House music

History

The musical origins of house lie in the disco music of the late 1970s, the influence of which can be felt above all in the harmonies and melodic lines. Frankie Knuckles played at the Warehouse in Chicago. Even then, it was common for disco maxis to feature club mixes - which usually meant extended instrumental passages focused on rhythm. Knuckles found that it was these rhythm sections that sent patrons into ecstasy, and began mixing only them into each other, leaving out the rest of the record. Besides Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders and Chip E. are counted as pioneers of Chicago House. Later, Detroit producers Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson picked up on this new love of monotony and developed Detroit techno from it.

At the same time, an important house scene also emerged in New York clubs such as the Paradise Garage and The Loft, influenced by DJs like Larry Levan, François Kevorkian and Eric Kupper. The Paradise Garage was the namesake for the disco-oriented house variant of garage house.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the term "house" also spread in many places as an umbrella term for various types of electronic, rhythmic music styles, to which even initially the newly developed techno music was still subordinated as techno house. This leads to some confusion, however, as there is now also a style called tech house, a technoized form of modern more minimal house music. For most Detroit and Chicago DJs and producers, there is no real distinction between techno and house.

In 2005, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley proclaimed "Chicago House Unity Day" for the first time. The date chosen was August 10.

In the early 2010s, a distinct style with its own characteristics began to develop from various variations of progressive, tech and electro house. The style is called Big-Room and is characterized by a catchy, aggressive drop, which is underpinned with an equal-beat bassline. The songs Animals by Martin Garrix and Tsunami by DVBBS and Borgeous simultaneously brought the new house style its first commercial successes in 2013 with several number one placements. This was followed by combinations with other music genres, such as hardstyle or individual house categories.

Paradise Garage, the birthplace of the Garage House

Character and production

House is characterized by its powerful, bass-heavy sound, which did not yet exist in this form in disco. The typical sound is mainly created by the use of a correspondingly powerful bass drum, which is played in the so-called "4-foot", i.e. continuous four beats per bar (also called four to the floor). The Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum sequencers, which are no longer in production, are particularly popular. In contrast to techno with its mostly straight, machine-like basic meter, house is often characterized by dotted sixteenths (shuffle).

Typical structure of the rhythmic framework of a bar in House:

Sixteenth notes	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
Bass drum	x				x				x				x
closed Hi Hat		x		x		x		x		x		x		x		x
open Hi Hat			x				x				x				x
Hand Claps					x								x

A commonly used addition that can quickly give the basic structure a typical house characteristic is a snare drum (or rimshot, preferably based on the sound of the TR-808 or TR-909), typically placed as follows:

Sixteenth notes	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
Snare												x			x

Another essential element in the development of house as an independent musical style is the extreme formalization of the musical structure through the almost exclusive use of sequences whose lengths are powers of the base 2. Every eight bars the sound changes by adding or taking away single sequences. Breaks are avoided in this way. This can be easily understood by simply counting 32 bass drums (four beats per bar times eight bars) from the beginning of a sequence in a classic house song. Then, theoretically, new instruments start, are dropped, or vocals are added, for example. In a classic house song, vocals would never start in the middle of such a sequence, but always at the beginning. A typical "house record" exceeds a three-minute radio hit in length; five minutes or more is the norm. This and the formalization of musical structure mentioned above make it easy for a DJ to match the speed of several house records (beatmatching) and to blend their beginnings and endings into one another in such a way as to give the untrained listener the impression of a single piece several hours long.

Music journalists have sometimes attributed an almost spiritual quality to the Chicago, deep and minimal house genres, which is also reflected in terms such as Set me free, Wisdom in track titles or vocal samples. House as a concept is understood here as an abstract social space created from sounds, into which everyone is invited (My house is your house and your house is mine). Musically, too, house takes influences from various previous musical styles, from Latin to soul and funk to disco, but is just as open to earlier electronic music as it is structurally to minimal music, which originated in high culture. This hybrid character, which house has in common with hip-hop, and which only became technically possible through the availability of cheap samplers, has become a model for other current genres of pop music.

Out of the club scene, especially important were the Warehouse in Chicago and the Paradise Garage and Red Zone in New York, the house dance scene associated with house music developed.