Classic style composing and arranging

[Byron Thomas]

I listened to the Gordon Dando's Classic Banjo documentary a while back on Chris Sand's youtube channel and it's a real treat. Within the video at about 1:08:35 Horace Craddy plays his arrangement of Duke Ellington's Caravan. I'm having a hard time hearing Caravan in his arrangement. I know there are obviously more songs that have been interpreted into the classic style, but this is the only jazz piece that I have seen. Besides the styles of music that are clearly marked (Schottische, Waltzes, Mazurka, Polka, Marches, Patrols, Rags, etc...) what are the compositional rules of classic banjo that makes a piece fit within the medium?

[Austin]

The Celtic women are very talented; however, they cannot be used as an example of Authentic music from the British Isles. The original is homophonic and linear. Try this:

(3) Christmas Day in the Morning, double jig - YouTube

Joplin considered his Ragtime classical music. You can really hear it in his later compositions and his Opera. 

Byron Thomas said:

I don't really want to feed into this too much as everyone has basically thwarted your efforts of explanation. I really wish that you would do more research into the claims that you make so that it wouldn't be so simple to go against your claims. I offer you examples of what you claim does not exist. Call and response from the British Isles. I Saw Three ships (a traditional song of the British isles) and Lord Randall. Both of these are song of the British region with no connection (so far as I know) to African descendants. I don't know what else needs to be stated in regard to shifting your opinions, however I do wish that you would use your skills at composition to aid in understanding the classic banjo style instead of pushing ill researched claims. By answering this, one can hope to disseminate this info unto others to either add well-made new pieces to the library (like the ragtime revival that happened in the U.S.) or at the very least expose others to the study (Like how joplin studied the romantic classics to better his understanding of music, but played a different style)

Austin said:

Yet he used a dictionary definition instead of one rooted in musicology and history. 

I'm saying singing a line and then playing a line didn't show up in the U.S from India. It showed up when the culture that had been standardizing call and response for hundreds if not thousands of years arrived. That kind of phrasing does not, and I repeat NOT exist in Europe as the rule. It is the exception. 

[Austin]

Samuel A Floyd Jr. 

Ethan Schwartz said:

Oh? Which ethnomusicologists exactly? I am in the middle of getting my PhD in ethnomusicology. Surely, I have heard of them.

Austin said:

It uses antiphony as a synonym for Call and response when they're not the same thing. Antiphony is like what you would find in Allegri's Miserere mei deus. Clearly not ethnomusicological and very Eurocentric if they see no difference between the two. Call and response is largely improvisational. Lyrics being swapped out with other lyrics or lines from other songs on the fly. One singer, one close to immediate response. It's not structural it's functional. Ethnomusicologists make this distinction explicit.

Ethan Schwartz said:

The entries in Grove are written by professional musicologists and reviewed by an editorial team of other professional musicologists. It is literally the standard English-language reference for the field of musicology. To suggest that anything in Grove is "not musicological" is comically false.

[Ethan Schwartz]

Samuel Floyd Jr is not typically described as an ethnomusicologist per se (no disrespect to him), although his work is certainly relevant. Fine. Here's how I know you haven't actually read him (or have, but didn't understand it).

In his discussion (ch.2 of The Power of Black Music) of the ring shout dance, Floyd writes:

"Central to the very structure of the spiritual, such antiphony appears in two forms: call-and-response and call-and-refrain."

Well, there you go. From the man himself.

Floyd is not making any generalizing argument about what call-and-response is or isn't. He is speaking specifically about historical black musical practices, nothing else. Does call-and-response in that particular context involve improvisation? Sure. Does that mean call-and-response, whenever and wherever it occurs in the world, is improvisational by definition? No. He's not suggesting anything of the sort.