Music of New York City
The Apollo Theater has long been a place for African American performers to begin their careers; it has such an iconic status that Congress has declared it a National Historic Landmark.
Fry's most notable composition was the opera Leonora, which received mixed reviews upon its opening and was criticized for its debt to Vincenzo Bellini's bel canto style.
He was to continue in this vein with the score for Rupert Brooke's "Wai Kiki," the ballet Sho-Jo, or — the Spirit of Wine, A Symbol of Happiness, and his orchestral composition The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan.
Attaining iconic musical status in the early 20th century, New York retained its position despite the rise of other cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, and San Francisco.
Piano ownership was widespread in middle-class families, and if one wanted to hear a popular new song or melody, one would buy the sheet music and then perform the piece at home.
Many professional songwriters lived nearby, churning out songs ready for mainstream audiences during a time that music, like other aspects of American culture, was becoming a national rather than a regional affair.
The need to adapt enjoyable songs to the constraints of a theater and a plot enabled and encouraged a growth in songwriting and the rise of composers such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.
It arose in New York in the early part of the 20th century, and quickly spread to other urban areas and, often, more affluent listeners than country blues, which is distinctively rural in nature.
Fletcher Henderson's jazz orchestra, first appearing in 1923 and including Coleman Hawkins (and later New Orleans musician Louis Armstrong) became wildly popular and helped invent swing music.
These large orchestras produced a number of instrumentalists that had a profound effect on the later evolution of jazz, including Coleman Hawkins' tenor saxophone innovations, electric guitarist Charlie Christian, and improvisational Lester Young.
Bebop "polarized listeners, critics and musicians alike" because it differed from swing in many important ways, including a lack of typical riffs and danceable beats, the use of melodic progression and the chords as the basis for all soloing and improvising.
The city has also been home to the well-known modern performer from New Orleans, Louisiana, Wynton Marsalis and the large M-Base Collective, as well as people such as John Zorn who use jazz as a prominent part of their experimental music in many different styles.
The performers associated with the Greenwich Village scene, many of whom were not originally from New York, had sporadic mainstream success in the 1940s and 1950s; some, such as Pete Seeger and the Almanac Trio, did well, but most were confined to local coffeehouses and other venues.
New York in the mid-to-late 1960s gave birth to the contemporary singer/songwriter, with the urban landscape as a canvass for lyrics in the confessional style of poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
In July 1969, Newsweek magazine's feature story, "The Girls-Letting Go," described the groundbreaking music of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Lotti Golden, and Melanie as a new breed of female troubadour: "What is common to them are the personalized songs they write, like voyages of self discovery, startling in the impact of their poetry."
The work of these early New York-based singer/songwriters, from Laura Nyro's insightful New York Tendaberry, released in 1969, to Lotti Golden's adventurous East Village, Manhattan, diaries on Motor-Cycle, her 1969 debut on Atlantic Records, has served as inspiration to generations of female singer/songwriters in the rock, folk, and jazz traditions.
They sang about politics, love affairs, the urban landscape, drugs, disappointment, and the life and loneliness of the itinerant performers, subjects that, hitherto, had largely been the preserve of male musicians."
It was developed by mid-1960s groups of New York City-area Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States, such as Machito and Tito Puente, with later variants such as salsa dura.
The genre got its start at neighborhood block parties when DJs such as Kool Herc began isolating percussion breaks in funk and R&B songs, eventually rapping while the audience danced.
The year 1982 was prolific, with seminal recordings like "The Message," "Planet Rock," and "Nunk" exploring social issues, also known as conscious rap, and fusing electro with hip hop introducing a sci-fi, Afrofuturist perspective.
However, in 1993, with the release of Black Moon's Enta Da Stage and later on Wu-Tang Clan's 36 Chambers in the same year, East Coast hip hop made a major comeback.
Additionally, the Queensbridge Projects in Queens have been an epicenter of hip hop, producing the Juice Crew (Marley Marl, MC Shan, Kool G Rap, Roxanne Shante), Mobb Deep, Capone-N-Noreaga, and Nas.
In order of appearance, Brooklyn has produced Whodini, Newcleus, Audio Two, Full Force, MC Lyte, Gang Starr, Jeru the Damaja, Masta Ace, Boot Camp Clik, AZ, Busta Rhymes, Foxy Brown, Talib Kweli, Afu-Ra, M.O.P., Shyne, and Siah and Yeshua DapoED.
Brooklyn drill artists include Pop Smoke, Fivio Foreign, Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, Bizzy Banks, J.I Prince Of New York, Jay Critch and more.
Drawing on local influences such as The Velvet Underground, Richard Hell, and the New York Dolls, punk music developed at clubs such as CBGB and Max's Kansas City.
Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Suicide, Television, The Fleshtones, and other artsy new wave artists were popular in the mid-to-late 1970s, as bands like the Ramones were establishing the punk rock sound.
No Wave was a short-lived rock movement in New York and raised James Chance, DNA, Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars began experimenting with noise, dissonance and atonality in addition to non-rock styles.
By 1985, the New York hardcore scene had become inhabited by straight edgers and skinheads, including bands such as Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Heart Attack, Youth of Today, The Plasmatics, Warzone, and Murphy's Law.
With the collapse of the CBGB hardcore matinees due to constant violence, a more activist DIY scene began to develop around ABC No Rio and the squats of the Lower East Side.
During the 1980s and 1990s, it was a major center of the East Coast thrash metal scene, which produced the bands Anthrax, Overkill (originally from New Jersey), Nuclear Assault, Toxik and Carnivore.
