Music of Maryland
Famous modern musicians from Maryland range from jazz singer Billie Holiday to pop punk band Good Charlotte, and include a wide array of popular styles.
[5] The Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras (MCYO) was formed in the 1946 to "nurture, develop and advance young talented musicians in a quality orchestral program".
[7] In the 1990s and early 2000s, HFStival, held by the WHFS radio station, established itself as an extremely popular annual festival, and became a major draw across the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.
Concordia Hall is a long-standing venue, founded in 1867 by German musical societies, which were then a large portion of Baltimore's population.
The city of Frederick is home to the Weinberg Centre for the Arts, which shows various kinds of theatrical and musical productions.
Later still, Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue, northwest of downtown, became a very well known home for African American music, especially jazz, while Maryland began producing popular musicians like The Orioles.
A few instruments, such as drums and trumpets, are known to have existed in the early history of the Maryland colony, probably as a functional means "of calling the populace to church or to market, or in serving as symbols for sea captains and those from the military"; some folk dancing and ballad singing is also substantiated by the historical record.
The early colonists had little tradition of any performance art, due to the small number of individuals, their low standard of living and great poverty and disease.
[14] With the arrival of large numbers of slaves, however, some white plantation owners earned enough wealth to invest in music and dance.
Unlike the northern United States, religious music did not prosper in Maryland until the end of the colonial period, and then only in the German communities in the bustling ethnic port city of Baltimore along with outlying rural farming towns of Carroll, Montgomery and Frederick counties.
Beginning in 1752, theater became a major part of Maryland culture for colonists of all classes; performances included light dance and incidental music, ballad operas and the works of William Shakespeare.
[10] Professional theater in Maryland died out during the American Revolution but was reestablished by 1780, now with Baltimore having replaced Annapolis as a cultural capital in the state.
In 1822, Arthur Clifton from Baltimore debuted his opera The Enterprise, while religious music flourished after the 1821 opening of the first constructed Roman Catholic Cathedral in the country.
[10] By the turn of the century, the middle classes of Maryland were holding regular dances featuring the cotillion, quadrille, schottische, polka and waltz.
Many immigrants in Maryland moved to Baltimore, forming their own distinct neighborhoods with German liederkranz singing societies, and Irish St. Patrick's Day parades and Jewish chants flourished among their respective communities.
[10] By the middle of the 19th century, Baltimore was a major center of sheet music publishing, home to Joseph Carr, F. D. Benteen, John Cole and George Willig, as well as the piano-building businesses of William Knabe and Charles Stieff.
This period also saw the rise of blackface minstrel shows, featuring the pseudo-African American songs of composers like Dan Emmett and Stephen Foster.
[10] The middle of the 19th century saw a wave of immigration from Europe into the United States, including a large number of German musicians who settled in Baltimore; the presence of these musicians, as well as the general growth in urban population with the Industrial Revolution and the continued rise of the music publishing industry, helped make music training more affordable for more Americans.
[10] While the largely white middle- and upper-class Baltimoreans supported the orchestras and other societies, the city's African Americans formed their own Coloured Symphony Orchestra in 1931, which was municipally supported just like the BSO; the first performance included Ellis Larkins and Anne Brown, the latter known for creating the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess.
[18] Maryland has produced popular musicians from many fields, including doo wop and hardcore punk, as well as the gangsta rap of Tupac Shakur, the contemporary R&B of Toni Braxton (who had two No.
[19] The genre-crossing Frank Zappa was also from Maryland, as was Tupac Shakur, who was born in Harlem, though he began his career in Baltimore, eventually becoming one of the most famous rappers in hip hop history.
Maryland-based band The Ravyns are also notable for having their song "Raised on the Radio" appear on the soundtrack to Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
The Urbanite magazine has identified several major trends in local Baltimorean music, including the rise of psychedelic-folk singer-songwriters like Entrance and the house/hip hop dance fusion called Baltimore club, pioneered by DJs like Rod Lee.
With The Obsessed on board, Hellhound began to sign other Maryland bands, such as Wretched, Iron Man, Unorthodox, Internal Void, and Revelation (who already had an album on Rise Above Records).
After Hellhound's demise in the late 90s, many Maryland doom bands were picked up by various other labels, including Southern Lord Records.
The local scene is led by artists and groups such as Dan Deacon, Double Dagger and North Carolina imports Future Islands.
