The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950 PDF Download

Author: Allen Forte
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691043999
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz. Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.

Author: David Metzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509746
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
While ballads have been a cornerstone of popular music for decades, this is the first book to explore the history and appeal of these treasured songs. David Metzer investigates how and why the styles of ballads have changed over a period of more than seventy years, offering a definition of the genre and discussing the influences of celebrated performers including Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston. The emotional power of the ballad is strongly linked to the popular mood of the time, and consequently songs can tell us much about how events and emotions were felt and understood in wider culture at specific moments of recent American history. Tracing both the emotional and stylistic developments of the genre from the 1950s to the present day, this lively and engaging volume is as much a musical history as it is a history of emotional life in America.

Author: Howard Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190458291
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Born into a poor Virginian family, John Treville Latouche (1914-56), in his short life, made a profound mark on America's musical theater as a lyricist, book writer, and librettist. The wit and skill of his lyrics elicited comparisons with the likes of Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter, but he had too, noted Stephen Sondheim, a large vision of what musical theater could be, and he proved especially venturesome in helping to develop a lyric theater that innovatively combined music, word, dance, and costume and set design. Many of his pieces, even if not commonly known today, remain high points in the history of American musical theater. A great American genius in the words of Duke Ellington, Latouche initially came to wide public attention in his early twenties with his cantata for soloist and chorus, Ballad for Americans (1939), with music by Earl Robinson-a work that swept the nation during the Second World War. Other milestones in his career included the all-black musical fable, Cabin in the Sky (1940), with Vernon Duke; an interracial updating of John Gay's classic, The Beggar's Opera, as Beggar's Holiday (1946), with Duke Ellington; two acclaimed Broadway operas with Jerome Moross: Ballet Ballads (1948) and The Golden Apple (1954); one of the most enduring operas in the American canon, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), with Douglas Moore; and the operetta Candide (1956), with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman. Extremely versatile, he also wrote cabaret songs, participated in documentary and avant-garde film, translated poetry, adapted plays, and much else. Meanwhile, as one of Manhattan's most celebrated raconteurs and hosts, he developed a wide range of friends in the arts, including, to name only a few, Paul and Jane Bowles (whom he introduced to each other), Yul Brynner, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Frederick Kiesler, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Dawn Powell, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams-a dazzling constellation of diverse artists working in sundry fields, all attracted to Latouche's brilliance and joie de vivre, not to mention his support for their work. This book draws widely on archival collections both at home and abroad, including Latouche's diaries and the papers of Bernstein, Ellington, Moore, Moross, and many others, to tell for the first time, the story of this fascinating man and his work.

Author: Allen Forte
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133359
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In the twenties, thirties, and forties, now-legendary American songwriters and lyricists created a repertoire of popular songs, songs that have captured the hearts of generations of music lovers. George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael and many others, along with such lyricists as Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Dorothy Fields, produced extraordinary songs of signal importance to the American musical heritage. In this book Allen Forte shares his love of American popular song. He discusses in detail twenty-three songs, ranging from Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” (1924) to Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out with My Baby” (1947), guiding readers and listeners toward a deeper appreciation of this vital and engaging music. Forte writes for the general reader, assuming no background other than a familiarity with basic music notation. Each song is discussed individually and includes complete lyrics and simple leadsheet notation. Forte discusses the songs’ distinctive musical features and their sophisticated, often touching and witty lyrics. Readers can follow the music while they listen to the accompanying compact disc, which was specially recorded for this volume by baritone Richard Lalli and pianist-arranger Gary Chapman, with Allen Forte, pianist-arranger for “Embraceable You” and “Come Rain or Come Shine”. Learn about these favorite songs and more: “How Long Has This Been Going On?” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “Embraceable You” “Autumn in New York” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” “The Nearness of You” “That Old Black Magic” “Come Rain or Come Shine”

Author: Brian Kane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190600500
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
When we talk about a jazz "standard" we usually mean one of the many songs that jazz musicians repeatedly play. But unlike classical musical works, standards are always being transformed in performance. They are rearranged and improvised, which raises the question: what gives a standard its identity? Hearing Double answers that question. Filled with case studies and music analysis, this book will draw your attention to unheard aspects of jazz performance as well as unrecognized philosophical, social, and cultural dimensions of the jazz repertoire.

Author: John Paul Meyers
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496850882
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the “Great American Songbook.” Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D’Angelo, and Janelle Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists’ homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.

Author: Jonathan Rhodes Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000091287
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1096

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Book Description
Film Music in the Sound Era: A Research and Information Guide offers a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on music in sound film (1927–2017). Thematically organized sections cover historical studies, studies of musicians and filmmakers, genre studies, theory and aesthetics, and other key aspects of film music studies. Broad coverage of works from around the globe, paired with robust indexes and thorough cross-referencing, make this research guide an invaluable tool for all scholars and students investigating the intersection of music and film. This guide is published in two volumes: Volume 1: Histories, Theories, and Genres covers overviews, historical surveys, theory and criticism, studies of film genres, and case studies of individual films. Volume 2: People, Cultures, and Contexts covers individual people, social and cultural studies, studies of musical genre, pedagogy, and the industry. A complete index is included in each volume.

Author: Michael G. Garber
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496834313
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence—Certificate of Merit in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music Ten songs, from “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902) to “You Made Me Love You” (1913), ignited the development of the classic pop ballad. In this exploration of how the style of the Great American Songbook evolved, Michael G. Garber unveils the complicated, often-hidden origins of these enduring, pioneering works. He riffs on colorful stories that amplify the rising of an American folk art composed by innovators both famous and obscure. Songwriters, and also the publishers, arrangers, and performers, achieved together a collective genius that moved hearts worldwide to song. These classic ballads originated all over the nation—Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan—and then the Tin Pan Alley industry, centered in New York, made the tunes unforgettable sensations. From ragtime to bop, cabaret to radio, new styles of music and modes for its dissemination invented and reinvented the intimate, personal American love ballad, creating something both swinging and tender. Rendered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others, recordings and movies carried these songs across the globe. Using previously underexamined sources, Garber demonstrates how these songs shaped the music industry and the lives of ordinary Americans. Besides covering famous composers like Irving Berlin, this history also introduces such little-known figures as Maybelle Watson, who had to sue to get credit and royalties for creating the central content of the lyric for “My Melancholy Baby.” African American Frank Williams contributed to the seminal “Some of These Days” but was forgotten for decades. The ten ballads explored here permanently transformed American popular song.

Author: B. Lee Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313072728
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The function of print resources as instructional guides and descriptors of popular music pedagogy are addressed in this concise volume. Increasingly, public school teachers and college-level faculty members are introducing and utilizing music-related educational approaches in their classrooms. This book lists reports dealing with popular music resources as classroom teaching materials, and will stimulate further thought among students and teachers. It focuses on the growing spectrum of published scholarship available to instructors in specific teaching fields (art, geography, social studies, urban studies, and so on) as well as on the multitude of general resources (including biographical directories and encyclopedias of artist profiles). Building on two recent publications: Teaching with Popular Music Resources: A Bibliography of Interdisciplinary Instructional Approaches, Popular Music and Society, XXII, no. 2 (Summer 1998), and American Culture Interpreted through Popular Music: Interdisciplinary Teaching Approaches (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000), this volume focuses on the growing spectrum of published scholarship that is available to instructors in specific teaching fields (art, geography, social studies, urban studies, and so on) as well as on the multitude of general resources (including biographical directories and encyclopedias of artist profiles).

Author: Jack Boss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888478
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler draws together papers delivered at the 2014 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The conference spanned an unusually wide spectrum of musical styles, including papers on European twelve-tone music after the Second World War, fourteenth-century music, pop music and jazz, the music of living composers, narrative and characterization, and the history of music theory. The title of the book reflects the large span of musical cultures that are represented within, but also accounts for the common thread through all of these essays, a strong emphasis on understanding the forms and processes of music through analysis. The reader will find within it a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.