Pop Music of the C20th and C21st Contd.

Popular music of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.

Hip Hop

Hip Hop is a genre of music which emerged in New York during the 1970s when DJs began to loop percussion breaks taken from funk or rock songs to create tracks for their audience to dance to. In hip-hop terms the “beat” is everything but the vocals. It is often built up in layers, including the basic audio loop of a drum track or midi drum patterns, a bass line, supporting orchestration such as a synthesiser and a variety of sound samples. The shortest “beats” are usually 8 bars long, but can be looped to produce “beats” of any length.

One feature of the music is the ‘break’, where the drum (or electronic/computer generated sound) plays a short solo.

This was later accompanied by rapping where the performer, which is often the DJ, speaks rhythmically and in rhyme over the beat.

Loops were originally created on tape but are now created digitally and can be created even in a live performance. Other effects are added by using samplers and synthesisers. A sampler is a device that stores recordings of many different sounds (samples) as digital information, which can then be played and modified in many different ways.

Hip Hop musicians have experimented by using different genres of music to create new and exciting beats, and to develop different styles of hip hop. Rhythm n Bass is one of those styles where there is an emphasis on projecting a strong bass line in the music.

Musical Theatre

Music theatre works are generally referred to as musicals. Like opera, a musical is a play which uses music to express emotion. Like a play it has characters, scenery and costumes and tells a story. However like opera it makes use of solo songs, duets, ensembles and choruses to express the emotion of the words and is accompanied by instruments, usually an orchestra. There are some differences between musicals and opera. Spoken dialogue is used more frequently in musicals than in opera, as well as dancing. Musicals are often influenced by popular music styles such as rock, blues or jazz and use electric guitars, keyboards and amplifiers to boost the volume of the singers and instruments. An opera is usually sung in a language in which it was composed by professionally trained singers. However a musical is more often sung in the language of its audience and the singers are actors first, rather than professionally trained singers.

Music theatre is big business. Theatres in major cities such as London and New York, offer a wide range of musicals, ranging from established classics such as The Phantom of the Opera – Andrew Lloyd and Les Miserables – Claude-Michael Schonberg to productions of brand new musicals.

Film Music

Music is often used to accompany a scene in a film. In the early 20^th Century when films had no sound, a piano player improvised music to fit what was happening on the screen. Music is powerful and is used in a film to enhance the mood or drama of a particular scene or to create the right mood for music that is about to happen. Like opera, which often starts with an overture films often begin with an opening piece of music set against the titles to help capture the audience’s attention and set the right mood.

Like most music composed for a specific occasion or event, film music often makes use of conventions. These are musical devices and features that listeners associate with something extra-musical (outside of the music) and can be used by composers to create a particular context in the music. For example, music for Western films often includes a harmonica, train whistle sounds, or “galloping” rhythms, because these instruments or musical devices are associated with the “Wild West” and using them helps the composer create the right mood and context.

A leitmotif is a memorable and distinctive theme or musical idea that is used throughout a piece to represent a person, object, idea or emotion. It is a musical “tag” that helps the audience establish a link with a character or object in a film and can even be played when the character or object is not actually on screen, suggesting some link between what is happening and the character. A leitmotif can be changed in some way to create a different mood or situation affecting the character or object. This device is used in opera in much the same way.