In Tuesday’s blogpost about Tin Pan Alley and the Jazz Age, I said that I wanted to talk a little more about how the songwriters of that era impacted shows after it, even up to today.
When I taught this course back in 2020, I asked my class the question:
What do these old dead guys have to do with today’s musicals?
And then I created this graphic:
The Melody Lingers On
If we look at Irving Berlin as the supreme melodist of the era (“Say it isn’t so,” “Cheek to cheek,” “The melody lingers on”), and then we look at who came after him, we can see that melody has remained paramount. The shows where we leave humming a tune, whether it’s from Oklahoma!, Fiddler, Phantom, Ragtime, or The Greatest Showman (yeah, it’s a movie – for now) – those are the shows that live on.
(I was actually surprised that Pasek & Paul considered themselves heirs to Rodgers & Hammerstein – until I read a Vanity Fair article titled “The Heirs of Rodgers and Hammerstein.” Plus, in this interview from 2016, they come right out and name them as one of their primary influences.)
An interesting quote I read about Irving Berlin as a songwriter comes from a blogpost by music historian Robert Greenberg:
… Berlin, unlike any of the other great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, came to writing songs as a singer and not as a piano player. As a singer, he always preferred to use the most direct, most “singable” melodies he could create, and words he could find.
Here’s Linda Ronstadt singing “What’ll I do” on her 1983 album “What’s new,” released 60 years after its 1923 composition:
I think it’s interesting that Gershwin called Irving Berlin, “America’s Franz Schubert” (also from the blogpost above). Which leads us to …
I Got Rhythm
Although Gershwin (and Porter, in the next section) was no slouch at writing a wonderful melody, he was the first person to introduce the rhythms of jazz to musical theater (as well as classical music – i.e., Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris). And we hear his influence in the rhythmic intensity of Leonard Bernstein (“Mambo“), the mixed meters of Stephen Sondheim, Jason Robert Brown, and the rap of Lin Manuel Miranda in both In the Heights and Hamilton. In fact, for Sondheim and LMM, the rhythms are most often dictated by their text, particularly the rhymes, both internal and end.
The same is true of George Gershwin – his lyrics were written by his brother, Ira, but his way of setting them dictated the rhythm. Here’s a great and perfectly titled example of this:
Anything Goes
Cole Porter’s music was elegant and his lyrics were clever (and there are often many saucier alternatives to the ones you find in his published works). His style was sophisticated – he came from money and the Midwest, not from Russia or Russian immigrants, as were Berlin and Gershwin. The musicals of Cole Porter are witty, urbane (and usually urban). I see similarities in the music of Kurt Weill (Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus), Kander & Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret), Maury Yeston (Grand Hotel, Nine) and Anais Mitchell (Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet). (I have no idea why I included Frank Wildhorn in the above graphic – I’m sure it made sense to me nearly 5 years ago, but right now I’m drawing a blank.)
Here’s the composer himself singing “You’re the top” from Anything Goes: