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'S Wonderful George
Gershwin / Ira Gershwin |
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| A lyric in Cole Porter's musical Jubilee has a society hostess saying of her next party: 'Twill be different in every way ... Gershwin's promised not to play.' George Gershwin (1898-1937) spent hours at parties improvising flamboyant variations on his latest hits, but in his compositions he could also show a mastery of economy by taking simple intervals and linking them to create flowing, compact melodies. 'S Wonderful, from the 1927 musical Funny Face, is such an example. The opening has the simple interval of a third repeated six times in its first sixteen bars, and the release uses an extended musical phrase that consists of little more than one note repeated for the entire eight bars. Ira Gershwin's lyrics, on the other hand, push linguistic playfulness to new extremes. | |
| Begin the Beguine Cole Porter |
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| Cole Porter (1891-1964) composed for his show Jubilee (1935) the longest popular song ever written, Begin the Beguine, a musical marathon coming in at a lengthy one hundred and eight measures. The beguine is a popular dance of Martinique, a fusion of African style with French ballroom steps, performed with undulating body movements and the partners separate. It reached Europe when Martiniquans were shipped to France to fight in World War I and then settled there with their music. Porter's beguine is indistinguishable from the Cuban rumba, and this rhythm has become one of the trademarks of his individual style, making its appearance in the accompaniments to Night and Day, I've Got You Under My Skin and other songs. In 1938 Artie Shaw recorded the famous swing arrangement that established Begin the Beguine as a standard. Porter was pleased with Shaw's version and invited him to a party, greeting him with: 'Happy to meet my collaborator.' 'Does that involve royalties?' asked Shaw. 'I'm afraid not' countered Cole, the multi-millionaire. | |
| Autumn Leaves Joseph Kosma / Jacque Prévert / Johnny Mercer |
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| Les feuilles mortes (The Dead Leaves), written in 1947, has been recorded on over 600 albums by artists from around the world, but its Hungarian-French composer, Joseph Kosma (1905-1969), is better known in some circles for his operas, his ballets, and his music for French cinema. He studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, and then moved to Berlin where he was associated in music theater with Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Bertolt Brecht. Kosma arrived in Paris in 1933 and began his career as film composer. He eventually scored over one hundred films, including some of the greatest ever made: Jean Renoir's Le Grande Illusion and La Régle du Jeu, and Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Pardise. Autumn Leaves is one of over eighty chansons he composed in association with the poet, Jacques Prévert. | |
| I Got Rhythm George Gershwin / Ira Gershwin |
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| By the time Girl Crazy had appeared in 1930, George Gershwin the successful theater songwriter had startled the musical world by composing Rhapsody In Blue, An American In Paris, and a piano concerto. He was firmly established in two musical worlds: the vernacular and the cultivated. Girl Crazy produced a string of hits. It contained the song that introduced Ethel Merman to New York, I Got Rhythm, and she brought the house down by holding a high C for sixteen bars while the band continued with the melody. The show's romantic ballad, Embraceable You, highlighted another newcomer to Broadway, nineteen-year-old Ginger Rogers. Gershwin developed an early infatuation with the pentatonic scale, the notes of which can be played on the piano's black keys, and I Got Rhythm is one of his pentatonic inspirations. The song's first two phrases, first rising, then falling, come out of this scale. Another Gershwin concert work evolved from this song, Variations on I Got Rhythm, for orchestra and piano (1934). | |
| Smoke Gets in Your Eyes Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach |
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| In 1926, working on the score of Show Boat, Jerome Kern (1885-1945) wrote an instrumental fragment for tap dancing, to be performed while the scenery was being changed. Short notes were used to allow the taps to be heard. While working on the 1933 musical Roberta, Kern's lyricist, Otto Harbach, saw this melody on the piano and suggested that the short notes, if augmented and smoothed out, might make an attractive ballad. Kern at first assertively insisted that a slow tempo did not fit the melody, but he eventually relented and adapted it to the languid pace of the song he later admitted was his own favorite, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. |
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| Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year Frank Loesser |
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| Frank Loesser (1910-1969), the composer of such landmark musicals as Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and The Most Happy Fella, began his career as a respected Hollywood lyricist, working with such masters as Hoagy Carmichael, Jule Styne, and Arthur Schwartz. He became his own collaborator, however, when required to write Special Services shows during World War II. These first compositions were mostly wartime exercises in jingoism, typified by the best-selling Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, but a career as a major new composer of popular song was launched when Deanna Durbin sang his ballad, Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year, in the 1944 film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel, Christmas Holiday. | |
| Medley: As Time Goes By / The Very Thought of You Herman Hupfeld;Ray Noble; arr. Charles Cassey |
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| LSA: (softly) Play it once, Sam, for old times sake. SAM: I don't know what you mean, Miss Ilsa. ILSA: Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By. These lines, not the mythical, 'Play it again, Sam', introduce As Time Goes By in the classic 1943 film, Casablanca. As Time Goes By is one of several older sentimental and nostalgic songs that were reintroduced during the stressful war years. The song was written in 1931 by Herbert Hupfeld (1894-1951) for the musical Everybody's Welcome, but it was practically forgotten until Sam, Dooley Wilson, sang it (the piano part dubbed by a studio musician) on the screen in Casablanca. As Time Goes By then became an immediate hit, and old recordings by Rudy Vallee had to be resurrected to supply the demand. Ray Noble (1903-1978) was a British band leader whose vocalist was Al Bowlly, the United Kingdom's answer to Bing Crosby in the then fashionable microphone-friendly crooning stakes. Noble came to the United States in 1934, assumed leadership of a band assembled by Glen Miller, and recorded, with Bowlly, The Very Thought of You. Noble moved to Hollywood in 1937 and worked as music director (participating in a little on-air mugging) for the Edgar Bergan/Charlie McCarthy Show and the George Burns and Gracie Allen show. |
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| I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart Duke Ellington / Henry Nemo, John Redman, Irving Mills; arr. Chuck Cassey |
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| The leading music venue in Harlem during the 1920s and 30s was the Cotton Club. It was a whites-only club that catered to a bewildering mixture of tastes, from the most high-minded intellectual curiosity to cultural and erotic slumming. A young band leader named Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was engaged there in 1927, and quickly achieved success for himself and the club. Ellington set out to become a successful composer and arranger of music for his own orchestra, but in 1930 (the year of Mood Indigo), lyrics were added to a series of works originally designed only for instrumental performance. Ellington's tenth show at the Cotton Club began in March of 1938 with a revue called Cotton Club Parade, Fourth Edition. He may well have been seeking a song hit to come out of this score, but ironically, the song that eventually succeeded, I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart, was dropped from the show itself. Ellington played it, nevertheless, during his regular radio broadcasts from the club, and it became one of his best-selling recordings. | |
Part II
| Laura
David Raksin / Johnny Mercer |
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| One technique of writing a motion picture score is the monotheme, the use of a single melodic idea throughout the score to emphasize a particular emotion, situation, or character. It was a method used with incomparable effect by film composer David Raksin (b.1912) in the 1944 film noir, Laura. The haunting theme became a million record seller in an instrumental treatment by the Woody Herman band, and the studio, sensing a way to double its money, engaged Johnny Mercer (1906-1976) to put words to it. Mercer, in an attempt to fit the song to the murder-mystery plot, combined a touch of Southern Gothic, 'footsteps that you hear down the hall', with words of sentimental nostalgia. | |
| Stormy Weather Harold Arlen / Ted Koehler |
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| A typical Harlem Cotton Club presentation featured lavish staging, elaborate costumes, and scores composed by accomplished Broadway composers such as Harold Arlen, but these shows had an energy that exceeded the decorous bounds of the Broadway stage. Arlen mastered many different song styles, but was most partial to the blues, sidestepping the traditional structure while retaining its plangent spirit. Arlen wrote Stormy Weather for Cab Calloway, producing a bluesy four note opening phrase that he thought would compliment Calloway's distinctive 'hi-de-ho' scat singing. When Calloway was replaced by Duke Ellington, Arlen prevailed on Ethel Waters to do the number. But even before one of the Cotton Club's most famous revues opened, Stormy Weather had become a best-selling record in a performance by Leo Reismann and his orchestra, with the composer himself doing the vocal. | |
| Night and Day Cole Porter |
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| Cole Porter, who loved gossip and chit-chat, disingenuously orchestrated stories to conceal two facts: his often profligate lifestyle and his sources of musical inspiration. He offered several bogus scenarios for the genesis of Night and Day, created for the 1933 musical Gay Divorce. It was either spawned by the world travelor's exposure to Moroccan religious chanting, or by the luxuriant atmosphere of the Ritz-Carlton and Newport beach, or by an overheard remark of Mrs. Vincent Astor about a leaky faucet ('Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops'). The song's real importance, of course, is its bold musical and verse structure, with a duration of 48-bars in place of the conventional 32; an opening with one note repeated 33 times over an eight-bar span followed by a note a half step higher played 29 consecutive times; and highly dramatic and imitative effects, such as the suggestion of heart beat in the verse, and the intense repetitions of sound/one/under/sun/hungry, moon/room/boom/through/you. | |
| Don't Fence Me In Cole Porter |
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| The popularity of the movie Western in the 1930s was responsible for the entry of a fringe genre, cowboy music, into the mainstream of American popular song. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter sang these songs in their movies and on the radio, and the demand for cowboy songs became so great that stars of screen musicals began singing them who had not even a remote affiliation with the West. In 1935, Porter composed six songs for a 20th Century-Fox film to be entitled Adios, Argentina. The picture was never produced, and only the song Don't Fence Me In was published. The public would never hear it, however, until it was sung by Roy Rogers cantering about on the back of his faithful horse Trigger in the 1944 film, Hollywood Canteen. The song soon aroused American patrioticism and became popular with American troops. In February 1945, when the liner Gripsholm landed in New York with hundreds of wounded and disabled servicemen, they disembarked to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters singing Don't Fence Me In. | |
| Over the Rainbow Harold Arlen / E. Y. Harburg |
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| Harold Arlen's score for the MGM film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz was not the first musical setting of the work. Baum himself wrote the book and lyrics to a very successful Broadway production in 1903. When Arlen first played the film's ballad melody for Yip Harburg, the lyricist thought the stately and richly harmonized melody sounded like a song for Nelson Eddy, not for an eleven-year-old girl from Kansas. It was only when Arlen, at the suggestion of Ira Gershwin, toned down some of the music's grandeur that Harburg agreed to do the lyric. Baum's book never mentions a rainbow, but the image certainly suited the film's dream sequence seque from black and white to technicolor. Amazingly, the studio cut the song from three successive prints of the film, objecting to its difficulty, its farmyard setting, and its perceived lack of market appeal. Who would buy the sheet music, who would record it, who would play it on the radio? The questions have been answered. | |
| Ain't Misbehavin Thomas Fats Waller / Andy Razaf |
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| In the 1920s and 30s, Fats Waller (1904-1943) and other black artists were often invited to fashionable parties on Park Avenue, where their white counterparts in music, men like Harold Arlen and George Gershwin, liked to pick up new ideas from these true jazz innovators. Waller, already known as clown, virtuoso, stride pianist of genius, stride being the predominant style in Harlem, composer, singer, and storyteller, was 'discovered' in 1934 by an RCA Victor executive at such a party, given by Gershwin himself, and launched into a successful carreer as a Derby-hatted popular entertainer. Waller had written Ain't Misbehavin' five years earlier (1929) as part of the score for Hot Chocolates. Louis Armstrong, in his first Broadway show, sang and played the song, first from the orchestra pit between acts and then from the stage. Waller scored his final success with a classic performance of his most famous composition in the 1943 film Stormy Weather. | |
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