Essay on Romantic vs Jazz Music: Comparing Composers, Performers and Audience

Music traditions refer to the conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared culture or set of conventions. Music can be subdivided into various types. Some of the different kinds of music traditions include Han, raga, American fork, Country music, jazz, and romantic music. In this essay, we shall contrast between jazz and romantic music concerning the composers, performers, and audience. Romantic music is a music tradition that originated from western European music. It insists on its imaginations and emotions. In contrast, jazz music is classified under American popular music. Jazz music originated from blues with a mixture of European and African origins.

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Concerning composition, a jazz musician writes down their own music; it majorly contributes to the development as unique, distinctive, and innovative artistic personalities. They basically write their songs down. Jazz composition requires a concretes skill set that can be acquired through structures practice, just like improvisation. The composer can create music through the process of listening, imitation, analysis, theoretical study, and goal-based regular practice. The composer incorporates various elements such as melody, harmony, and rhythm. The composer begins by absorbing sonic vocabulary by consistent listening, brushes up the music theory, begins looking at scores, composes short imitative pieces with given guidelines, and starts forming fully.

In contrast, romantic music composers are people who have significant interests in art and literature; they write music about emotions of love, hate, or death. It is composed by an individual who wants to express his feelings. The composer begins by writing the verses; chorus down. They then picked a title for the song with regard to their agendas; chooses an alternating rhyme scheme for the verse; pick chords on a primary key to make the song sound happy. They mainly chose four chords to use in their songs and use the chords for the vocal melody. Besides, the music was composed using several narratives that told different stories. These composers prioritized the emotional or narrative information of the music.

Besides, romantic music was performed using a solo voice and a piano. In this music, the piano is not only accompaniment in the performance but also a partner of the voice. The music is performed to the audience individually or using a group of musicians. The composers can as well play the role of a performer. They as well use more extended melodies, more comprehensive ranges of tone, pitch, and tempo. They mainly performed in stages when people were waiting to watch cinemas. They would perform before the cinema began. The romantic songs were as well performed in weddings, burials, festivals, and dowry ceremonies. The music was dependent on the mood of the ceremony. Romantic music in the past was an artistic, literary, and intellectual musical tradition that was meant to strengthen the industrial revolution. Currently, this music meant to portray the occurrences taking place in a person's life. This may include death, love, and marriage.

In contrast, jazz music performance contributed to public integration and involved social dances. During its performance, it included cultural dance that aided in bring up artistic subcultures. Its performance was mostly used to bring young people together and was a great social leveler and unifier. It was performed through radio and the recording industry. It was performed by the composers who played along with dances whose moves were in line with the rhythms of the songs. At other times this music was performed by a band composed of few people. The performers would use soloist playing in relation to backup ensembles as well as worked effectively with larger groups. In the past, jazz music was danceable and had a characteristic emphasis on the offbeat. It had become the dominant musical genre. However, currently, the pure jazz music has disappeared from the charts, its impacts and influence have been taken over by other popular music.

Concerning romantic audience, music is mainly meant for the small and upper class as well as those who were knowledgeable about music. Currently, the primary audience of this tradition is young people. The audiences were expected to meet up in public concerts and festivals with large audiences paying customers that had not had music lessons. As the audience was listening to the presentation, they would get emotional when listening to a song that included calamities. In contrast, they would get excited when listening to a presentation about love or marriage. According to the tradition of romantic music, it is essential to consider the audience when considering the type of performance that is relevant to the audience.

In contrast, the primary audience for jazz music has always been young people. The audiences desire to listen to jazz in small venues, thus enabling socialization, considering that it involves young people. Young people who are the audience tend to enjoy listening to music when they are familiar with the music and participate in playing the music-the audience as well as a contribution to the song that will be performed to the audience.

The romantic era made use of several; musical sounds, the similar basic vocabulary of harmonies, standard guidelines of harmonic progression, rhythm form, and similar musical; intention based on the composer, performer, and listener. The main features that define romantic music are the melodic and harmonic structures, free form, and tonality. In contrast, jazz music was seen as a type of music that originated from the blues in line with European and African origins. This music was played by a band that was composed of ten or more players. They used instruments that included the saxophone, guitars, drums, and piano.

Improvisation in the romantic tradition slowly faded out as it changed from the classical and baroque period. Nevertheless, such singers were still learning on the way to improvise. This resulted in improvisation in order to survive through the solo cadenza. This was an elaborate passage of fantasia at the end of the first or last movement of a concerto and played by the solo instrument. Due to the increase of the stature of the composer, precision of notation, the emphasis on the perfected was maximizing, the masterwork of the 19th century maximized the specialization between composer and performer. The style of composition found in specific orchestral pieces with loose formal structure was maintained to be a large part of the Romantic Movement. While jazz improvisation is the procedure of the creation of new melodies by repeating the cycle of chord progressions. Jazz musician creates a form of theme and variation based on the tune and the role of the instruments. Jazz piece is more flexible to enable the soloist to venture out and express their feelings using the horn.

Romantic musical form is referred to as sonata-allegro. It has the characteristic of binary and ternary forms. It consists of an exposition that portrays a theme for the first time, mainly in two theme groups. It then follows the development of the agenda, and thus it is rearranged, transposed, and transformed. In contrast, the jazz standard form has a chord progression in AABA, ABA, AAB, and at other times ABAC. On the first and last repetition, the A section can be played or sung, and the singer improvises in other repetitions to the end of the song.

Conclusion

In conclusion, romantic music and jazz music are different in several ways. For example, based on instrumentation in romanticism, they used pianos while in jazz, they used brass, saxophones, and drums. Though the two music traditions are different, they as well share some similarities. The singers in both cultures are similarly based on expression and harmonic structures.