Essential Question – How did literature, art, and music convey the spirit of the time period?

Objectives:

Recognize artists, musicians, and writers of the 1920s. Recognize the relevance of the essential questions. Discuss how art, music, and literature reflect the time period.

Procedure:

1. Show a piece of modern art. (scroll down to bottom for a sample.) Discuss what it is reflecting with regard to the 21st Century. What is it trying to convey? (Can play a clip of modern music, too.) Point out the essential question. (Plastic bag art reflects the current “green” movement.)

2. Pass out note taking sheet.

3. Discuss the above notables from the 1920s. Be sure to focus on how their work was reflecting the times. Students take notes. (Use teacher notes located under pics and excerpts…scroll down.)

4. Students travel the room looking at the pictures, book covers, poem excerpts, and listening to music. Based on the information given in their notes, students try to match the correct “artist” with their product. (Have pictures and excerpts placed around the room and numbered. Teacher should have a computer set up to play the music clips for students so that they do not see the artist’s name.)

5. Reveal the answers, and while doing so, stress the idea that the art, music, and literature are reflecting society at that time.

6. Revisit the essential question. Have students write a brief paragraph in response to the essential question.

Assessments:

Participation/observation

Paragraph

Chapter Test

Teacher notes for lecture: Jacob Lawrence painted a series called The Migration Series. The series, a moving portrayal of the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the North after World War I and their struggle to adjust to Northern cities, was shown in New York, and brought him national recognition. Paintings often portrayed the African American struggle.

Teacher notes for lecture: Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities. She made large-format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens, and New York buildings, most of which date from the same decade. Beginning in 1929, when she first began working part of the year in Northern New Mexico—which she made her permanent home in 1949—O’Keeffe depicted subjects specific to that area.

Dream Boogie

Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?

Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -

You thinkIt's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -

What did I say?

Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!

Hey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!

Y-e-a-h!

Teacher notes for lecture: Langston Hughes wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing. (wrote jazz poetry) His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Teacher notes for lecture: Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labor. Wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

Teacher notes for lecture: F Scott Fitzgerald(September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.[1] Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg

Teacher notes for lecture: Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974)[1] was an American composer, pianist, and big-band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. A major figure in the history of jazz, Ellington's music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical. His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals, and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other traditional genres of music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Who6fTHJ34

Teacher notes for lecture: Bessie Smith - Nicknamed The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s.[1] She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and, along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iJdXWY7JRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPM

Teacher notes for lecture: Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971),[2] nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZciIDZxLJo

Teacher notes for lecture: Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers" and is best known to the public for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as Populist and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wePM0aITzYc

Teacher notes for lecture: George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess. Gershwin's compositions have been used in numerous films and on television, and several became jazz standards recorded in many variations. Countless singers and musicians have recorded his songs.

Teacher notes for lecture: Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

Teacher notes for lecture: Luigi Lucioni, best known for his Realist landscapes and still lifes, immigrated to the U.S. in 1911 and settled in New Jersey. Lucioni's amazing attention to detail comes as a result of his work as an etcher (1922), which stressed sharp, linear precision. Showed “smoothness” and texture.

The Wasteland (excerpt)

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruelest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, covering          

5

Earth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.

Teacher notes for lecture: Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.” Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalized as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. Wrote in a modernist style. The poem(wasteland) is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation.

Ts'ai Chi'h

The petals fall in the fountain,

the orange-coloured rose-leaves,

Their ochre clings to the stone.

Teacher notes for lecture: Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic, who became a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.

Essential Question – How did literature, art, and music convey the spirit of the time period?

Art, music, and literature of the 1920s:

Ezra Pound -

TS Eliot -

Luigi Lucioni -

Edward Hopper -

George Gershwin -

Aaron Copland -

Louis Armstrong -

Bessie Smith -

"Duke" Ellington -

F Scott Fitzgerald -

John Steinbeck -

Langston Hughes -

Georgia O'Keeffe -

Jacob Lawrence -

Plastic Bag Art – Blue River by John Dahlson