extended beyond a twelve-tone series of pitches and encompassed other musical elements. One of the crucial developments of the 1950s was the new medium of electronic music, pioneered by Varèse, which allowed composers to achieve unprecedented control over a musical work. The Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio, established in 1952, became a center for such composers as Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and Otto Luening. Woody Guthrie Oklahoma-born singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie was a witty poet, orator, and advocate of lost causes. Today people regard his ballads as historic and deeply humanistic accounts of the Dust Bowl disasters of the 1930s and the struggle for migrant workers' rights, and as powerful images of the urban poor. Guthrie's "people's anthem," "This Land is Your Land," has been adopted as an American classic. Archive Photos/"This Land Is Your Land" (Woody Guthrie) (c)1956 Ludlow Music Inc. (Cat.# Smithsonian Folkways CD SF 40001) (p)1989 Smithsonian Folkways Records. International rights secured. All rights reserved. One of the shaping forces of experimental music was John Cage, who invented new sound possibilities by attaching objects to the strings of a piano. Many of Cage's compositions are aleatoric, in that chance helps determine the outcome of a particular performance. His openness to various aesthetic trends foreshadowed the eclecticism of style from the 1960s on. Most characteristic of these decades was a willingness to utilize all kinds of sound--electronic, acoustic, or environmental--as potential musical material. The song cycle Ancient Voices of Children (1970) by George Crumb, for example, uses a toy piano, a Tibetan prayer stone, and electronically manipulated voices. Other significant eclectic composers are Norman Dello Joio; David Del Tredici, noted for his Scenes and Arias from Alice in Wonderland (1969); John Corigliano; and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Zwilich, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for music--for her Symphony No. 1: Three Movements for Orchestra (1982)--blends 19th-century harmonic and tonal elements with various features of avant-garde 20th-century classical music. Jazz Saxophonist John Coltrane Jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer John Coltrane emerged in the late 1950s as a leading innovator in jazz music, recording both with his own groups and as a soloist with trumpet player Miles Davis. Performing on tenor saxophone, and later on soprano saxophone, Coltrane infused his improvisations with new harmonic relationships and imaginative timbres (tone colors) and gained recognition for his technical genius. Widely imitated and admired, he helped to revolutionize the role of the saxophone in jazz. Coltrane improvises in this 1958 recording of his composition "Trane's Slo Blues." UPI/THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE/"Trane's Slo Blues" (John Coltrane) from John Coltrane: Lush Life (Cat. # OJCCD-131-2) (c) Prestige Music (BMI) (p) Prestige Records under master license to Fantasy, Inc. All rights reserved. In the mid-1980s some critics advanced the theory that since about 1968 there had been a swing away from the cool rationality of modern music to more tonal, more immediately accessible forms. The concept of a "new romanticism" was much debated, however. Evidence of the new trend was claimed to exist in such orchestral compositions as Imago Mundi (1973) by George Rochberg, generally a serialist; Baroque Variations (1967) by Lukas Foss; and Windows (1972) by Jacob Druckman, a professor of electronic music. Del Tredici's eighth Alice piece, "All in the Golden Afternoon" (1983), and the Chromatic Fantasy (1979) for narrator and six instruments by Barbara Kolb were also cited as examples. Bob Dylan American singer, guitarist, and songwriter Bob Dylan helped pioneer American folk-rock music during the 1960s. With his provocative, poetic lyrics and gifted sense of melody, Dylan has endured as one of the most influential songwriters in popular music. Krasner/Trebitz Photography In popular music the postwar period was equally dynamic and expansive. In the 1940s the lyrical-theatrical tradition of the musical was strengthened by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and by Irving Berlin. The standard was maintained with eloquence and energy in West Side Story (1957) by Leonard Bernstein, an acclaimed conductor and composer of classical music. In the 1970s and 1980s the music of Stephen Sondheim contributed an urbane sophistication to the form. The influence of the musical was drastically altered, however, by the rock-and-roll revolution of the 1950s. The popular "standard" song disappeared, replaced by rhythm and blues and its offspring, rock and roll. Like ragtime, rock music testified to the vitality of African American music. Despite the hegemony of rock in the 1960s, other new styles of popular music surfaced. The folk-music revival, spread by professional urban folksingers such as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, brought rural blues and ballads to national attention. Country music achieved a national market in the 1970s (see Country-and-Western Music). In the 1980s rap music brought the oral traditions of African American poetry into mainstream popular music. Glass's "Closing" Philip Glass is one of several American composers who build works from simple, strongly rhythmic, and repetitive material, projecting it over a long time span and often using subtly shifting rhythms and timbres (tone colors). This approach to composition is known as minimalist or repetitive music, and it influenced many composers in the late 20th century. The excerpt here is from Glass's "Closing" (1982) for piano and orchestra. Richard Vogel/Liaison Agency/"Closing" composed and performed by Philip Glass, produced by Kurt Munkacsi and conducted by Michael Riesman, from Philip Glass: Music from Dunvagen (c)1982 Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. With the profusion of popular styles and the eclecticism of classical and jazz composers, the boundaries separating these three types of music were often blurred. The modal explorations of John Coltrane and the "free" improvisations of Ornette Coleman bring the classical concerns of atonality and nonstandard scales into the realm of jazz. Classical and popular elements overlap in the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, composer of the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). Tonally stable melodic patterns are manipulated by repetitions and subtle rhythmic shifts. Favored tone colors are those of percussion instruments of all kinds. The meditative effect praised by some critics of this music has given rise to the label "trance music" and indeed evokes the music of the Far East and Indonesia. The strength of American music continues to be its openness to new influences and the variety of its ethnic and national styles, which interact and alter one another in ever-new syntheses. See also Music, Western; Popular Music; Spiritual. Reviewed By: Deane L. Root Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.