Memories Are Made of This

This essay considers the cultural implications of a brief period in the life of New York’s Brill Building, America’s second Tin Pan Alley, a transformative moment in R&B that involved music performed by African American artists but written by songwriters committed to “Jewish Latin.” Recorded on 45 rpm vinyl, circulated in jukeboxes and on radio in new Top 40 radio formats, this sound formed young taste, and, in the bargain, its commercial cycles produced staggered temporal segments that shaped feeling and memory for a generation. One’s sense of life history, of history itself, was time-coded by what we heard and how we heard it, with some interesting implications.

Small-Screen Singalongs

As the television industry struggled to establish its identity in the late 1940s, it looked across town to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and embraced the deep-rooted, highly lucrative, popular musical and its music as sources of inspiration. It turned to the familiar sounds of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein—music which fueled Broadway ticket sales and the recording industry. Focusing specifically on commercial television’s first decade, 1944–1955, this chapter explores how network programming sought to absorb both the sweeping popularity and cultural legitimacy of the musical genre and Broadway stage in pursuit of much-needed viewers and a more established cultural image or cachet. Further, it explores how visuals were transported from Broadway houses to small screens and how the first glimpses of Broadway on television would emerge as the medium set the stage for decades of small-screen singalongs.

Stairway to Paradise

In November 1914, Max Steiner arrived in New York City, with little money and few prospects. This chapter details another formative time in Steiner’s life: his ascent from a struggling Tin Pan Alley music copyist to successful Broadway conductor. It also details his first professional experience with cinema (then silent), as musical supervisor and composer for a chain of New York theaters owned by William Fox. Steiner’s gregariousness and his gift for quick problem-solving led to work with celebrated composer Victor Herbert. Steiner also formed friendships with rising talents like Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, and George Gershwin. Stage hits like the Gershwin-scored George White’s Scandals expanded Steiner’s musical language, which was fundamentally European, to include American jazz. However, his own attempt to write a Broadway show—1923’s Peaches—was a failure, discouraging him for a time from further composition.

Portmantonality and Babbitt’s Poetics of Double Entendre

This essay presents a theory of musical and verbal double entendre inspired by and applicable to the late-period music of Milton Babbitt. Rather than assuming the appropriateness of any single method (which might tend toward singularity of meaning), a number of approaches are applied to three late works: primarily his Whirled Series (1987), and secondarily his Canonical Form (1983) and Gloss on ’Round Midnight (2001). These are interpreted through various kinds of analysis, not only serial, but also tonal (chordal and voice-leading), associational, pitch-permeational, and form-functional. Connections to Tin-Pan-Alley song lyrics, jazz improvisation, hermeneutics, and Gibsonian affordances are discussed in relation to these musical analyses. All this is done to infer and cultivate connections (represented as a conceptual integration networks) between Babbitt’s extra-theoretic verbal expression and extra-dodecaphonic aspects of his music, connections that suggest an underlying poetics (a tacit motivational philosophy implicitly fueling his creativity) that provides pragmatic benefit to the artistic ambitions of diverse personal identities.

Stephen Foster

Stephen Collins Foster (b. Lawrence, near Pittsburgh, PA, 4 July 1826–d. New York, 13 January 1864) was the first professional songwriter in the United States, and the earliest to write songs whose images pervaded American culture and whose melodies endure into the 21st century. For his most familiar songs, he wrote both lyrics and music, though he also set poems that had appeared in household magazines, and toward the end of his life he partnered with poet George Cooper. His oeuvre includes principally songs for solo voice (or solo voice plus four-voice chorus) with piano accompaniment, four-voice hymns, and instrumental works (mostly dances, for piano). His songs for blackface minstrels (which provided him with the majority of his income, though they amount to less than one-tenth of his 287 authenticated compositions) were controversial from the start; they made Foster’s reputation, even as he attempted to create “refined” songs in a genre he considered to be rife with “trashy and really offensive words” (Foster letter to E. P. Christy, 25 May 1852). He was of Scots-Irish descent, and as a resident of a northern industrializing urban center that drew workers from throughout Western Europe, he was attuned to different national styles of song and common sentiments of lyric poetry not confined by ethnicity, race, or social class. His song structures and lyrics became models for other songwriters well into the Tin Pan Alley era; his inability to control copyrights (which were owned by his publishers) and his death in poverty (with 38 cents in his pocket) were factors in the establishment of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) fifty years later. It is perhaps not coincidental that songs quoting Foster’s “Swanee River” (“The Old Folks at Home”) helped launch the careers of two of the most significant American songwriters of the 20th century, Irving Berlin (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) and George Gershwin (“Swanee”). This bibliography summarizes the major sources of archival, published, and online information about Foster’s life, career, music, and their interpretation and influence in the social and cultural history of the United States, Europe, and East Asia. It omits the sound recordings, plays, films, novels, and other creative works that reflect and contribute to that influence.

The Polish Tin Pan Alley, a Jewish Street

This chapter highlights the 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan, that became the home of several music publishers. It looks into the various accounts of how 28th Street came to be called “Tin Pan Alley,” pointing out the observation that the pianos played by song “pluggers” produced a cacophony reminiscent of the clatter of tin pans. It also mentions how the name “Tin Pan Alley” was eventually used as a metonym for the American popular-music industry. The chapter explores the pre-eminent role of Jewish composers, poets, songwriters, and performers in the Polish popular music industry of the 1920s and 1930s. It also focuses on Adam Aston, who was credited with popularizing the first Polish rumba, and Mieczysław Fogg, the most popular Polish singer of the twentieth century.

Noisy drummers, ragtime, jazz, and the avant-garde

This chapter examines the early drum kit and how it challenged preconceptions about the relationship between noise and music. First, it explores the development of ragtime music. Second, it examines the negative impact of the early music scholarship on the status of the drum kit and drummers. Third, it discusses the profession of trap drummers and their role in performing sound effects for silent film. Fourth, it discusses the challenges facing women who wished to become professional drummers, the association between percussive noise and immigrant cultures, the influence of Chinese instruments on the early drum kit, and the origins of Tin Pan Alley. Fifth, it examines the role of the drum kit in the birth of jazz. Sixth, it explores the drum kit and drummers in 1920s recording studios. Finally, it examines the influence of the drum kit and other percussion instruments in classical music.