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The music of Minnesota has played a role in the historical and cultural development of 's radio station usually lists dozens of performances each week in the Twin Cities Some performers from nearby regions of neighboring states, such as western Wisconsin and Fargo, North Dakota, are often considered a part of the Minnesota music scene. Minneapolis has produced a number of famous performers, such as Bob Dylan , who was born in Duluth, grew up in Hibbing, and began his musical career in the Minneapolis area, and Jimmy Jam And Terry Lewis , who eventually formed The Time and Produced for Gladys Knight and Janet Jackson . Minneapolis' most influential contributions to American Popular Music began in the 1970s and 1980s, when the city's music scene "expanded the state's cultural identity" and launched the careers of acclaimed performers like the multi-platinum Soul singer Prince , and cult favorites The Replacements and Hüsker Dü . More recently, the Twin Cities has played a role in the national hip-hop scene with artists such as Atmosphere and P.O.S. . Minneapolis Music Collection ''In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the creative explosion in Minnesota's thriving black and white rock music scenes expanded the state's cultural identity far beyond the shores of Lake Wobegon.'' INSTITUTIONS AND VENUES , Nicollet Mall , Minneapolis ]] Music institutions in modern Minnesota include the , a long-running group that performs in the traditional styles of Scandinavian-Americans, particularly Norwegian Music . Leroy Larson and the Scandinavian Music Ensemble Industry and media in St. Paul ]] The Independent Public Radio is a state-wide network of twelve independently-owned stations that play music by local artists. These stations include KFAI , KUMB , KAXE and KVSC , most of whom also operate Internet Radio streams. Local music is also a part of the Playlist s of Minnesota's College Radio stations like the University Of Minnesota 's Radio K and Macalaster College 's WMCN . Most other radio stations in the state are owned by conglomerates like Clear Channel , and play few, if any local artists; they instead use a national Radio Format , mostly playing classic rock, pop, and contemporary hip hop and R&B. Minnesota Public Radio is also a major part of the Minnesota radio industry; it is one of the most successful public radio organizations in the country, and has grown from a small station associated with St. John's University in Collegeville in 1967, to a part of the American Public Media Group and is now the dominant network of radio stations in the state. Recently MPR launched a new station, KCMP 89.3, The Current , which has gained a cult following throughout the country and indeed throughout the world thanks to its Internet presence. Pitchfork The Minneapolis-St Paul area is home to a free alternative . Many local performers record for one of several regional labels in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the state. Some of these labels are well-known in their field, such as Red House , a prominent folk label, and the Twin/Tone indie rock label. In addition to record labels, Minneapolis has been home to several important recording studios. The first studio in the state was Kay Bank , established by studio engineer Bruce Swedien in the 1950s; the studio's first hits were from The Trashmen ("Surfin' Bird") and Dave Dudley ("Six Days on the Road"), which helped popularize a distinctive Kay Bank style based on using three-track recording and echo effects. Herb Pilhofer and Tom Jung worked at Kay Banks before founding Sound 80 in 1969. Sound 80 recorded numerous local artists over the years, ranging from part of Bob Dylan's '' Blood On The Tracks '' to works from Dave Brubeck . Though the Sound 80 building was sold in 1990, the studio is now an Anechoic Chamber labeled the "quietest place on Earth" by the '' Guinness Book Of World Records ''. Flyte Tyme Productions , a soul and R&B studio led by Jimmy Jam And Terry Lewis , defined the '' Minneapolis Sound '' in the 1980s with albums like Janet Jackson 's '' Control ''. Other important studios in Minneapolis include the Dove studio, which released several cult classic psychedelic and garage rock recordings in the 1960s, and Blackberry Wray , founded by Paul Stark , who would later found the Twin/Tone record label. Blackberry Wray recorded many local alternative rock performers like The Replacements and Soul Asylum , while Twin/Tone was home to The Suburbs and The Fingerprints , among others. City Pages Minneapolis is home to a few legendary record stores, Oar Folkjokeopus (now known as Treehouse Records) and the Electric Fetus , as well as other stores such as Cheapo . Venues nightclub]] Large venues frequently hosting widely popular national music acts in Minnesota include the Target Center , Xcel Energy Center , and, more rarely due to poor Acoustics , the Metrodome . The most influential small musical venue in the state is First Avenue , a nightclub that initially opened (as ''The Depot'') in 1970; it was soon renamed ''Uncle Sam's'', and became a franchise of the American Events Company , before finally becoming ''First Avenue'' in 1978. It's central location in the heart of downtown on 1st Avenue and historic value of launching renown acts such as Prince solidifies its importance in the current local scene and in Minnesota music history.Scholtes, Peter. "First Love." City Pages. September 3, 2003. http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1187/article11480.asp First Avenue (homepage) ; Minneapolis Music and Nightlife The Twin Cities is also home to older traditional theaters of less than 2,000 capacity including , all in the Hennepin Theatre District. There is also a mix of modern clubs and simple bar and stage venues which generally host local acts. In Minneapolis these include the Fine Line Music Cafe, 400 Bar, the Triple Rock Social Club , Varsity Theater , Foundation, Acadia Cafe, and the Uptown Bar. In St. Paul these include Station 4 and the Turf Club . Just outside of St. Paul in Maplewood there are The Rock, and Myth Nightclub . In 1990, Prince opened The Quest (then under a different name) in downtown's Warehouse District and the club built a reputation of booking the best local and national acts, competing directly with First Avenue. With a string of misfortunes in the early 2000s, it closed indefinitely by 2007.Anderson Jr., G.R. "RIP: The Quest club." City Pages. January 12, 2007. http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2007/01/rip_the_quest_nightclub.php Venues generally exclusive to classical, choral, vocal and acoustic music or productions include Orchestra Hall , the Basilica Of St. Mary , Ted Mann Concert Hall , Ordway Center and the Fitzgerald Theater , a major music and theater venue owned by Minnesota Public Radio . The Dakota Jazz Club on Nicollet Mall offers the region's best jazz. Along with collegiate music, choral and opera productions, Northrop Auditorium on the University Of Minnesota campus sometimes hosts up and coming national acts to appeal to a college-aged crowd but has a limited capacity of less than 5,000. The region also contains youth music venues, many of which operate as youth centers by day. These include the in Hopkins , Enigma Teen Center in Shakopee , and on some occasions the Apple Valley Teen Center . Also, a few venues catering to all ages crowds, now gone, are remembered as significant to the Twin Cities music scene. These include the Foxfire Coffee Lounge in downtown Minneapolis and the Fireball Espresso Cafe in Falcon Heights, St. Paul. Outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, important local venues include Chisholm 's Ironworld U.S.A. , which hosts major country stars, Ralph's Corner , which closed in 2005 but was for many years one of the premier indie rock clubs in the Fargo-Moorhead area.Byron, pg. 111 Byron calls Ironworld a "theme park of iron-ore mining and European immigrant cultures" Defunct but historically important venues include the former cinema, the Pence Opera House , Perpich Center For Arts Education , NorShor Theater ( Duluth ) and the Prom Ballroom , which showed many prominent jazz, rock and other bands in the mid-20th century. EDUCATION , a preeminent college of contemporary music based in Saint Paul , offers Bachelors of Music in music Performance and Music Business , as well as Associates Degrees and diploma programs in Recording Technology . Elementary school music education introduces elements of music like Melody , Rhythm and Harmony , and examines the music of a "variety of cultures and historical times". Students are expected to perform simply melodies and rhythms and perform songs and on instruments, and to use Musical Notation . Older students are exposed to more complex forms of music, and more scholarly approaches to music education. Middle school students further learn about "the connection between a work of music, its purpose, and its cultural and historical contexts" and comparisons between music and other art forms. Students also perform and listen to music, and are expected to evaluate performances using personal feelings and objective criteria. At the high school level, performance, critical and scholarly expectations are higher and more complex, and may require participation in extracurricular programs like a school band or chorus. Arts standards in 2003 HISTORY Music in Minnesota extends prior to historical documentation, with the es, Polka s and Waltz es with instrumentation including Fiddle , Button-box , Mandola , Accordion and Banjo . Leroy Larson and the Scandinavian Music Ensemble The first singing school in Minnesota was in St. Anthony (now part of Minneapolis), opened in 1851. Later in the century, the Plymouth Congregational Church of Minneapolis began a singing group in 1857, followed by the first such club for women only, the Lorelei Club (later the ''Ladies' Thursday Musical Chorus''), in 1892. A History of Minneapolis: Music yearbook]] Thousands of Norwegians settled in Minnesota between 1825 and 1925. Subcultures formed based around village of origin (''bygde''), and then formed organizations to maintain their home dialect and musical traditions. These organizations held annual meetings (''stevne'') which featured folk dancing, singing, fiddling and poetry. In the late 1860s, male choirs with primarily Norwegian and Swedish singers formed in cities and Lutheran colleges in Minnesota. These choirs sang a variety of popular and patriotic songs, hymns and folk tunes. In the 1880s, these choirs inspired the organization of singing societies that sponsored music festivals; the largest of these singing societies is the Norwegian Singers Association Of America and the Union Of Scandinavian Singers . The end of the 19th century also saw the foundation of two long-running music groups, the Thursday Musical Chorus and the Apollo Men's Musical Group . Two of the most important Minnesota institutions were founded in the early 20th century, namely the MacPhail School of Violin (1907, later becoming the MacPhail Center For Music ) and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (1903, later the Minnesota Orchestra ). A History of Minneapolis: Music Minneapolis became a home for Vaudeville , especially Scandinavian-American vaudeville. This field was known as ''bondkomik'' (Norwegian) or ''bondkomiker'' (Swedish), and featured multi-act plays, dances, songs and monologues. Vaudeville shows usually ended with social dancing. Minneapolis' most famous performers were the Olson Sisters , Hjalmar Peterson and Ernest and Clarence Iverson ( Slim Jim & The Vagabond Kid ). After World War 1, Scandinavian musical pride diminished, a process accelerated by economic decline in the 1930s; rural and regional dance music slowly died out and became largely unknown. During this era, however, the '' Leikarring '' movement began, which celebrated national Norwegian folk dance and song through musical societies like Minnesota's ''Norrona Leikarring''. Around the time of World War II , the Andrews Sisters from Minneapolis were very popular. Today they are perhaps best known for the song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," which was Covered by Bette Midler decades later. There was also a thriving Jazz scene at the time of the war. Local Radio host Leigh Kamman is linked to jazz in Minnesota, as he has now been covering it for more than sixty years. The oldest recording studio in the state, Kay Banks , was established in 1955 by Bruce Swedien , a recording engineer, using the building of the Garrick Theatre . City Pages FOLK MUSIC Minnesota is home to many ethnic groups, but the state's folk music is best known in the areas of Swedish , Finnish and Norwegian Musics . These ethnic communities frequently settled near each other, in Minnesota and in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, North Dakota and South Dakota, and their musical and cultural identities grew blurred. Norwegians and Swedes very frequently lived near each other in Minnesota, for example, and their music merged into a perceived Scandinavian identity, rather than uniquely Swedish or Norwegian. Their music is perceived as '' Old-time Music '', and is also influenced by the area's German, Irish, English, Polish and other Northern and Central European musics. Norwegian folk dance (''bygdedanser'') includes participatory social dances and performance dances like ''springar'', ''springdans'', ''pols'', ''rull'' and ''halling''. The Norwegian '' Gammeldans '' tradition continues in ethnic communities in Minnesota, where Two-step s, Waltz es, Polka s, Schottische s and Mazurka s are know as '' Old-time Music ''. Vocal music includes short poetic songs called ''stev'', Emigrant Ballad s which expressed nostalgia for Norway and express hope, despair and loss about life in the United States. Musical accompaniment includes the Accordion , Violin , Guitar , Bass Guitar , Piano , Harmonica , Organ , Banjo and Mandolin . The Norwegian Hardanger Fiddle , or ''hardingfele'', tradition has been played at weddings and taverns in Minnesota. MODERN MUSIC and his band, 2007]] ]] Minnesotan musicians from all genres have gained notoriety over the years, with the singing Andrews Sisters gaining worldwide prominence during World War II. The modern music scene includes Rock , Hip Hop and Electronic Music , and is especially known for Punk Rock and Hardcore . Prior to the evolution of punk in the 1970s, there was little rock and roll tradition from Minneapolis, which author Steven Blush attributed to a lack of anything to "rebel against", noting that it was Minneapolis' friendly atmosphere that made future hardcore punk musicians "crazy and rebellious"Blush, pg. 224 ''Prior to Punk, Minneapolis provided little fodder for the music industry. No Rock & Roll tradition existed. Maybe there was nothing to rebel against. Life in friendly places tends to make kids crazy and rebellious. Thus, Mpls cultivated its own brand of alienation and self-loathing.'' (sic) The first rock band from Minneapolis to achieve national prominence was the Surf Rock group The Trashmen who formed in 1962 and had a hit two years later with "Surfin' Bird". That song, along with Dave Dudley 's "Six Days on the Road", helped to establish the Kay Banks studio, which would go on to record bands like The Guess Who and would become known for a distinctive sound characterized by three-track recording and the use of echo effects. Dove Studios was another prominent studio in the 60s, known for releasing a series of psychedelic and garage rock singles that have become collector's items, including Calico Wall 's "Flight Reaction" and The Litter 's ''Distortions''. City Pages Bob Dylan, a Hibbing native, became the first major mainstream solo star from Minnesota in the 1960s, known for his unique lyricism and Folk-rock style. He spent a brief period in Minneapolis, attending the University of Minnesota, where he played free shows on the West Bank of the University Of Minnesota Minneapolis campus. He was associated with Dinkytown , the local center for young fans of folk music, where he listened to a wide variety of folk and blues. The city's local folk scene produced a few well-known performers in the 1960s, besides Dylan, who spent much of his early career based out New York; these include the guitarist Leo Kottke and the trio Koerner, Ray & Glover . Folk music continues to be a major part of the Minnesota music scene, and is broadcast by the '' Prairie Home Companion '', a radio show hosted by author Garrison Keillor ; the Red House record label is the most influential local label, and releases records by Peter Ostroushko and Greg Brown , among others.Unterberger, pg. 326 These influences contributed to the rise of Punk rockers Hüsker Dü , Soul Asylum , The Replacements , and the Rhythm And Blues stylings of Morris Day And The Time and Prince in the 1980s.1 R&B mega-producing team Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis have origins in the Twin Cities, and jazz musician Lester Young lived there for a time in his youth. These later sources brought the Minneapolis music scene to national attention; the period from about 1977 to 1987 was a period of incredible dynamism in the Minneapolis music scene, with offshoots in the punk scene including Soul Asylum, Babes In Toyland , the Clams and many other seminal favorites, while Prince's immense power in the industry (which peaked during this period) created a rhythm and blues mini-empire at his Paisley Park Studios , based in suburban Chanhassen . Contemporary local artists continue to enjoy critical acclaim such as Hip-hop duo Atmosphere and frontman Slug 's label Rhymesayers Entertainment , the smaller Doomtree , and commercially successful pop-rockers Semisonic . While things have slowed considerably, the Twin Cities are still the region's musical hotbed. More recently, the music scene has showed signs of revival with the success of the Minneapolis-based rock bands Motion City Soundtrack , Tapes 'n Tapes , and Quietdrive . The area has also shown an unusual affinity for certain artists. For instance, while largely unnoticed on their home turf in New York City, the Twin Cities accounted for the majority of national sales for Soul Coughing 's second album '' Irresistible Bliss '' during its first eight weeks of release; this followed from the fledgling fan base that Soul Coughing found here while touring for their first effort, '' Ruby Vroom ''. R&B See Also: Minneapolis sound Minneapolis became noted as a center for R&B in the 1980s, when the singing star Prince rose to fame. The city had little history in African American popular music, like R&B, until Prince debuted in 1978. He became the first architect of the ''Minneapolis sound'', a Funk and Disco -influenced style of R&B, and inspired a legion of subsequent performers, including The Time , Wendy & Lisa and Vanity Six .Unterberger, pgs. 323–325 In 1980, a group of session musicians, recording as Lipps Inc. , recorded the song "Funkytown" at Sound 80 Studios . The song launched the Record Production careers of Jimmy Jam And Terry Lewis , whose Flyte Tyme Productions helped define the Minneapolis sound. The pair's first big break was Janet Jackson 's '' Control '' in 1986, which launched her career and spawned numerous projects between Jam and Lewis with artists as varied as Mint Condition , Michael Jackson , Sounds Of Blackness , New Edition , Alexander O'Neal , Cherrelle , The S.O.S. Band , Boyz II Men Patti LaBelle , and many others.Unterberger, pgs. 325–326 Rock In the mid-1970s, the local music scene in the Minneapolis area began producing popular and innovative acts. Many signed to major record labels, and by the mid 1980s, had achieved national prominence. The first may have been Lipps Inc , who gained some popularity in the late 1970s during the Disco era with the global hit " Funkytown " (though the song itself was not in the rock genre). The Suburbs also formed around the same time. They were the first group to be released under the local Twin/Tone Records label in 1978. Largely only known locally, the group developed a New Wave sound in the 1980s and opened for national acts such as Iggy Pop and The B-52's .
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