SwingDJs

lipi wrote:First off: chill the $^&# out. It's not worth getting annoyed because not everyone agrees on the definition of a word. "Swing" is a vague term........

In the most ambitious technical attempt to describe swing, the American composer and musicologist Virgil Thomson defined it as "a form of the two-step in which the rhythm is expressed quantitatively by instruments of no fixed intonation, the melodic, harmonic and purely percussive elements being freed thereby to improvise in free polyphonic style." At the core of the definition was a distinction between "beat music," whose rhythm was dominated by accents, and "quantitative music," in which rhythmic intervals were defined by rolls or trills--filled time--rather than by stresses. The former, according to Thomson, created a muscular music conducive to jerky dances and marches; the latter, which he associated with swing, produced a hypnotic response. "Notice the high degree of intellectual and nervous excitement present in any swing-audience," he wrote. "The listeners do not close their eyes and sink into emotional or subjective states. They sit up straight, their eyes flash, they applaud the licks. They occasionally jerk on the absent down-beat, but on the whole they seem to be enjoying one of those states of nervous and muscular equilibrium that render possible rapid intellection."

Understanding Swing, David Stowe