CHAPTER TWO: “AFTER THE BALL”: MUSIC OF THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Key Terms and Definitions

banjo: / Four- or five-stringed instrument with a membrane stretched over a wooden or metal hoop that is strummed or plucked. It was developed by slave musicians from African prototypes during the early colonial period. The banjo was used in the music of the minstrel show, early jazz, old time country music, and bluegrass.
blackface: / A style of stage makeup in which performers would apply burnt cork to darken their face. It is associated with the practice of minstrelsy.
Bones: / Nickname for the character in a minstrel show who performed the bones and was positioned at the end of a line of performers (as was Tambo).
cakewalk: / Africanized version of the European quadrille (a kind of square dance). The cakewalk was developed by slaves as a parody of the “refined” dance movements of the white slave owners.
chorus: / Repeating section within a song, consisting of a fixed melody and lyrics repeated exactly, typically following one or more verses.
contradance (or country dance): / Dance tradition in which teams of dancers form geometric figures such as lines, circles, or squares.
Interlocutor: / One of the standard performers in the minstrel show; the lead performer who sang and provided patter between acts.
minstrel show: / The first form of musical and theatrical entertainment to be regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character. Featured mainly white performers who artificially blackened their skin and carried out parodies of African American music, dance, dress, and dialect.
nickelodeon: / Machine that played the latest hits for a nickel. In the 1890s, the first nickelodeons were set up in public places. These machines later became known as “jukeboxes.”
parlor song: / Popular form of American music in the nineteenth century. Parlor songs had simple piano accompaniment and were meant to be performed at home in the parlor.
phonograph (or gramophone): / Early device for playing recorded sounds etched on a disc.
plantation song: / Type of song descended from the minstrel song tradition; combined elements of the parlor song and minstrel song.
ragtime: / The word derives from the African American term “to rag,” meaning to enliven a piece of music by shifting melodic accents onto the offbeats (a technique known as syncopation). Ragtime music emerged in the 1880s, its popularity peaking in the decade after the turn of the century. Scott Joplin is the recognized master of this genre.
refrain: / In the verse-refrain song, the refrain is the “main part” of the song, usually constructed in AABA or ABAC form.
sheet music: / The principal medium for disseminating popular sings until the advent of recording in the 1890s.
song plugger: / Employee of Tin Pan Alley music publishing firms who promoted their popular songs.
strophe: / Poetic stanza; often, a pair of stanzas in alternation that constitute the structure of a poem and could become the verse and the chorus of a strophic song.
syncopation: / Rhythmic patterns in which the stresses occur on what are ordinarily weak beats, thus displacing or suspending the sense of metric regularity.
Tambo: / Character in a minstrel show who performed the tambourine and was positioned at the end of a line of performers (as was Bones).
Tin Pan Alley: / Nickname for a stretch of 28th Street in New York City where music publishers had their offices—a dense hive of small rooms with pianos where composers and “song pluggers” produced and promoted popular songs. The term, which evoked the clanging sound of many pianos simultaneously playing songs in a variety of keys and tempos, also refers to the style of popular song created by these publishers in the first half of the twentieth century.
vaudeville: / Style of show that included a variety of acts; it became the dominant form of popular entertainment in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
waltz: / Type of dance with a triple-meter accompaniment, circular movements, and smooth, graceful lines.