By Raymond Tobaygo
The following are examples of ways to stay sane when it's time to start college this fall. A healthy balance of all eight tips will insure you a happy, healthy freshman year.
Do not hesitate to consider transferring if you cannot get into the program you want. Be sure you research all aspects of transferring, or it could be a disaster.
To see the original webpage, click http://www.collegeview.com/college/collegelife/academics/first_years.html
1. What does it mean to do something ASAP? Does it mean "Ask Sally and Peter"?
2. "Stay sane" is a common expression. What does that mean, to "stay sane"? (It's an exaggeration of course; like saying, "I lost my head when I fell in love with him." You obviously didn't lose your head!)
3. What do you do to "stay sane" when the pressure is too great, your boy/girlfriend is nasty, or your mother phones your cell number twelve times a day?
4. How much do you tip when you go out to dine? A waiter once asked me, "How about a tip," I answered, "Bet on horse number 11." What's that meaning of "tip"?
5. What are some household tips you might give your classmates, for example, on saving money, time, or work on their household chores?
6. What's another word for "fall"? What does it mean to fall in love? To fall for someone?
7. What does it mean to insure something from happening?
8. When someone is determined to do something, what does this mean?
9. What does a bus schedule show? A television schedule?
10. What does it mean to set the clock back? Forward? To set the alarm?
11. Have you ever heard of daylight savings time? Do a web search and tell us about it.
12. What's a prerequisite for success in life? For a happy marriage or relationship?
13. When the immigation person asks, "Do you have anything to declare" what does he/she mean?
14. What's a recommendation letter? What food places would you recommend?
15. "Gym" is one of many words that are shortened from longer words. There's a fancy name for this but I'm not going to say it! Instead, say some other short ways of saying longer words. Try to make a list. HINT: "photo" is short for "photoggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-----------"?
16. What does it mean to transfer from one department to another?
17. Is making friends like making snowballs? How do you make friends?
18. "Making" is an all-purpose verb in English, like "let" or "take" ("take my wife--please!"). To make up with your friend. To make up your face? To make amends?
19. How do you allocate your time each week?
20. What is a catalogue. What is Elvis Presley's catalog? Or a gun catalog? Or a record catalog?
21. What facilities do you use on campus most?
22. In Chuck Berry's song, "Math" is another of those shortened words. What does "math" stand for?
23. In Berry's song, what's the Golden Rule?
24. What "slot" does the coin go in, in the song?
25. Speaking of ASAP, what are some other abbreviations, like P.S. (two famous songs were titled, P.S. I love You, one by the Beatles). P.P.S.?
The Broadway song came from--Broadway! Broadway is a number of streets in New York City where plays are performed. Some plays have music. These are called musicals.
A musical is different from an opera, with which it is often confused by Taiwan students. Opera has wall-to-wall music, heavier instrumentation (including a large orchestra), more wide-ranging tunes (called arias), and heavier singing. Musicals use more simple tunes with a narrow singing range that most people can sing in the shower or at home. Few people can sing an aria like Nessun Dorma!
The Broadway song is part of a type of song called Tin Pan Alley. It got its name from 28th street in New York City. In the old days, people bought sheet music instead of record players (there were none). To sell the sheet music for people to play on their home pianos, people had to hear the song. This was the job of the song plugger: a person who played and sang the song over and over again. This is called plugging (selling) the song. Like today, if people hear a song over and over again, they buy it!
Now Tin Pan Alley music had a jazz influence, with a crazy beat. This sounded like noise to some people, compared, say, to a gentle waltz. In fact, it sounded like tin pans banged together. The street was a little alley. Add the two terms and you get "Tin Pan Alley" after which the music was named.
Now today that music doesn't sound noisy at all. Compared to hip hop or early Rock 'n' Roll it sounds sweet. Thousands of these songs are known as "classics" of American music, such as Smoke Gets In Your Eyes or Stardust.
Among the great names of Tin Pan Alley are George Gershwin (Summertime), Cole Porter (a movie has just been made of his life), Richard Rodgers (The Sound of Music), and Irving Berlin (White Christmas).
Frank Loesser was a later composer from this tradition. His most famous musical was Guys and Dolls, one of the great shows in Broadway history, done all over the world.
Summertime Love comes from Frank Loesser's 1960 musical, Greenwillow. It was not a success and closed in a few weeks. But the music lives on.
Summertime Love is not one of Loesser's better songs. Only in the bridge does it rise above average.
What's the bridge? The bridge (also called the "release") is the middle part of the Tin Pan Alley (Broadway) song, written as AABA. A tune is heard (A), repeated (A), then another tune is heard for a change (B), until we go back to the first tune (A)! Simple. But it gave us thousands of great songs that are still sung and heard all over the world.
Of course finding tunes is not easy! Try it sometime.
So composers saved their best tunes for the A part of the song and used a lesser tune for the middle (B) part. But the best composers had good tunes for both parts and even wrote some songs as ABCD, with four tunes! Rock star, Roy Orbison, wrote in the Tin Pan Alley style and has a song called In Dreams, which uses a new tune for each part.
Most Tin Pan Alley songs were first heard in a musical. Musicals are not all singing, but talking too. So the composer had to find a way to move from talking to singing. For this reason a "verse" was used. A verse is a kind of half-singing part before the main song that we showed as AABA. This AABA song is called the chorus. So a Broadway song had a verse + chorus.
Bad composers couldn't do much with a verse. But the best composers could write beautiful verses, such as the great verses for Stardust or Gershwin's Someone To Watch Over Me.
Verses are rarely sung on most radio records. The reason is radio time. Commercials, you know!
Also listeners are lazy. They want to get to the main tune fast, like eating french fries.
Usually only by listening to the original musical can one hear the complete verse + chorus. Of course, by the time of Rock 'n' Roll the verse was dropped completely. Only one Beatle song, Do You Want To Know a Secret?, uses a very short verse.
Apart from the beauty of the music (thousands of great tunes), the words are among the finest folk poetry of the last century, with clever rhymes and ideas. English-language learners can build up their vocabulary by listening to these songs. Luckily, many lyrics to these songs can be found on the Internet.
Several singers have put out "songbook" recordings of these composers. The most famous are the Ella Fitzgerald songbooks, with many songs from each of the great Tin Pan Alley composers. Look for her George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern songbooks. The Gershwin 3-CD collection has more than fifty songs by America's most famous composer.
In Loesser's song, the singer tells of the end of summer and his "summertime love." Oddly this recording changes the word "miss" to "love" in the second line, which destroys the sense of the song. The point is that now that summer is over, the singer is apart from his love.
Note here that in this song the bridge (middle part, remember) is more interesting than the A part of the chorus.
center or hire a personal trainer.Try walking, suggests the American Council on Exercise.
An eight-year study of 13,000 people found that those who walked 30 minutes a day had a significantly lower risk of premature death than those who rarely exercised.
Begin with a five-minute stroll and increase your distance gradually. Walk at a comfortable pace, focusing on good posture. Breathe deeply. If you can't catch your breath, slow down or avoid hills. If you can't talk and walk, you are walking too fast.
Many experts recommend that you walk a minimum of 20 minutes a day, but there are no hard and fast rules. Fit walking into your schedule whenever you can.
1. What's a premature baby?
2. What does it mean to be precocious? Do a search on a precocious individual and tell your classmates about this person. Be sure to include interesting facts (years, accomplishments, etc.).
3. What does it mean to take a stroll around the park?
4. What's a baby stroller?
5. What is meant when we say that someone doesn't fit in with a crowd? When a suit doesn't fit?
6. When your mother has a fit over your grades, what does that mean?
7. What's a fit of coughing? A fit of laughter?
8. Describe a meal fit for a king?
9. What do you consider yourself an expert on?
10. What kind of exercise do you do?
11. It's said that, "You're only young once, but you can be immature the rest of your life." What does that mean? What is a mature person? An immature person?
12. What's the opposite of increase? What's a crease in a pair of pants? What does it mean to be deceased?
13. How does one catch one's breath? When do we commonly try to catch our breath? Do you need a glove to catch your breath? In what season of the year can one usually see one's breath?
14. What's another word for heavy-breathing exercise?
15. What kind of work does a job councilor do? A school councilor?
16. What's the opposite of minimum? What's minimum wage? Is a minimum a "little mother," like a minibus is a "little bus"?
17. How many steps are three paces?
18. What does it mean to set the pace for something? To pace yourself?
19. Can you imitate poor posture?
20. What kind of person is an imposture?
21. What's a risky money scheme?
22. Discuss a risk you took in life? Would you risk your life for another?
23. How is "calm down" different from "slow down"?
24. What's a hoe down? In a western, what's a showdown? When playing cards, what's a showdown?
25. What do you mean when you say that someone is insignificant?
26. When someone says, "I don't buy it," what does that mean?
27. "Gradually" is related to which word that means to get a diploma?
28. What's a rare book? A rare disease? A steak that's rare?
29. Give some situations when you're likely to pace up and down?
30. What are some hard-and-fast rules you've learned in life that you would like to share with others?
How Superman Has Changed Over the Years
In the beginning were Siegel and Shuster. And from the minds of these two men sprang a Superman, immortal and unchanging, towering across the newsprint like a beacon of continuity, a standard of all who came after to follow, a monument to consistency for over 60 years.
You think so, do you?
Actually, since 1934, Superman has undergone many changes, some slight, some just enhancements, but many of such major proportions as to justify the contention that an entirely new character had been created.
Throughout the years, the powers-that-be have seen fit to redefine Superman's powers and origins several times in order to keep the character current with popular tastes. Sometimes these changes have been clear cut. More often, they have evolved following a period of contradictions. By ignoring some of the contradictions and treating certain periods in Superman's career as overlapping, it becomes clear that there is approximately one substantially different version of the Man of Steel for each decade of his existence.
Superman is the brainchild of writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. "Joe and I were high school classmates in Cleveland," Siegel recalls. "Like me, he was a science fiction fan; we published a fanzine called Science Fiction, with Joe as art director and myself as editor."
In the January 1933 issue, Siegel's The Reign of the Superman, illustrated by Shuster, saw print. In this tale, the "Superman" becomes a villain after being granted super-powers by a mad scientist who is very much like the later arch-villain, Lex Luthor.
Later in 1933, when Siegel saw Detective Dan, one of the first comic books, "it occurred to me that a Superman who was a hero might make a great comic character," and wrote a comic book story that Shuster drew: The Superman.
After it was rejected by Dan's publisher, a dejected Shuster destroyed all of the original art - only the cover survived.
Pulp publisher Street & Smith's advertisement for Doc Savage's launch in 1933 bears similarities to Siegel and Shuster's alternate cover rough for The Superman.
"We had a great character," Siegel remembers, "and were determined it would be published." They set out to recreate Superman as a comic strip. One summer night in 1934, Siegel came up with almost all of the Superman legend as we know it, wrote weeks of comic strips by morning, and had Shuster drawing it all the next day - including the creation of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman's distinctive red, yellow, and blue costume.
"I suggested to Joe he put an 'S' in a triangle," Siegel says. Shuster added the cape to help give the effect of motion to Superman. Together they chose primary colors for his costume because they were, Shuster recounts, "the brightest colors we could think of."
Over the next three years, their Superman strip was turned down by every comic syndicate editor in the country. Esquire Features suggested, "pay a little attention to actual drawing. Yours seems crude and hurried."
But Sheldon Mayer, an editor at the McClure syndicate "went nuts! It was the thing we were all looking for!" He couldn't convince his boss, M.C. Gaines, to publish it - but when DC Comics publisher Harry Donenfeld called Gaines looking for material for his new title, Action Comics, Gaines sent him Superman.
Donenfeld showed it to his editor, Vince Sullivan, who bought it, saying, "it looks good... it's different... and there's a lot of action! This is what kids want!"
In order to meet the first issue's deadline, Shuster cut, pasted, and redrew Superman's daily strips into 13 comic book sized pages. The cover was based on an interior panel.
This article is from the Superman webpage.
1. What does it mean when one says that a father towers over his son?
2. What's a towering figure in culture? Is that good or bad? Can you name some persons or artists who are said to be towering figures?
3. Do you sleep on a spring bed? What kind of bed do you sleep on?
4. What does it mean to spring a trick on someone? Is a spring chicken old or young, bird or person?
5. Two phrases in this article are from the Bible. "In the beginning" are the first words of the Bible. By class, be ready to complete the sentence following these words.
6. The phrase, "the powers that be" is also from the Bible (Romans 13:1). What are the "powers that be"?
7. If a person is called a beacon of their generation, what does that mean?
8. Discuss a monument you enjoy or know about in Taiwan or elsewhere.
9. The Lincoln Monument is in Washington, D.C. Which American statesman does it honor?
10. The Mount Rushmore monument is in Colorado. Which four presidents does it honor? Download a picture of that monument for class.
11. What are the proportions of something?
12. What's the pulp of an orange or a pineapple?
13. How do you enhance your romantic dinners (real or imaginary)?
14. What are current events? What is currency? What is a current problem? What is a recurrent ailment? Name one.
15. What's a clear-cut choice, say between Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion?
16. What do you mean if you say an artist's style evolved? Can you mention a singer or actor whose style you think has evolved? Can you explain how?
17. What does it mean to contradict oneself? To be contradicted?
18. The word fanzine is a blend of two words, called a blend word, like brunch (breakfast + lunch) or smog (smoke + fog). Which words are blended in fanzine?
19. Although it's uncertain, the word fan probably comes from what longer word? (Learn to use a dictionary to check word origins.)
20. What's a one-word synonym for "powers," as in, "He has remarkable powers of observation"? Or, "His artistic powers developed rapidly."
21. What's a syndicated television show? A syndicated columnist? A syndicated cartoon strip?
22. What's a cartoon strip? What's one part of a cartoon strip called?
23. What's a crude remark? Crude drawing skills?
24. What's a distinctive singing style?
25. Name the primary colors.
26. What makes you feel dejected in life?
27. What does it mean to launch a CD, television show, or movie? What analogy is used in this metaphor? (A metaphor says one thing is like another without using the phrase, "is like.")
28. When we say that something is the brainchild of someone, what do we mean?
29. Kids are young goats. How can families keep kids in their homes?
30. A decade is ten years. What are a hundred years called?
31. What's a substantial improvement in something or someone?
32. When something overlaps with another, what does that mean?
33. What is your favorite comic strip? Comic book?
34. What's a rough draft? What does it mean to rough someone up?
35. Is a deadline a telephone line that is out of order? What is a deadline? What does it mean to meet the deadline? To miss the deadline?
36. What does it mean to say a book "saw print"?
They sing in westerns, but they also have guns, bars, and saloon girls. They have "girls" in musicals, but these girls do different things, which most viewers recognize as the difference between one "genre" and another.
The same is true of musical genres. They use violins in a pop record, but not in the same way they do in a Sibelius symphony. They sing in opera, but in a
different way from a musical.The plots differ too. Musicals end in marriage, operas in death.
There are exceptions, of course. A western may not have a gunfight and a musical, like West Side Story, may end in death. But if a film shares many elements in common with other musicals, it's probably a musical. If a record shares elements in common with records by country stars like Hank Williams or George Jones, then it's country.
Of course, lines "blur." More than any artist, Elvis Presley started crossing boundaries.
Elvis blended many styles (Gospel, bluegrass, rockabilly, blues, pop, country), starting a "crossover" change that continues to this day.
At one time, no Country record could make the Billboard Pop chart, unless "covered" by a pop artist. Country sounded too "country" for most Americans outside the South.
But then the South was far different from what it is today. It was less another part of the country than another country, with different ways of speaking and different beliefs.
Coming from the hills of places like Kentucky, the music was first called "hillbilly," a blend word of "hill" and "billygoat." (Rockabilly was named the same way.) Its market was limited to the South, like Black rhythm records were limited to Black markets.
Later the name became Country and Western and, finally, Country. In fact, Country is to Country and Western what Rock is to Rock 'n' Roll--an updated form of the music.
Country
has been called the white man's blues. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the Country vocal style is a "cry" in the throat. This may be hard to describe but easy to hear. That vocal style persists to this day, despite changes in the music.Country music was close enough to the blues that none other than Ray Charles, whose blend of different musical styles rivals that of Presley, recorded an album called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Released in 1962, it stayed on the Billboard Pop charts for more than two years and at Number One for 14 weeks. It became one of the landmarks in music history.
In this way, a great Black artist made Country "respectable" in the Black community. Charles also showed that, at bottom, there was not much difference between the white man's cry and the black man's cry.
I Can't Stop Loving You, was written by Country star, Don Gibson and reached Number 81 on the Pop charts in 1958. Ray Charles' 1962 record was Number 1 for five weeks:
I can't stop loving you, I've made up my mind
To live in memories of the lonesome times.
I can't stop wanting you, it's useless to say
So I'll just live my life in dreams of yesterday.
Bridge: Those happy hours that we once knew
So long ago still make me blue
They say that time heals a broken heart
But time has stood still since we've been apart.
I can't stop loving you, I've made up my mind
To live in memories of the lonesome times.
I can't stop wanting you, it's useless to say.
So I'll just live my life in dreams of yesterday.
Even before Charles, Chet Atkins had started the "Nashville sound." This was a blend of Country and Pop styles. It was an attempt to make crossover records for the Pop charts.
Instead of the traditional banjo and acoustic guitar, Atkins used a piano, strings, and chorus. The point was to "clean up" the country style.
Country purists disliked these changes. But in the long run they sold Country to "mainstream" audiences. Soon they listened to Hank Williams instead of to cover copies of him.
A good example of the Nashville style is Jim Reeves, who had many crossover pop hits, such as He'll Have to Go (1960):
Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone
And let's pretend that we're together all alone
I'll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low
And you can tell your friend there with you
He'll have to go
Whisper to me, tell me do you love me too ?
Or is he holding you the way I do ?
Though love is blind, make up your mind
I've got to know
Should I hang up or will you tell him
He'll have to go?
You can say the words I wanna hear
When you're with some other man
Do you want to answer yes or no
Darling, I will understand.
M
any Country stylings are missing. There's no catch in the throat, but instead a smooth baritone. There's a tinkling piano but no twangy guitar. Instead of a homely subject, such as money or marital problems, there's romance.
Yet it's still Country. It can't be anything else. It's not Rock or Soul or the Blues.
Besides, the arrangement is "homely," though "urbanized." One has only to listen to other records from the same period to hear the difference. An Elvis Presley ballad has a distinctive bluesy edge, while still not being the Blues. A Johnny Mathis vocal uses soft falsetto: soulful, though not Soul.
Nor is Reeves' record Pop, though it was a crossover hit. It lacks a big orchestra arrangement to sound comfortably Pop. Instead, it's the Nashville sound.
There are no "hard and fast" rules here. People know Country when they hear it, like they know a science-fiction movie or a comedy. They cry when a drunk falls down in a melodrama like Written on the Wind and laugh when a drunk falls down in a Jim Carrey comedy.
Country has never been the same since the Nashville sound changed it. Once Country artists had the market, they kept it open. Some, like Dolly Parton, could go back to their roots and still have crossover hits. Others, like Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, Shania Twain or the Dixie Chicks sell in the millions.
Yet many great Country records rarely make the pop charts. This is good. It means pure Country still exists.
George Jones is an example. If anyone doubts Country is the white man's Blues, they should listen to Jones' great records, like The Grand Tour, a maudlin song about a failed marriage. The singer takes the listener on a "guided tour" of his broken home:
Step right up, come right in. If you'd like the grand tour of the lonely house that once was home sweet home. I have nothing here to sell you. Just some things that I will tell you, some things I know will chill you to the bone. Over there, sits the chair, where she'd bring the paper to me and sit down on my knee and whisper, "Oh, I love you!" But now she's gone forever, and this old house will never be the same without the love that we once knew. Straight ahead, that's the bed, where we lay in love together and Lord knows we had a good thing going here. See her picture on the table. Don't it look like she'd be able just to touch me and say "Good morning, Dear"? There's her rings, all her things, and her clothes here in the closet like she left them when she tore my world apart. As you leave you'll see the nursery. Oh, she left without mercy, taking nothing but her baby and my heart. Step right up. Come on in.
The images are homely, seldom found in Pop or Rock. Then there's the steel guitar and that cry in the voice.
Even a Country artist with more crossover appeal, such as Reba McEntire, whose voice is nearer to Soul, keeps that Country cry in the voice, as in What Am I Gonna Do About You?:
The kid down the street mows the lawn every week
The neighbor next door fixed the roof where it leaked
The jobs going fine and the bills are all paid
And everyone thinks that I'm doin' ok
There's a guy down at work he's asked me out once or twice
I haven't said yes but I'm thinkin I might
Then on my way home I thought I saw you walk by
If only I could get you out of my mind
What in the world
Am I gonna do about you
Oh your memory keeps comin' back from out of the blue
Oh well I've tried and I've tried
But I still can't believe that we're through
So tell me what in the world am I gonna do about you
What am I gonna do about you
I went to the store but it wasn't much fun
It doesn't take long when you're shoppin' for one
And standing in line I thought I saw you walk in
And that's when it started all over again
What in the world
Am I gonna do about you
Oh your memory keeps coming back from out of the blue
Oh well I've tried and I've tried
But I still can't believe that we're through
So tell me what in the world am I gonna do about you
Darling what am I gonna do about you?
The dividing line between Country and other genres may be less clear than when the music was called "hillbilly," but no one doubts a dividing line. If nothing else, there's always the vocal twang of a Country singer. If not that, there's the cowboy boots and hat of the Country star, still seen even today on Country CD jacket covers, despite crossover sales of superstars like Garth Brooks. If, as with Jim Reeves, there's not even a country twang, there's always, as argued above, traces of Nashville.
Nothing is new, however, if one remembers that Jimmie Rodgers, credited with being the first Country star in the 1930s, blended jazz, pop, blues, and folk even then.
Wha
t may be new is the glamor of Country. By the 1970s, a great Country star like Dolly Parton could not only write and sing in the purest Country style, but could cross over into movies and pop with sex appeal.
Her title song for the Jane Fonda movie, 9 to 5 (1980), in which Parton also co-starred, is an example of her crossover success. It reached Number 1 on the Pop charts and stayed on the charts for weeks. In addition, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.
The arrangement, with heavy brass and a big beat, blends pop and soul music styles. There's not much that can be identified as Country music in this record, other than Parton's bankable Country star name, her face, and faint traces of her Country vocal style. Even the lyrics are more urban than country. (What's less Country than commuting to the job?) Yet it won the Grammy for Best Country and Western song (1981).
Pour myself a cup of ambition,
Yawn and stretch and try to come alive.
Jump in the shower, blood starts pumping
Out in the streets traffic starts jumping
With folks like me on the job from 9 to 5!
Workin 9 to 5 what a way to make a living,
Barely getting by,
It's all talkin and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
Nine to five for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion,
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me!
They let you dream just to watch 'em shatter
You're just a step on the boss mans' ladder,
But you've got dreams he'll never take away
You're in the same boat wih a lot of your friend,
Waiting for the day your ship'll come in
The tide's gonna turn, and it'll all roll your way
Workin 9 to 5, what a way to make a living,
Barely gettin by,
It's all talkin and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it!
Nine to five -- yeah they got you where they want you
There's a better life, and you think about it, don't you
It's a rich man's game, no matter what they call it
And you spend your time putting money in his wallet.
Workin 9 to 5! What a way to make a living,
Barely gettin by,
It's all talkin and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it!
Despite changes in the music, there will be Country music as long as there is an American south. Some of this is more genre than culture. What's jazz without smoke rings and a lonely saxophone player, or Country without cowboy hats and boots and a spangled shirt?
Yet the music has many styles, such as Bluegrass and Rockabilly, as heard in the first records of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich, and Johnny Cash. Later there was Country Rock, a blend of Rock and Country.
Besides 
Elvis, two Country singers who started this blend were the Everly Brothers. They invented Rock harmony, based on Hillbilly harmonies, as heard in Bluegrass.
Adding a beat and electric guitar (besides the usual acoustic guitar), and using teenage worries instead of homely troubles, the Everly's, like Elvis, helped sell Country sounds. Their influence can be heard in Simon and Garfunkel as well as The Beatles, who once punningly called themselves The Foreverlys.
Their first hit, Bye, Bye Love did to hillbilly harmony what Elvis' That's All Right did to the Blues, making it sound like a music for teenagers.
Their second hit, Wake Up Little Susie, with its magical acoustic guitar riff and teenage subject, shows how Country won crossover success:
Wake up little Susie, wake up!
Wake up little Susie, wake up!
The movie wasn't so hot,
It didn't have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked,
Our reputation is shot,
Wake up little Susie,
Wake up little Susie!
What are you gonna tell your mama, what you gonna tell your pa?
What are you gonna tell your friend when they say ooo la la?
Wake up little Susie, wake up little Susie!
Well I told your mama that you'd be in by ten
Now Susie, baby looks like we goofed again!
Wake up little Susie, wake up little Susie, we gotta go home.
Wake up little Susie, wake up!
Wake up little Susie, wake up!
The bullfrog's sound asleep,
Wake up little Susie and weep!
It's four o'clock and we're in trouble deep
Wake up little Susie, wake up little Susie!
But there are always "purists." Despite Elvis' great Country records, he has still not been inducted into the Country Hall of Fame. Yet he has been inducted into other Halls of Fame, such as Rock, Gospel, and R&B.
Old habits die hard for some people. But for others, there's no point in looking back. Whatever its changes, there'll always be Country.
It refers to a body of knowledge that has become so comfortably a part of our lives (minds) that it is like "furniture."
Therefore the writer must know when facts must be explained and when they need not be. This of course depends on one point of the communication triangle, the audience.
A lecture in music to Harvard graduates would explain far less than a presentation to grade school children. A music review in a music monthly will take many terms for granted, on the assumption that the average reader (audience) would know about them.
Consider the recent web item on Rod Stewart's new album (his 3rd of American pop "standards"). Note that the word "standards" is not explained in the article, because the readers of the article are assumed to be reasonably knowledgable about music to know what the word means.
Still, the omission in the Rod Stewart article gives occasion to show how additive replacement might be used not only to address the few readers who might not know the meaning of a word, but also to "amplify" or make larger one's content while at the same time improving coherence.
Additive replacement is yet another form of replacement cohesion, including repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, omission and others studied in class. Additive replacement simply adds information to an antecedent term (a term that comes before), such as "That restaurant, which serves Italian food at inexpensive prices, is located at," etc. Here, the nonrestrictive clause, "which serves Italian food at inexpensive prices," would be called replacement by addition, linked by the demonstrative pronoun, "that" (a pronoun replacement).
Using replacement by addition, with another replacement pronoun, we could revise the first paragraph in the article above as:
"The third time is the charm for Rod Stewart, who with his latest collection of standards sits at Number 1 on the U.S. pop albums chart for the first time in 25 years. This collection of old American popular songs, most written in the 1920s and 30s, show that there is still an audience for songs that were well written.
"The artist's new J Records release," etc.
Here you can see that I have changed nothing; rather I've simply used replacement by addition and achieved three goals in one sentence:
1. I amplify (increase) my content,
2. I clarify a word to widen my audience (assuming someone has no knowledge of the word "standards"), and,
3. By using another replacement strategy, I increase coherence/cohesion too.
ry of Thanksgiving is basically the story of the Pilgrims and their thankful community feast at Plymouth, Massachusetts.The Pilgrims, who set sail from Plymouth, England on a ship called the Mayflower on September 6, 1620, were fortune hunters, bound for the resourceful 'New World.'
The Mayflower was a small ship crowded with men, women and children, besides the sailors on board. Aboard were passengers comprising the 'separatists', who called themselves the "Saints", and others, whom the separatists called the "Strangers".
Aft
er land was sighted in November following 66 days of a lethal voyage, a meeting was held and an agreement of truce was worked out. It was called the Mayflower Compact. The agreement guaranteed equality among the members of the two groups. They merged together to be recognized as the "Pilgrims." They elected John Carver as their first governor.Although Pilgrims had first sighted the land off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, they did not settle until they arrived at a place called Plymouth. It was Captain John Smith who named the place after
the English port-city in 1614 and had already settled there for over five
years. And it was there that the Pilgrims finally decided to settle.
Plymouth offered an excellent harbor and plenty of resources. The local
Indians were also non-hostile.
But their happiness was short-lived. Ill-equipped to face the winter on this estranged place they were ravaged thoroughly. Somehow they were saved by a grou
p of local Native Americans who befriended them and helped them with food.Soon the natives taught the settlers the technique to cultivate corns and grow native vegetables, and store them for hard days. By the next winter they h
ad raised enough crops to keep them alive.The winter came and passed by without much harm. The settlers knew they had beaten the odds and it was time to celebrate.
They celebrated it with a grand community feast to which the friendly native Americans were also invited. It was kind of a harvest feast, like the Pilgrims used to have in England. The recipes included "corn" (wheat, by the Pilgrims usage of the word), Indian corn, barley, pumpkins and peas, "fowl" (especially "waterfowl"), deer, fish. And yes, of course the yummy wild turkey.
However, the third year was real bad when the corn got damaged. Pilgrim Governor William Bradford ordered a day of fasting and prayer, and rain happened to follow soon. To celebrate, November 29th of that year was proclaimed a day of thanksgiving. This date is believed to be the
real begi
nning of the present Thanksgiving Day.But Thanksgiving Day is presently celebrated on the fourth Thursday of every November. This date was set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941). Earlier it was the last Thursday in November as was designated by President Abraham Lincoln. But sometimes the last Thursday would turn out to be the fifth Thursday of the month. This falls too close to Christmas, leaving the businesses even less than a month's time to cope with the two big festivals. Hence the change.
2. What was the name of the ship called that arrived in the "New World"?
3. Thanksgiving is now celebrated on the fifth Thursday of every month. T-F.
4. What does it mean to be unable to cope? If something is copacetic, is that good or bad?
5. What's the opposite of a feast?
6. Name some other feasts, in Taiwan or elsewhere.
7. President Franklin D. Roosevelt started the first Thanksgiving. T. F.
8. The law-making body in America is called the a)judiciary, b)congress.
9. What does the writer mean by "Native Americans"?
10. What kind of corn is very painful and cannot be eaten?
11. When someone says a movie is corny, what does that mean?
12. What is one's native languge?
13. When something is called "lethal," what does that mean? What's a one-word synonym for lethal? What's a lethal weapon?
14. When something is yummy, does it mean it's good or bad?
15. Is a tummy ache good or bad? What's a one-word synonym for tummy?
16. If you call your boyfriend or girlfriend a dummy, does that mean you think s/he's smart?
17. What's a dummy in a department store? What is a department store dummy usually used for? In entertainment, what's a dummy?
18. When you settle down someplace, what does that mean?
19. What's a one-word synonym for cultivate, as in the phrase, "He's cultivating grapes." "Cultivated" can also be used intransitively; that is, without an object, as in, "He's very cultivated." Does that mean he lives in a garden? What does it mean?
20. How can you damge your teeth? Hearing?
21. What American holiday follows Thanksgiving?
22. Should a person be arrested for beating the odds? What does it mean to beat the odds?
23. Who befriended the first European settlers in North America?
24. Is the opposite of "real bad" "unreal bad"? What is a one-word synonym for "real" in "real bad"?
25. What's a one-word synonym for "pilgrim"?
26. Using a form of the word "pilgrim," what do you call it when you make a visit to a special place, like a shrine or religious location?
27. What do you feel thankfulfor, apart from taking my class?
28. What does it mean when your application has been approved? To apply for a job? To apply yourself to something?
29. Name a person whose fame was short-lived.
30. What's a one-word synonym for "designate" as it is used in the essay (5th sentence from the bottom)?
31. What does it mean when a child is estranged from her parents?
32. What is the name of the Pilgrim governor who ordered a day of fasting and prayer after the corn got damaged in the 3rd year of the Pilgrim settlement?
33. If Thanksgiving falls on the last Thursday of November, what is the day after Thursday called?
34. What was the truce between the Strangers and the Saints called?
35. Where did the Pilgrims first decide to settle?
36. What foods were included in the first Thanksgiving feast?
37. What does it mean to proclaim a holiday? Does it mean to praise a holiday?
38. What's a famous port city in Taiwan?
39. How would you settle a dispute between two feuding neighbors?
40. What kind of woman is a fortune hunter?
41. Why do you pay shipping costs on purchase of something?
42. When someone says, "Don't crowd me!" what does he mean?
43. When a conductor shouts "All aboard!" what does he mean?
44. The word "saint" comes from a Latin word meaning "holy." Another form of the word appears in the name of a famous person who wears a red suit and travels around the world once a year. What's his name?
45. Name some kinds of fowl.
46. What is foul language? A foul ball in baseball?
47. When a movie is called a "turkey," does that mean it's very good or very bad?
48. What recent movie have you seen that you would call a turkey?
50. What kind of music did the pilgrims like?
51. Why did they let the turkey join the band?
52. What did the mother turkey say to her disobedient children?
53. Where did the first corn come from?
54. Why didn't they take the turkey to church?
55. Can a turkey jump higher than the Empire State Building?
56. Why did the police arrest the turkey?
Leonard Bernstein
one hearing this music, anyone on any civilized part of this earth, east or west, pole to pole, would immediately say: That is jazz.We are going to try to investigate jazz, not through the usual historical approach, which has become all too familiar, but through approaching the music itself. We are going to examine the musical "innards" of jazz to find out once and for all what it is that sets it apart from all other music.
Jazz is a very big word. It covers a multitude of sounds, all the way from the earliest Blues to Dixieland bands, to Charleston bands, to Swing bands, to Boogie-Woogie, to crazy Bop, to cool Bop, to Mambo--and much more.
It it all jazz, and I love it because it is an original kind of emotional expression in that it is never wholly sad or wholly happy. Even the Blues has a robustness and hard-boiled quality that never lets it become sticky-sentimental, no matter how self-pitying the words are:
I woke up this morning with an awful ache in my head.
I woke up this morning with an awful ache in my head.
My new man had left me just a room and an empty bed.
And on the other hand, the gayest wildest jazz always seems to have some hint of pain in it. Listen to this trumpet, and see what I mean:
That is what intrigues me about jazz. It is unique, a form of expression all its own. I love it also for its humor. It really plays with notes.
We always speak of "playing music." We play Brahms or we play Bach--a term perhaps more properly applied to tennis.
But jazz is real play. It "fools around" with notes, so to speak, and has fun with them. It is, therefore, entertainment in the truest sense.
But I find I have to defend jazz to those who say it is low-class. As a matter of fact, all music has low-class origins, since it comes from folk music, which is necessarily earthy.
After all, Haydn minuets are only a refinement of simple, rustic German dances, and so are Beethoven scherzos. An aria from a Verdi opera can often be traced back to the simplest Neapolitan fisherman.
Besides, there has always been a certain shadow of indignity around music, particularly around the players of music. I suppose it is due to the fact that historically players of music seem to lack the dignity of composers of music.
But this is especially true of jazz, which is almost completely a player's art, depending as it does on improvisation rather than on composition. But this also means that the player of jazz is himself the real composer, which gives him a creative, and therefore more dignified, status.
Then
there are those who argue that jazz is loud. But so are Sousa marches, and we don't hear complaints about them. Besides, it's not always loud. It is very often extremely delicate, in fact.
Perhaps this objection stems from the irremediable situation of what is after all a kind of brass band playing in a room too small for it. But that is not the fault of jazz itself.
However, the main argument against jazz has always been that it is not art. I think it is art, and a very special art. And before we can argue about whether it is or not, we must know what it is. And so I propose to share with you some of the things I know and love about jazz.
Let's take that Blues we heard before and find out what it's made of.
Now what are the elements that make that jazz?
First of all there is the element of melody. Western music in general is based, melodically speaking, on scales, like the major scale you all practiced as kids.
But there is a special one for jazz, which is a variation of the regular major scale. In jazz, this scale gets modified three different times. The third note gets lowered from this, to this. The fifth from this, to this. And the seventh from this, to this.
Those three changed notes are called blue notes. So instead of a phrase which would ordinarily go something like this, which is not particularly jazzy, we would get, using blue notes, this phrase, which begins to show a jazz quality.
But this so-called jazz scale is used only melodically. In the harmony underneath we still use our old unflatted notes, and that causes dissonances to happen between that tune and the chords.
But these very dissonances have a true jazz sound. For example, jazz pianists are always using these two dissonant notes together. And there is a reason for it. They are really searching for a note that isn't there at all but one which lies somewhere between the two notes, between this and this. And the note is called a quarter tone.
The quarter tone comes straight from Africa, which is the cradle of jazz and where quarter tones are everyday stuff. We can produce one on a wind instrument or a stringed instrument or with the voice, but on the piano we have to approximate it by playing together the two notes on each side of it. The real note is somewhere in there, in that crack between them.
Lets see if I can sing you that quarter tone, if you will forgive my horrid voice. Here is an African Swahili tune I once heard. The last note of it is a quarter tone.
Sounds as if I'm singing terribly out of tune. But actually I am singing a real note in another musical language. In jazz it is right at home.
Now just to show you how important these so-called blue notes are to jazz, let's hear that same Blues played without them, using only the plain white notes of the scale.
There is something missing, isn't' there? It just isn't jazz.
But even more important than melody in jazz is the element of rhythm. Rhythm is the first thing you associate with the word jazz, after all.
There are two aspects to this point. The first is the beat. This is what you hear when the drummer's foot is beating the drum. Or when the bass player is plucking his bass. Or even when the pianist is kicking the pedal with his foot.
All this is elementary. The beats go on from beginning to end of a number, two or four of them to a measure, never changing in tempo or in meter This the heartbeat, so to speak, of jazz.
But more involved and more interesting is the rhythm going on over the beat, rhythmic figures which depend on something called syncopation, a word you have certainly heard but maybe were never quite sure of.
A good way to understand syncopation might be to think of a heartbeat that goes along steadily and at a moment of shock misses a beat. It is that much of a physical reaction.
Technically, syncopation means either the removal of an accent where you expect one or the placing of an accent where you least expect one. In either case, there is the element of surprise and shock. The body responds to this shock, either by compensating for the missing accent or by reacting to the unexpected one.
Now where do we expect accents? Always on the first beat of a bar, or the downbeat.
If there are two beats in a bar, one is going to be strong, two is going to be weak, exactly as in marching: right, left, right, left!
Even if there are four beats in a bar, it is still like marching. Although we all have only two legs, the sergeant still counts out in four: "Hup, 2, 3, 4! Hup, 2, 3, 4!"
There is always that natural accent on "one." Take it away, and there is a simple syncopation: 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, etc. You see that that missing accent on the first beat evokes a body response.
Now, the other way to make syncopation is exactly the reverse: put an accent on a weak beat, the second or the fourth, where it doesn't belong. Like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4! This is what we all do, listening to jazz, when we clap our hands or snap our fingers on the offbeat.
Those are the basic facts of syncopation. And now we can understand its subtler aspects. Between one beat and another there lie shorter and even weaker beats. And when these get accents the shock is correspondingly greater, since the weaker the beat you accentuate, the greater the surprise.
Let's take eight of those fast beats in a bar: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The normal accents would fall on 1 and 5: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Now instead, let's put a big accent on a real weak one, the fourth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. As you can see, we get a pure rhumba rhythm.
Of course, the strongest syncopation of all would obviously be obtained by doing both things at once: putting an accent on a weak beat and taking away the accent from the strong.
So now we will do this double operation: put a wallop on the weak fourth, and remove the strong fifth beat entirely; and we get: 1, 2, 3, 4! 6, 7, 8. It begins to sound like the Congo, doesn't it?
Now that you've heard what syncopation is like, let's see what that same Blues we heard before would sound like without it. I think you'll miss that essential lament, the very life of jazz. Sounds square, doesn't it?
Well, that takes care of two very important elements,: melody and rhythm. But jazz could not be jazz without its special tonal colors, the actual sound values you hear. These colors are many, but they mostly stem from the quality of the Negro singing voice.
For 
instance, when Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet, he is only doing another version of his own voice. Listen to an Armstrong record, like I Can't Give You Anything but Love, and compare the trumpet solo with the vocal solo.
You can't miss the fact that they're by the same fellow. But the Negro voice has engendered other imitations. The saxophone is in itself a kind of imitation of it, breathy, a little hoarse, with a vibrato, or tremor, in it.
Then there are all the different growls and rasps we get by putting mutes on the horns. Here, for example is a trumpet with a cup mute and a wah-wah mute. And a trombone with a plunger mute.
There are other tonal colors that derive from Afro-Cuban sources: bongo drums, maracas, the Cuban cowbell and all the others.
Then there are the colors that have an Oriental flavor: the vibraphone, the various cymbals and so on.
These special colorations make their contribution to the tonal quality of jazz. You have certainly all heard jazz tunes played straight by non-jazz orchestras and wondered what was missing. There certainly is something missing: the coloration.
There is one more jazz element which may surprise some of you who think jazz is not an art. I refer to form.
Did you know, for example, that the Blues is a classical form? Most people use the word Blues to mean any song that is "blue" or torchy or low-down or breast-beating, like Stormy Weather, for example.
But Stormy Weather is not a Blues, and neither is Moanin' Low nor The Man I love, or even The Birth of the Blues. They are all popular songs.
The Blues is basically a strict poetic form combined with music. It is based on a rhymed couplet, with the first line repeated. For example, Billie Holiday sings:
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
Oh, he's the lowest man I've ever seen.
But when she sings it, she repeats the first line, so it goes:
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
Oh, he's the lowest man I've ever seen.
That is one stanza of Blues. A full Blues is nothing more than a succession of such stanzas for as long as the singer wishes.
Did you notice that the Blues couplet is, of all things, in iambic pentameter?
My MAN/don't LOVE/me, TREATS/me AW/ful MEAN.
This is about as classic as one can get. It means that you can take any rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter (from Shakespeare for example) and make a perfect Macbeth Blues:
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
It makes a lovely Blues.
Now if you've noticed, each of these three lines got four bars apiece, making it all a twelve-bar stanza. But the voice itself sang only about half of each four-bar line and the rest is supposed to be filled up by the accompaniment.
This filling-up is called a "break." And here in the break we have the origin of the instrument imitating the voice: the very soil in which jazz grows.
Perhaps the essential sound of jazz is Louis Armstrong improvising the breaks in a Blues sung by Bessie Smith. From this kind of voice imitation all instrumental improvising has since developed.
Did you notice the instrument that has been accompanying our singers today? It is a harmonium, that wheezy little excuse for an organ which we all associate with hymn tunes.
But far from being out of place in the Blues, this instrument is especially appropriate, since the chords in the Blues must always be exactly the same three chords we all know from hymn tunes:
These chords must always remain in a strict classical pattern, pure and simple. Try to vary them and the Blues quality flies out the window.
Well, there you have it: melody, rhythm, tone color, form, harmony. In each department there are special features that make jazz, instead of just music.
Let's now put them all together, and hear a full-blown, all-out happy Blues. Oh, did you know that Blues could be happy? Just listen.
This is the end of the first part of Leonard Bernstein's lecture on jazz, originally presented at a Young People's Concert in New York City, and broadcast on October 16, 1955.
Now that you've stopped listening and tapping your feet to Leonard Bernstein and his jazz samples, you can all start talking by responding to the following questions. But you mustn't tap your feet as you talk.
1. What does it mean to go "all out" for something?
2. Name a famous Neapolitan song. (You may have to netsearch.)
3. The word "Neapolitan" refers to which city in which nation?
4. Which nation has given the world the most beautiful melodies?
5. When do you feel you are treated with indignity?
6. What is your current marital status?
7. John Philip Sousa was a great march composer. On what occasion are marches usually played? The name of a country (his birthplace) is in Sousa's name. Which country is it?
8. In Bernstein's lecture, what do the "two poles" refer to?
9. Whose your favorite historical personality? Why?
10. Describe uncivilized behavior.
11. If someone tells you your girlfriend or boyfriend is fooling around, does that mean he or she is being foolish? What does it mean?
12. Do a netsearch and tell us which century produced the minuet.
13. What's a one-word synonym for delicate, as in delicate skin? What does it mean to handle something or someone delicately?
14. Is a blue Christmas happy or sad?
15. The word "aria" is related to which English word? What once common and deadly disease was named from "aria" and how did it get its name?
16. If you have to improvise an excuse to your boyfriend or girlfriend why you didn't show for the date, do you plan what to say or make it up quickly?
17. In a lawsuit, the person making a complaint is called by what name, using a form of the same word?
18. Describe rustic scenery.
19. Is a person in robust health healthy or sickly?
20. A multitude of books means many or few?
21. What's a parking meter? A gas meter?
22. Where is the Congo located?
23. In the 1950s and 60s, "square" was opposed to "cool." Which one was good and which bad? Explain.
24. The word "vibrato" is related to which English word?
25. What does it mean to modify your plans?
26. In what room do you use a plunger and why?
27. What does it mean to accentuate the positive?
28. What's a synonym for "stem" in the sentence, "The trouble stems from the past."
29. In
an Austin Powers movie, Liz Hurley, as Vanessa, rejects Austin's romantic advances in these words: "If you were the last man on earth and I was the last woman and the future of the human race depended on it, I would still refuse you!" Austin replies, "So what's your point, Vanessa?" Was Vanessa giving a subtle hint?30. What's another word for a "note" in music? If you write a note to someone, are you writing them a tune or a message?
31. What happens when you turn the mute on a CD player or a television set?
32. The word "Dixieland" refers to which part of the US?
33. The person with whom one corresponds is called by what word?
34. What does it mean to crack under pressure?
35. What's a crackpot? A crackpot idea?
36. How many notes make up a chord?
37. How can you soil your clothes?
38. Where are hymns heard?
39. Use your English or American Lit textbooks and recite a single rhymed couplet from memory.
40. Is a horrid movie good or bad?
41. Where are sergeants usually found?
42. Is something "irremediable" able to be fixed? What word is found in that word?
43. What is the opposite of dissonance?
44. How do you compensate for your weaknesses?
45. Four is a number. What's a "number" in a show or musical?
46. Show how to clap your hand over your mouth.
47. If an exam was a snap, does that mean it was easy or hard?
48. Bernstein refers to "Negro" music. That was in 1955. What word would we likely use today?
49. Does classical mean old or new? What's another word for classical music?
50. What do you lament from your childhood?
51. Is your girlfriend likely to wallop you when you bring her flowers or when you forget to bring her flowers?
52. What vehicle are you likely to pedal?
53. If we say, "She was the bane of his life," do we honor or dishonor the woman?
54. If we say, "Make it snappy!" what do we mean?
I've used the Blues to investigate jazz only because it embodies the various elements of jazz in so clear and pure a way. But the rest of jazz is concerned with applying these same elements to something called the popular song.
The popular song, too, is a form and it has certain strict patterns. Popular songs are in either two-part or three-part form.
By far the most numerous are in the three-part. You all know this form, of course, from hearing it so much. It is as simple as pie. Anyone can write one.
Take Sweet Sue for instance. All you need is the first eigh
t bars, really, which in the trade are called the front strain. Now the song is practically written, since the whole thing will be only 32 bars long, four groups of 3 bars apiece. The second 8 is the same exactly as the first. Sixteen bars, and we're already half finished.Now the next 8 bars which are called the release or bridge, or just simply the "middle part," must be different music. But it doesn't matter if it's very good or not, since most people don't remember it too well anyway.
And then the same old front strain all over again and it's finished. Thirty-two bars, and a classic forever! Easy, isn't it?
But Sweet Sue is still not jazz. A popular song doesn't become jazz until it is improvised on, and there you have the real core of all jazz: improvisation.
Remember I said that jazz was a player's art rather than a composer's Well, this is the key to the whole problem.
It is the player who by improvising makes jazz. He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way, and it comes out an original.
So the pop tune, in acquiring a new dress, changes its personality completely, like many people who behave one way in blue jeans and a wholly different way in dinner clothes.
Some of you may object to this dressing-up. You say, "Let me hear the melody, not all this embroidery." But until you accept this principal of improvisation, you will never accept or understand jazz itself.
What does improvising mean? It means that you take a tune, keep it in mind with its harmony and all and then as they used to say, just "go to town," or make it up as you go along.
You go to town by adding ornaments and figurations or by making real old-fashioned variations, just as Mozart and Beethoven did. Let me show you a little of how Mozart did it and then you may understand how Erroll Garner does it.
Mozart took a well-known nursery rhyme, which he knew as Ah, Vous Dirai-je Maman and which we know as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, or as a way of singing the alphabet:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Now Mozart takes a series of variations. One of them begins. Then another. Another. And another.
They are all different pieces, yet they are all in one way or another that same original tune. The jazz musician does exactly the same thing.
There are infinite possible versions of Sweet Sue for example. The clarinet might improvise one chorus of it this way.
Now he could have done that in any number of ways. And if I asked him to do it again tomorrow morning, it would come out a whole other piece. But it would still be Sweet Sue and it would still be jazz.
Now we come to the most exciting part of jazz, for me at any rate: simultaneous improvising. This happens when two or more musicians improvise on the same tune at the same time. Neither one knows exactly what the other is going to do. But they listen to each other and pick up phrases from each other and sort of talk together.
What ties them together is the chords, the harmony, of Sweet Sue. Over this harmony, they play two different melodic lines at the same time, which, in musical terms, makes a kind of accidental counterpoint. This is the germ of what is called the jam session.
Now the trumpet is going to join with the clarinet in a double improvisation on Sweet Sue. See if you can distinguish the two melodic lines:
You see how exciting this can be? This business of improvising together gave rise to the style called Dixieland, which is constantly having a big revival.
One of the most exhilarating sounds in all music is that of a Dixieland band blaring out its final chorus, all stops out, with everyone improvising together.
But jazz is not all improvisation, not by a long shot. Much of it gets written down, and then it is called an arrangement.
The great days of the arrangements were the 30s, when big, startling swing arrangements were showing off the virtuosity of the great bands, like Casa Loma, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Dorsey brothers, and so on.
Now jazz is hard to write down. There is no way of notating exactly those quarter tones we talked about, nor the various smears and growls and subtle intonations.
Even the rhythms can only be approximated in notation, so that much of the jazz quality is left to the instincts of the player who is reading the music. Still it does work, because the instincts of the players are so deep and genuine.
Let's listen to a good solid swing arrangement of a chorus of Sweet Sue as we might have heard it back in 1938.
Now remember, this arrangement was for dancing. In 1938 we were all dancing.
And that brings up the most important point of all. Nobody seems to dance to jazz very much any more, except for mambo lovers, and they are limited to those who are athletic enough to do it.
What has happened to dancing? We used to have a new dance practically every month: the Lindy Hop, the Shag, the Peabody, the Big Apple, Boogie, Susie-Q. Now we have only dances you have to take lessons to do.
What does this mean? Simply that the emphasis is on listening these days, instead of on singing and dancing.
This change had to happen. For one thing, the tremendous development of the recording industry has taught us to listen in way we never did before.
But even more significant, with the advent of more complicated swing and jazz, like Boogie Woogie and Bop, our interest has shifted to the music itself and to the virtuosity of its performance. That is, we are interested in what notes are being played, how well, how fast, and with what originality
You can't listen to Bop intelligently and dance too, murmuring sweet nothings into your partner's ear. You have to listen as hard as you can to hear what's happening.
So in a way, jazz has begun to be a kind of chamber music, an advanced sophisticated art mainly for listening, full of influences of Bartok and Stravinsky and very, very, serious.
Let's listen for a moment to this kind of arrangement of our old friend Sweet Sue. Whether you call this kind of weird piece "cool" or "crazy" or "futuristic" or "modernistic" or whatever, the fact is that it is bordering on serious concert music.
The arrangement begins to be a composition. Take away the beat and you might not even know it's jazz at all. It would be just a concert piece.
And why is it jazz? Because it is played by jazz men, on jazz instruments, and because it has its roots in the soil of jazz and not of Bach.
I think the key word to all this is the word cool. It means what it implies.
Jazz
used to advertise itself as hot. Now the heat is off.
The jazz player has become a highly serious person. He may even be an intellectual. He tends to wear Ivy League clothes, have a crew cut, or wear horn-rimmed glasses. He may have studied music at a conservatory or a university.
This was unthinkable in the old days. Our new jazz man plays more quietly, with greater concentration on musical values, on tone quality, technique. He knows Bartok and Stravinsky and his music shows it. He tends to avoid big, flashy endings. The music just stops when it is over.
As he has become cool, so have his listeners. They don't dance. They listen respectfully, as if to chamber music, and applaud politely at the end.
At jazz night clubs all over the world you find audiences who do not necessarily have a drink in their hands and who do not beat out the rhythm and carry on as we did when I was a boy. It is all rather cool and surprisingly controlled, considering that jazz is essentially an emotional experience.
Where does this lead us in our investigation? To some pretty startling conclusions.
There are those who conclude from all this that here, in the new jazz, is the real beginning of serious American music; that at last the American composer has his own expression.
Of course when they say this they are intimating that all American symphonic works up to now are nothing but personalized imitations of the European symphonic tradition from Mozart to Mahler.
Sometimes, I must say, I think they have a point. At any rate, we can be sure of one thing: that the line between serious music and jazz grows less and less clear. We have serious composers writing in the jazz idiom and we have jazz musicians becoming serious composers.
Perhaps we've stumbled on a theory. But theory or no theory, jazz goes on finding new paths, sometimes reviving old styles, but in either case, looking for freshness.
In any art that is really vital and searching, splits are bound to develop; arguments arise and factions form. Just as in painting the non-objectivists are at sword's point with the representationalists, and in poetry the imagist declaims against the surrealists, so in jazz music we have a major battle between the traditionalists and the progressives.
These latter are the ones who are trying hardest to get away from the patterns of half a century, experimenting with new sonorities, using note relationships that are not common to the old jazz, and, in general, trying to keep jazz alive and interesting by broadening its scope.
Jazz is a fresh, vital art in the present tense, with a solid past and an exciting future.
2. What are some ornaments on a Christmas tree?
3. When 2 people talk simultaneously, what does that mean?
4. What's a simulcast? (Hint: This is a blend word, like brunch.)
5. From Bernstein's lecture, what do you think a jam session is? Is it a time when children open up a bottle of jam when their parents are sleeping?
6. What is the key to being a good student?
7. If music is blaring from a radio, does that mean the music is loud or soft?
8. What's the germ of an idea?
9. An idiom is a phrase that says more than the literal meaning, such as "How's it going?" What's an idiomatic style of speaking or singing?
10. What's the opposite of latter? Progressive? What's progressive education?
11. What is representational art? At what time of day is one likely to see surrealistic images?
12. Describe a crew cut. In what profession does one usually see crew cuts?
13. How can you tell the advent of winter?
14. What does it mean to revive a musical? To revive a person?
15. Name a famous Chinese virtuoso. What common word can be found in that word?
16. What's an exhilarating trip?
17. What is the middle of a song called?
18. Name some Ivy League colleges.
19. The word "chamber" comes from the Italian word for room. What English word is related to this word and how? What is chamber music?
20. What's a weird person or movie?
21. What's an Italian way to say "dining outdoors"?
22. Is a sonorous voice pleasant or unpleasant to listen to?
23. The word "tremendous" is related to what similar word?
24. What does it mean to conserve electricity? Is a conservative more likely to vote for change than a liberal? What is the difference?
25. When are you likely to whisper sweet nothings into someone's ear?
26. What world famous 20th century painter is an example of nonobjectivist art?
27. What subject is usually taught in a conservatory? What is usually grown in a conservatory?
28. Name a famous symphonic composer.
29. Listen to the music of a symphonic composer and discuss your experience. Or go to the library and listen to the second movement of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. Do you recognize a popular song in it?
30. Give an approximation of a baby crying, the sound of an hyena, or a lion roaring.
31. What values should a leader embody?
32. What technique do you use to get a person interested in you? What technique do you use to chase a person away?
2. To whom do you feed scraps from the table?
3. Is picking a pocket the same as picking one's nose? What does it mean to pick a pocket? Pick a lock? Pick a tie? Pick a winner?
4. When something is inconvenient, does that mean you'd like to do it?
5. What's a comprehensive exam?
6. What's a ponderous speech? What does it mean to ponder an issue?
7. How much money does a destitute person have?
8. What does it mean to coach someone how to speak?
9. Is an apprentice an experienced or an inexperienced person? What is the stage of an apprentice called?
10. Does a mercurial person change quickly or slowly? Where does "mercurial" get its meaning?
11. What's a simple synonym for "discharge" in the phrase, "He discharged his duties." When you discharge a gun, does that mean you get rid of it? What does it mean? What's an honorable discharge from the army? A dishonorable discharge?
12. If a woman is deserted by her husband, does that mean she then lives in a desert like Las Vegas? What does it mean?
13. For what actions are you likely to do penance? What's a word related to "penance" that ends in "y"?
14. If you study your English Literature textbooks, you'll find that one of the most famous writers was Anonymous. Where was Anonymous born and in what year?
15. What does it mean to hold a grudge against a person? Have you ever held a grudge against a person?
16. Using simpler English words, how would you say, "dreadful apparition"? What's another (very common) English word related (in form or spelling) to "apparition," while also related in meaning?
17. What does it mean to have a bent to do something?
18. What's a room in a house that's related to the word "parliament," a place where lawmakers talk?
19. Which relative do you most resemble in your family?
19a. When you assemble something you a)compare it, b)put it together, c)break it apart, d)sell it.
19b. When you dissemble, you a)lie, b)sing, c)talk, d)laugh.
20. Describe a nightmare you've had recently.
21. Who was your idol as a child? Do you have any idols now? Who are they? What is the worship of idols called?
22. What does it mean to embark on a journey?
23. What wares are you likely to find in a stationery store? What's a house that stores wares called?
24. When are you likely to use a (physical) crutch?
25. Besides its "literal" meaning, "crutch" is commonly used in a figure of speech. What are some common crutches people use to get by in life? Do you use any crutches?
25a. What does it mean to crush a fruit in one's hands or to crush a box by sitting on it?
25b. Have you ever had a crush on anyone. Describe it.
26. If something is exorbitantly priced, does that mean it costs a lot or a little?
27. If tickets are complementary, does that mean the tickets say nice things about you? What are complementary tickets.
28. What would you take as a compliment?
29. What's a lame joke? A lame person?
30. When do we commonly need a dowry?
31. Toast is commonly eaten at breakfast. When you toast someone, does that mean you put them in an oven? What does it mean? What words are usually spoken?
32. Does a stingy person spend a lot or a little?
33. Name some things that gets you engrossed in a novel or movie.
34. What's an unfurnished apartment?
35. What does it mean to squander money? What's a simple one-word synonym for that phrase?
36. How would you tactfully tell someone that she or he is overweight? What's a tactless thing to say to someone?
37. Are shuttered windows closed or open?
38. What does a bounty hunter do?
39. When a crop is bountiful, does that mean it was good or bad?
40. When you sneer, are you likely to be pleased or displeased? Can you imitate a sneer?
41. What is meant by the phrase, "Charity begins at home"? What is the adjective form of charity?
42. When a person is irresolute, does that mean she or he acts quickly or slowly?
43. Consider John Donne's famous line, "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." What does that mean? Look up the poem by John Donne (it's easily found using keywords on the Internet), read it, and give your interpretation in class. An American writer used that line for the name of a novel. What is the name of this American writer?
44. What does it mean to get your mother's consent to do something?
45. Do a search on the word "punch" and prepare to speak about its ingredients in class. Do not search for Mike Tyson, but for beverages.
46. Discuss a stern teacher you had in high school. Do you consider your mother or father stern?
47. What do you consider a burden today?
48. If you scrap a project, you a)pursue it, b)eat it, c)stop it, d)fund it.
49. A lad is a a)child, b)female child, c)male child, d)kitten.
50. If someone says, "That's the spirit!" what does that mean? What is the opposite of "spiritual values"?
51. Are musty values new or old?
52. In Christmas in Hollis, to "chill" means to a)relax, b)freeze, c)shake.
53. "Bug" means a a)cockroach, b)act strange, c)relax.
54. "Ill" means a)sick, b)strange, c)relax.
55. Name some "goodies."
56. What's a yule log?
57. Is a mistletoe the second half of a married couple, "Mr. and Mistletoe"? What's a mistletoe?
58. "Collard greens" are like a)spinach, b)lettuce, c)cabbage.
59. Are "G's" a)hundreds, b)thousands, c)millions, d)billions?
60. "Dough" is something you bake. But "dough" is also slang for a)cake, b)cupcake, c)money, d)food.
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