Survey of Popular Music Exam 1

What role did song pluggers play in the music industry from the nineteenth century until the 1920s?

they filled in missing parts of arrangements when the originals couldn't be found

What different individual occupational roles are involved in the production of pop music?

composer and lyricist, arranger, artists and repertoire, producer, engineers, publicity department, public relations.

Originally an oral tradition passed down in unwritten form, ballads were eventually circulated on large sheets of paper called handbills, the ancestors of today's sheet music. true/false

false

Until the mid-1990s, the stylistic mainstream of American popular music was largely oriented toward the tastes of white, middle- or upper-class, Protestant, urban people. True/False

false

Which legendary French-born superstar of tango was inspired by operatic bel canto singing and the criollo songs of the Argentine gauchos?

Carlos Gardel

Popular music has been wholly successful in avoiding the perpetuation of stereotypes.

False

The first Latin American style to have a major international impact was the Cuban tango, an African-influenced variant of the French country dance tradition. True/False

False

The huge region of Africa from which enslaved people were drawn-the areas bordering more than eight thousand miles of Atlantic coastline stretching from current-day Senegal to Angola--shared a singular, monolithic culture? True/False

False

The onset of quarantining in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 led to a dramatic decline in creativity and an accompanying decline in the purchase of music creation software such as Apple's GarageBand, as well as musical instrument sales by online vendors such as Sweetwater, Guitar Center, Reverb, and other retailers. True/False

False

What is formal analysis of music and what are the basic building blocks of music that should be considered in such an analysis?

Listening for musical structure, its building blocks, and the ways in which these blocks are combined; Musical process: analysis of how popular music actually sounds, including the interpretation by performers. Riff: repeated pattern designed to generate rhythmic momentum. Hook: memorable phrase or riff. Groove: evoked channeled flow of swinging, funky, of fat rhythms. Timber: quality of a sound, sometimes called "tone color". Also grain of voice and instrumental performers have familiar sound prints. Engineers, producers, arrangers, and record labels do as well. Lyrics and dialect as well.

A repeated pattern designed to generate rhythmic momentum is called what?

Riff

From which stream of influence does the "high lonesome sound" commonly heard in country music hail?

anglo-american stream

In rock music, the accenting of the second and fourth beat of a four-beat bar is referred to as the _______.

backbeat

A _______ is a type of song consisting usually of verses set to a repeating melody in which a story-often romantic, historic, or tragic-is sung in narrative fashion.

ballad

What role has the musical "margins" in shaping mainstream popular taste and the workings of the music industry, one typically defined by centers and peripheries?

center: geographical centers have included NY, LA, Nashville. Until 1950's mainstream media oriented to white middle or upper class and urban people. Periphery: smaller institutions and those historically excluded from the political and economic mainstream

Which of the following is true about the Afro-Cuban rumba?

it accompanies dances featuring sexual role-playing and was originally suppressed by Cuban authorities

Which is true about Brazilian bossa nova music?

it was popularized in the united states by songs like "The girl from Ipanema"

In what ways has popular music been instrumental in the formation of identity?

music is a means of expressing identity. comfort and continuity, cultural stereotypes, ethnicity, and race. music brings narratives to life. Popular music challenges stereotypes.

Which southern string band did James Gideon (Gid) Tanner lead?

skillet lickers

_______ refers to rhythmic patterns in which the stresses occur on what are ordinarily weak beats, thus displacing or suspending the sense of metric regularity.

syncopation

Initially played by musicians in Argentina's capital city of Buenos Aires, the _______ was influenced by the Cuban habanera rhythm, the African-influenced milonga, Italian and Spanish popular songs, and the songs of the guitar-playing Argentine gauchos

tango

Which Latin dance style did Irene and Vernon Castle and movie star Rudolph Valentino help popularize in the early twentieth century?

tango

Which of the following is true about African American ballads of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

they celebrated the exploits of black heroes and "bad men"

to what degree has technology affected our relationship to music and, more importantly, other people?

through mass media, the gap between artists and their listeners has shrunk. People are now able to buy equipment to make their own music as technology advances. Streaming has increased dramatically.

Critical listening is listening that consciously seeks out meaning in music by drawing on knowledge of how music is put together, its cultural significance, and its historical development. True/False

true

Informal worship spaces organized by enslaved people were referred to as "hush quarters." True/False

true

The arranger of a song decides which instruments to use as accompaniment and what key the song should be in. True/False

true

The type of music most closely associated with the mid-19th century's "Great Awakening" was a body of sacred songs called spirituals. True/False

true