Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: popular music and the experience of modernism
- PART I MUSICAL MODERNISM: POPULAR MUSIC IN THE TIME OF JAZZ
- PART II GERSHWIN, PORTER, WALLER, AND HOLIDAY
- 3 Melting pot and meeting place: the Gershwin brothers and the arts of quotation
- 4 “What is this thing called love?”: Cole Porter and the rhythms of desire
- 5 Signifying music: Fats Waller and the time of jazz
- 6 Music without composition: Billie Holiday and ensemble performance
- Conclusion: popular music and the revolution of the word
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Melting pot and meeting place: the Gershwin brothers and the arts of quotation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: popular music and the experience of modernism
- PART I MUSICAL MODERNISM: POPULAR MUSIC IN THE TIME OF JAZZ
- PART II GERSHWIN, PORTER, WALLER, AND HOLIDAY
- 3 Melting pot and meeting place: the Gershwin brothers and the arts of quotation
- 4 “What is this thing called love?”: Cole Porter and the rhythms of desire
- 5 Signifying music: Fats Waller and the time of jazz
- 6 Music without composition: Billie Holiday and ensemble performance
- Conclusion: popular music and the revolution of the word
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In important ways, it is proper to begin discussions of strategies of music and lyric composition in Modernism and Popular Music with the Gershwin brothers. They worked at the heart of commercial popular music in the United States in the early twentieth century, New York City, and, in the face of the racism of American society, they were the first to introduce elements of African American jazz to commercial music in the United States. In fact, Cole Porter – Protestant, from Indiana and living outside New York – felt throughout his life that the kind of popular music he was writing was significantly “outside” the work in New York, that he himself didn't fit into the popular music scene. And Fats Waller, a lifelong New Yorker, developed a music that was also “outside” the New York City mainstream of Tin Pan Alley in his stride piano of Harlem. In many ways, then, Jewish American composers and lyricists, striving to articulate in music what Irving Berlin described as “what the people want, what they understand, what hits them and hits me,” accomplished situating themselves, as Charles Hamm says, “in the absolute center of American popular culture” by pursuing the “twofold strategy” of the new immigrants in the early twentieth century: “(a) trying to become ‘invisible,’ by modifying all obvious signs of ethnic origin (dress, language, sometimes their names and even physical appearance) in an attempt to be indistinguishable from ‘mainstream’ Americans; and (b) trying to make positive and visible contributions to American life and culture.
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- Modernism and Popular Music , pp. 81 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011