09-19-2016, 01:18 AM
You are in my area. To be sure, many of the Big Band hits are not songs, strictly speaking.
This was highly-polished music... tuneful, tasteful, and even fun.
In a way, Mozart was a 'Big Band' composer. True greatness in any cultural expression depends upon fitting several levels of esthetic delight at once. Most works of classical music (most works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert are immediately accessible) are acquired tastes. If you find Bach's fugues or Beethoven's late string quartets among the apices of musical expression you may have your justification -- but you also have rare sophistication in music because you have had adequate leisure at some point in your life. You haven't had to work ten hours a day at one job consistently or work two jobs just to survive as is becoming the American way of life.
... The Big Band musicians in at least one instance (Let's Dance) made an improvement over a classical work, Carl Maria von Weber's rambling Invitation to the Dance. Let's Dance is superior to the original to the work whence it is derived in the one aspect that defines classical music from practically everything else: a tight formal structure.
This was highly-polished music... tuneful, tasteful, and even fun.
In a way, Mozart was a 'Big Band' composer. True greatness in any cultural expression depends upon fitting several levels of esthetic delight at once. Most works of classical music (most works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert are immediately accessible) are acquired tastes. If you find Bach's fugues or Beethoven's late string quartets among the apices of musical expression you may have your justification -- but you also have rare sophistication in music because you have had adequate leisure at some point in your life. You haven't had to work ten hours a day at one job consistently or work two jobs just to survive as is becoming the American way of life.
... The Big Band musicians in at least one instance (Let's Dance) made an improvement over a classical work, Carl Maria von Weber's rambling Invitation to the Dance. Let's Dance is superior to the original to the work whence it is derived in the one aspect that defines classical music from practically everything else: a tight formal structure.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.