艺术文化类
美国早期唱片
第一段:一个Jazz音乐家与一个发行商合作很好,音乐家的音乐独成一派,在发行商的帮助下,他的唱片卖了很多,并且有很多其它歌手翻唱他的音乐。
第二段:这个音乐家又创作了另一种曲风,但是没有那么成功,主要原因有:一个原因是新的歌曲很长,当时的是唱片,一张唱片只能装几首这样的歌曲;另一个原因就是新的曲风很复杂,他的新曲风是他和一个非常专业的band合作的,很难被翻唱和被消费者认同。(第二段是讲歌曲本身的原因)
第三段:讲了发行商的原因。因为发行商主要以发行流行音乐闻名,现在又发行classical music, 所以即使他们的价格便宜,唱片质量好也不会买。
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V2
第一段:美国音乐早先是注重vocal的,plugging比recording更赚钱。某人写了一首歌,是one of the best hits,红了十年。
第二段:某唱片公司卖sheet record,但不愿意做录音时间太长的唱片,因为:一来,要印刷更多的页数,增加cost;二来,一张sheet record放不下。某人的歌,别人很难reproduce,(好像是Jazz),因为他和他的乐队都把曲子记在脑子里,而且,这支乐队的演奏通常很长,不适合在grogram里播放。
第三段:某唱片公司也开始制作古典音乐了,但是人们tend to 不买他家生产的唱片,尽管他家做的这种唱片又好又便宜,因为他家以前是做流行音乐的。
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1)“他和他的乐队都把曲子记在脑子里”有什么作用? ()
2)作者会expect此家的唱片应该很好卖是因为which of the following...?
3)关于那首歌,哪个是对的?(该歌曲本来是作为纯曲子创作的(后来谱的词)。)
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Out of all the aspects of the musical business, vocal tunes represented the number one priority for promotion during Ellington’s tenure at the Mills organization. Hit vocal tunes sold sheet music. According to Paul Mills and other sources, the biggest profit came from plugging songs more than particular recordings.
It was rare for an African American musician/composer to be involved in this Tin Pan Alley-dominated process that resulted in songs being covered by a wide variety of artists in different genres. But this dovetailed perfectly with the marketing strategy for Ellington which held that African American music represented a potentially popular genre. Mills Music commissioned lyrics for many of Ellington’s instrumentals, and a few of them, including “In My Solitude” and “I let a Song Go Out Of My Heart”, became his biggest hits of the decade. Of other contemporary African Americans, perhaps only Fats Waller (who had some of his copyrights handled by Mills) enjoyed the same advantages and presence in the song-writing marketplace that Ellington received during his tenure with Mills Music. Louis Armstrong had two songbooks dedicated to his work in 1927, four years before Mills published songbooks that collected Ellington material, but Armstrong’s folios emphasized his famed “hot” instrumental breaks and were intended for trumpet players, not the mass commercial market at which Mills aimed Ellington’s work. The Mills organization made Ellington sheet music available in multiple formats that served individual musicians and different sized bands.
The marketing of Ellington’s sheet music also represented a form of integration practiced by the Mills organization to increase Ellington’s commercial potential. Ads accompanying his sheet music featured cross-promotion with either exclusively or mostly white songwriters and artists. Such racial cross-promotion was rare in any facet of the industry, and must have advanced Ellington’s work with a white audience, especially notation-reading musicians more inclined to appreciate the sophisticated nature of the Ellington material compared to the usual Tin Pan Alley fare. Conversely, such cross-promotion may have increased the sales of the white songwriters whom Mills Music marketed alongside Ellington. Ellington was a star as a songwriter as well as a performer, and it appears from the ads that Mills used this fame to cast a favorable light on other Mills-managed performers and composers.
Ellington’s extended pieces, which he began writing in 1930, proved to be one area where economic motives did not mesh smoothly with artistic motives. Many reasons existed for the relative commercial failure of these pieces. First, until the mid-1940s, publishers tended to refuse songs that lasted more than 32 bars. Not only were they too long for the standard 10”78 RPM record format, but they also entailed additional pages in printed sheet music, which mandated a more expensive and less marketable product. An additional problem ensued because, even if the public bought sheet music for such extended pieces as “Creole Rhapsody” and “Reminiscing In Tempo”, it would be difficult or impossible for most musicians to reproduce the complicated intricacy of Ellington’s arrangements and the unique timbres of his instrumentalists. Ellington wrote these pieces with his band’s individual talents in mind, and those men constituted some of the best musicians in jazz history. The fact that such pieces were deemed too long by radio programmers did not help their popularity either.
The segregation that existed between popular and classical music further complicated the longer pieces’ immediate success. When Mills Music started publishing classical folios, some customers would not buy from them because they sold popular music as well, even though their versions were cheaper and “had better engraving”. |