Week 8 - The "Democracy" of Jazz

The recording below is taken from the studio LP production of a musical called "The Real Ambassadors," which was created by Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The musical directly addresses issues of race while also exploring the history of the jazz tours, as the Brubecks and Armstrong had experienced them. Listen to the first track in the line-up on this video, titled "The Real Ambassadors." What do the words and the characteristics of the music suggest about the Brubecks' and Armstrong's attitude toward the Cold War State Department tours?

Questions for Dr. Anne Shreffler

Please post a question here for Anne Shreffler. It might concern the reading for this week or last, her work on the Cold War and music, or musicology in general.
Please post it by Monday night, so we can vote on the best five in time for Thursday. I'll be in touch about how to vote.

Week 6 - The Cold War Politics of Tonality and Serialism

George Rochberg is an American composer who made the journey from serialism to tonal music. You can read a brief biography here.

In 1972 he abandoned his previous serial style and wrote a work that engaged with the language of tonality, the Third String Quartet, featuring stylistic allusions to Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Bartók. You can listen to a recording of this quartet on the Naxos database (available via the library website: go to Naxos and search for Rochberg string quartet - this is the only one they have.)

What this video of Rochberg talking about this stylistic shift.

Listen carefully to what Rochberg has to say and the language he chooses. What do Rochberg's words reveal about the political and social implications of music-stylistic choices during the decades of the Cold War?