A brief introduction

Music in America

Music is global. Everyone has an opinion on it. Songs usually reflect the times that they are written in and if anything is a good record of what was going on a certain point in time, music is. This has applied since the middle ages when music started becoming an organized thing.

While I’m here to talk about how popular music represents the times, I’m going to go way back and talk about some CLASSICS. Like really old, classic music classics. Like I said, music is a great representation of the true feelings of a certain time. Classical music is no exception. While we can’t understand the language and most people these days don’t get anything out of the music just by listening to it, the composers would always try to represent the true feelings of the times in their music.

You might say that a lot of music from the Baroque era and earlier isn’t as much a reflection on the times as a whole as it was a reflection on the church in many cases. However back in the day, the church was everything. They were as big as the government in many cases, and it was the place for the musicians to showcase their talent, whether it be the monks and their Gregorian chant or Bach’s Baroque compositions intended for the church.

Eventually composers would become more expiramental and musicians would be more willing to break the rules. The 1900s would be a very hectic era for music, as all sorts of branches started to break out and the U.S. because a home to many composers. The music got more hectic as time went on, and then split in every different direction. Thanks to this we have all of the different “genres” of music we listen to today.

If one breaks down the last hundred years in terms of decades of music, and looks at how much the times reflect the music, the parallels are all there. The music of the 1920’s reflected the happy times that were going on, and likewise the music of the 1930’s reflected more upon the heavy times a lot of America was facing. The Jazz and Blues music deeply reflected the struggles, as well as the happy times for African Americans back in the day.

So what does this have to do? Music has exponentially increased in the amount there is and the number of different genres there are. What I intend to do for the next few days is to write about how the music today reflects the American public today and why it is popular. I’ll do a few songs from the last few decades, and then primarily focus on what everyone is listening to right now.