What does jazz music symbolize

How does music change over time and why has it changed? How have technological innovations like the microphone, the sound recording, radio, and the Internet changed music?

How does music affect watching a visual image? Starting out with jazz vocal recording would be the best way to ease the students into this music, by giving them lyrics to latch onto.

The tunes are attractive and highly listenable and the lyrics are clever, witty, and satirical. It would be then be useful to give students some elementary music theory: teach them to clap in time to the record, to recognize the time signature, to think about repetition in the song so that they might begin to understand the structure of the piece. Pains should be taken to consider the instrumentation of the various pieces, the time signature, whether the piece was bright or sad, why people may have liked this particular piece of music.

Students should be prepared carefully before the piece is played so that they may have some idea of what to expect and have sense of what to listen for.

Why would musicians be interested in making dissonant music? Is there some sort of melody? How is this music supposed to make me feel as a listener? Is the music trying to tell some sort of story or is it some sort of narrative? Should I think of the different instruments as characters in a tale or a poem? Do musicians feel better or freer playing this sort of music than playing more traditional music?

Are audiences supposed to feel freer? Can noise be music? Or is music, after all, really just noise? In dealing with the influence of jazz on African American literature, the most pertinent question is why is this music a muse for some writers? What do these writers see in this music? Is it necessary to be a musician or to know music technically in order to write about it or use it in poetry and fiction? In teaching Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, it would be good to make sure that jazz of the era is played and explained to the students.

Baldwin liked jazz but not in quite the informed, passionate way of either Baraka or Murray. Baldwin, in fact, knew more about gospel music and wrote about at far greater length in his novel, Just Above My Head He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in To cite this essay: Early, Gerald.

National Humanities Center. All rights reserved. Revised: June nationalhumanitiescenter. At the same time, jazz spread from the United States to many parts of the world, and today jazz musicians--and jazz festivals--can be found in dozens of nations.

Jazz is one of the United States's greatest exports to the world. Skip to main content. What is Jazz? Sign up for Monthly E-newsletter. Search Google Appliance Enter the terms you wish to search for. In Jazz, each performer takes a turn experimenting with different notes to create an overall new sound experience. Every time they step out on stage, Jazz musicians may perform songs that no one has ever heard before, and no one will hear again.

Since the beginning of Jazz, people have been using its improvisation factor to express how they feel. In the 20 th century, New Orleans became the hub of Jazz music. On a more abstract level, a spontaneous improvised art such as jazz magnifies the moment. The act of improvising implies that the past and the future are irrelevant. There is no time for value judgments or censorship when one is improvising. If only because of the amount of information which has to be filtered through during the improvisational process, the jazz artist must be in the now, one hundred percent present, or the communicative value, let alone musical discussion at hand will be lost.

At that point, the jazz player must rely on past habits or future intentions rather than immediate feeling. In fact, a constant dilemma for a jazz artist is just that: how to stay in present time, psychologically and musically. From a totally different standpoint, jazz for me represents the ultimate synthesis of independence and dependence, of the individual within the group.

Except for the occasional solo performer, the majority of improvised jazz takes place in groups of several individuals which at its core symbolizes participatory democracy at work in real time.