Examine and answer to the best of your abilities the following questions that correlate the various popular American styles with the musical elements used to create them.
1) In folk music, it is both the major / minor pentatonic and major / natural minor groups of pitches that create the majority of folk melodies. Yes / No
2) Songs written in the folk traditions are almost always essentially diatonic in nature and rarely modulate.
Yes / No
3) Folk harmony is for the most part created from triads.
Yes / No
4) The diatonic dominant 7th chord is common in the various folk styles. Yes / No
5) Folk songs in the minor tonality will often use a dominant 7th type Five chord.
Yes / No
6) The 8 bar phrase, the A / B and A / A / B / A song forms are all used in organizing and writing folk songs.
Yes / No
7) The main instrument used to tell folk stories is the voice.
Yes / No
8) The main instrument used to back the voice in creating the folk styles is the guitar.
Yes / No
9) The guitar is cool in that it can not only be a rhythmic motor, but it also contains the full potential of equal tempered melody and harmony and all of the blue notes in between, thus can provide the full spectrum of musical colors essential for the creation of the American styles.
Yes / No
10) The blues are at the core of nearly all of the American sounds.
Yes / No
11) The basic rhythmic motor of the blues is 4 / 4 time.
Yes / No
11) By adding a pitch a tritone above the root into the minor pentatonic scale, the minor blues scale emerges.
Yes / No
12) For blues in the major tonality, the harmony is based on the dominant chord type.
Yes / No
13) Dominant chord type harmony is based upon the inclusion of the tritone interval between the major 3rd and minor 7th of the chord.
Yes / No
14) The essential core of the blues compositional forms is the 12 bar blues.
Yes / No
15) At the heart of the blues melodic line, we often find the age old vocal interplay of call and response.
Yes / No
16) The common six string guitar is perhaps best suited to create the blues with it's ability to create rhythm, in tune chords and search for out of tune melodies comprised of the blue notes.
Yes / No
17) From it's emergence in the mid 1950's, rock and it's various sub genres is perhaps the most popular of the American styles of music.
Yes / No
18) Much of the sound of the early rockers and even much today comes from the blues core.
Yes / No
19) The major and minor pentatonic scales are among the most popular of the melodic groups in creating the rock sounds.
20) Rock harmony is mostly triadic with added 7th's while heavy metal rockers often reduce their chords down to just the musical interval of a perfect 5th.
21) The meter of rock music is predominantly 4 / 4 time.
Yes / No
22) The musical forms used in rock include, the 12 bar blues form, 32 bar song form and endless variations.
Yes / No
23) In general, for whatever reasons, rock music often strives to be the most theoretically simplistic of the American musical styles.
Yes / No
24) American jazz is often the most theoretically complex of the American styles.
Yes / No
25) At the historical heart of American jazz is the blues.
Yes / No
26) American jazz explores the entire well tuned resource of equal temper both melodically and harmonically while adding in the variably tunes blue notes.
Yes / No
27) It is not uncommon for jazz composers to use the technique of modulation of keys to enhance their work.
Yes / No
28) Jazz rhythms are often polyrhythmic, the layering of different rhythms creating the essential groove of getting the music to swing.
Yes / No
29) For performance, the rapid tempos of many of the jazz styles require a great facility on one's chosen instrument.
Yes / No
30) Jazz compositions are often written in the blues forms, 32 bar A / B and A / A / B / A song forms.
Yes / No
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)