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1、音樂欣賞Music Appreciation20th Century DancevWhereas during the 19th century the popularity of the leading dances spread from Europe to America, during the 20th century the traffic was reversed. Examples of American influence had been felt during the 19th century, for example the barn dance (or military
2、 schottische) which began a long popularity in British ballrooms during the 1880s. Of wider significance was the boston or valse boston though known in Europe during the 1870s, it was in the years immediately before World War I that it enjoyed considerable popularity in European ballrooms as danced
3、to the waltzes of Archibald Joyce, Sydney Baynes and others. Although the boston itself in time fell out of favour, it was probably primarily responsible for breaking the hold that the fast, rotary Viennese waltz had on the public in favour of the more sedate 20th-century style of waltz. 20th Centur
4、y DancevEven more of a sensation in the years preceding World War I was the tango, which was rhythmically related to the habanera and exported from Argentina to Paris where it was adapted to the ballroom. At a time when the afternoon the dansant session was popular at fashionable hotels, tango tea w
5、ere very much the fashion at the height of the dances popularity in 1912-14. A companion dance, the maxixe, which arrived at much the same time from Brazil, was less successful.RagtimevIt was, however, the ragtime dances, of which the two-step and cakewalk had been direct precursors, that brought ab
6、out a radical change in dance styles. Around 1910 the one-step, a dance based on a simple walking step, became popular in the USA, providing an entree to the dance floor for commercial ragtime numbers such as Alexanders Ragtime Band. Variants of the one-step included the bunny hug and turkey trot, a
7、nd there were other ragtime dances such as the horse trot and fish walk. But it was the foxtrot, developed in the USA around 1912 and promoted by the dancing team of Vernon and Irene Castle, that really established a new era in dancing; it reached Britain in 1914 and in due course spread through Eur
8、ope. After ragtime, the actual steps or the movement of the dances were no longer a central concern. Rather, the impetus for the new dance styles came from the rhythm. There was also a dramatic shift away from the uniformity that had dominated dancing in the past, towards an increasing emphasis on i
9、ndividuality and freedom.After World War I vInterest in the new dance styles rapidly increased. New dances enjoyed periods of success, such as the shimmy, which reached Europe from the USA in 1921 and was characterized by a turning in of the knees and toes followed by a shake of the bottom. Another
10、was the charleston, which featured vigorous side-kicks and which, like so many earlier dances, met with a good deal of opposition on moral and medical grounds before its brief period of acceptance in the mid -1920s. The waltz survived to lend rhythmic variety in the midst of the prevalence of common
11、 time, but its tempo was by then considerably slower than that of the 19th-century waltz. Like so many dances, it was subject to continual changes in steps and tempo; and the foxtrot came to be danced either as the slow foxtrot or the quick foxtrot which in due course came to be known simply as the
12、quickstep.Ragtime and JazzvThe rise of new styles coincided with mounting public interest in ragtime and jazz, and the syncopation and instrumental characteristics of such ensembles were taken over by the dance bands of the time. However, in seeking to satisfy the public the typical dance band esche
13、wed the more revolutionary or suspect aspects of jazz, such as improvisation. Yet there was no firm dividing-line between jazz and dance bands, and the dance bands were probably as near as the general public came to jazz. Paul Whiteman, the most widely known bandleader of the 1920s, was popularly du
14、bbed King of Jazz, yet his publicity proclaimed that he confined his repertory to pieces that were scored and forbade his players to depart from the script. He was a violinist by training and in the early 1920s led his band on the violin as in the 19th-century dance band; the violin was generally dr
15、opped as lead instrument the standard dance-band instrumentation became two or more brass instruments, two or more saxophones (usually doubling other reed instruments) and a rhythm section consisting of piano, banjo and drums, sometimes with a brass bass or tuba. Later still the guitar replaced the
16、banjo.JazzvWhereas the fame of 19th-century band-leaders and their music had owed a good deal to sheet music and the bandstand, those of the 1920s and 1930s owed much to the gramophone and radio. It was especially through the growth of radio during the 1920s that the new dance-band sounds gained wide popularity and radio stations soon came to realize their commercial value. Notably in Britain, wh
