Module 7
American Popular Music
a. Early American Psalms, Hymns, and Gospel Singing
America was settled in the early seventeenth century by passionate, devout people
who were seeking freedom for their particular religious beliefs. They were serious folk,
and the music they brought with them, both written and aural, was mostly religious
music. Of course, people sang and played what we call “secular” popular music—fiddle
tunes, sea shanties, work songs, and ballads, for example—but this kind of popular music
wasn’t published in America until the early nineteenth century. People may have sung
everywhere, but the one place in which they sang from written scores was church.
Among the earliest books, musical or otherwise, to be published in America was
the Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1640), a Psalter (Book of Psalms) to
which homophonic and polyphonic settings of psalm texts were affixed in later editions.
During the eighteenth century, the old psalm tunes of New England were gradually
replaced by newer hymns, accompanied by church organs. These hymns gradually
journeyed south and west, more or less following the path of the Appalachian Trail. As
they migrated, new hymns were added to the common repertoire. Prior to the American
Civil War (1861–1865), these tunes were sung not only in free white churches but also
within enslaved African-American communities, providing a springboard for spirituals
and gospel music. Whites generally sang from books; blacks, from an unwritten oral
tradition.
Such a bicultural mode of performance can be seen in the history of the American
gospel hymn “Amazing Grace.” Although known by all, “Amazing Grace” has a
generally unknown history, owing largely to the complexity of the story. The words
originated in the British Isles in 1748, the product of seaman John Newton, who penned
them as the result of a spiritual conversion he experienced after being rescued from a
violent storm. Originally a slave trader, Newton went on to become a clergyman and an
abolitionist. The text of Newton’s hymn made its way to America, where in 1835 South
Carolinian William Walker supplied it with a new melody, a tune that Walker adopted
and adapted from a well-known New England song called “New Britain.” (Supplying a
new text with an old tune was commonplace in earlynineteenth-century America; that’s
how “The Star-Spangled Banner” came about in 1814.) Eventually, Englishman
Newton’s text with American southerner Walker’s borrowed melody was published in
The Southern Harmony in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1835 and thereafter became a
beloved favorite. If this sounds like the script for a film or a Broadway show, you’re
right. The film Amazing Grace appeared in 2006, and a show with the same name opened
on Broadway in 2015.
But the story continues. Although “Amazing Grace” has been published countless
times, the music continues to evolve. Because this tune was disseminated partly through
oral tradition, regional dialects have emerged and will continue to do so. Recall the
version of the tune you have in your head, find it on the Internet, or watch a YouTube
video of President Barack Obama (who appears to have his own version) singing it, and
compare them with the original printed version from 1835.
What accounts for the power, indeed the staying power, of “Amazing Grace” (see
Listening Guide)? Why have generations loved this melody? First of all, the tune is
simple but not square; it consists of two seven-bar phrases—unusual for a popular song.
In range it outlines exactly an octave, and the tonic triad is strongly present. In terms of a
scale, the melody is pentatonic (here G, A, C, D, E, [G]), the sound of which takes us
from the classical realm to the world of folk music. The tempo is slow, and the meter is
triple (weak strong, weak strong), which adds a comforting, lilting quality to the listening
experience. Finally, not only do words such as “sweet the sound” add emotional impact
(music sung to a text has the capacity for a “double whammy” of musical and syntactical
perception), there are also verbal disjunctions (“lost” and “blind”) that resolve (to
“found” and “see”) as a musical dissonance might resolve to consonance. Pun intended,
this is an amazing tune—so simple, so elevating, and so eternally perfect.
Hymns such as “Amazing Grace” became deeply embedded in the oral memory
of Americans, particularly in the South. Among African-Americans before the Civil War,
social gatherings and certain musical instruments were controlled or proscribed, for fear
they would foment rebellion within this enslaved population. The singing of hymns in
churches, however, was permitted, and hymns became the core of the musical, social, and
spiritual experience of blacks in the South. When sung in a black community, texts that
referred to “crossing on over the river Jordan” or that enjoined “let my people go” would
be heard as encouragement, or at leasthope, of a release from the slavery of this life. In
black communities, the hymn might be “Africanized” in several ways: The words might
be parsed out between leader and chorus in “call and response” style (see below under
“Blues”), the tune might be syncopated or “jazzed up,” or the accompaniment might be
converted to a blues harmony, and, in the end, all would be sung with joyous hand-
clapping, foot-stomping enthusiasm. In printed form, this is a hymn; when Africanized in
this fashion, the hymn becomes gospel music. In the course of time, “The StarSpangled
Banner” (1814) became America’s official national anthem and “Amazing Grace”
(1835), its unofficial gospel hymn.
Yet, such is the protean power of music that the same “Amazing Grace” would
sound very different in a white Appalachian church or outdoor revivalist meeting.
Supplied with two counter voices—one a harmony-implying bass below and the other a
“close-harmony” voice, within an octave around the melody, above—and accompanied
by a guitar or fiddle, the tune stuck closer to its published original. This style of
Appalachian-hill country singing has been called, since the 1940s, country music.
b. Country Music
Country music can be defined as the traditional repertoire of religious and folk
music flourishing in the Appalachian region of America. The songs, mostly about love
and life’s disappointments, came mainly from the Anglo-Irish settlers. They were mostly
folk ballads, narrative songs in strophic form that told a (usually sad) tale in an
unemotional way. Appalachian ballads were at first sung by voice alone or voice
accompanied by a fiddle (an inexpensive violin played without much vibrato). Sometimes
a mountain dulcimer or an autoharp might also be used or a banjo, a four- or five-string
plucked folk instrument of African-American origin. Eventually, all of them were
replaced by one or more guitars, an instrument with greater resonance and range.
The style of country music usually involves a vibrato-less voice, which imparts a
“lonesome” quality. The singer often slides between pitches, a musical gesture that seems
congruous with the many diphthongs (two sounds on one vowel) of a typical southern
drawl. Harmonies are uncomplicated in the extreme, usually consisting of only two (I and
V) or three (I, IV, and V) chords. This harmonic simplicity likely derived from the
rudimentary skills of early country singers, who could strum only these chords on the
banjo or guitar. Unlike African-American gospel music, rarely is there a strong beat or
drums in traditional country music.
From rural roots in the Appalachian Mountains, country music has grown into a
mega-industry. There are country music stars, country radio stations, and a country music
city (Nashville) with a Country Music Hall of Fame. While CD sales of almost all genres
of music—pop as well as classical—have steadily declined in recent years in favor of
digital downloads, those of country music have actually increased. Garth Brooks, for
example, has sold 150 million albums. Each week, according to a recent survey, more
than 77 million adults tune in to a country music station.
Whatever one’s response to country music—people seem either to love it or to
hate it—the explosion of the genre has had one undeniable consequence: It has elevated
the female vocalist to a position of primacy as a recording artist. The process began with
Sara Carter (1898–1979), the lead singer of the influential Carter family, and continued
with June Carter Cash (1929–2003; wife of Johnny Cash), LorettaLynn (1935–), Dolly
Parton (1945–), Reba McEntire (1955–), Shania Twain (1965–), Carrie Underwood
(1983–), and Taylor Swift (1989–). Oddly, the same ascent has happened with gospel
singers, for the majority of the best of them have been women. Whether in the context of
the white Appalachian barn dance or the African-American church service, women were
on an equal footing with men regarding access to education, opportunity, and
encouragement, and, in this domain of popular music, they came to receive, in the word
of Aretha Franklin (1942–), “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
c. Blues
Why, where, and how the blues originated is a story that will probably never be
fully told. We cannot even hazard a guess as to who named this style of singing “the
blues,” though the expression “the blue devils” had been used to describe a melancholy
mood since Shakespeare’s time. All that can be said with certainty is that the blues is a
form of black folksong that originated in the South sometime during the 1880s and
1890s. Like all true folk music, the blues was passed along by oral tradition, with one
performer learning directly from another without benefit of written notation. Despite
having nothing written or recorded, tracing the ancestry of the blues leads to two very
different sources. First, and most important, was the African work song and field holler
(or cry) of the black laborers, which bequeathed to the blues a wailing vocal style, a
particular scale, and a body of subjects or topics for singing the blues. The second was
the Anglo-American folk ballad, which imparted the regular, predictable pattern of chord
changes that characterizes the blues. Blues was first printed as sheet music in 1912 (“The
Memphis Blues” and “The Dallas Blues”), and the first blues recordings, most of which
were made by black artists, were cut in 1920.
A singer sings the blues to relieve a melancholic soul and to give vent to feelings
of pain and anger. Poverty, loneliness, oppression, family troubles, infidelity, and
separation are typical subjects of the blues. The lyrics are arranged in a succession of
stanzas (usually three to six in a song), and each stanza is made up of three lines. The
second line normally repeats the first line, and the third line rounds off the idea and
concludes with a rhyme. At the end of each line, an instrument inserts a short response,
called an instrumental break, as a way of replying to the cry of the voice. Thus, the blues
perpetuates the age-old African performing style of call and response, the form of which
is shown in the following stanza from the “Preaching Blues”:
By the 1920s, the guitar had become the accompanying instrument favored by
blues singers. It could supply not only a solid harmonic support but also an expressive
“second voice” to answer the previous call of the singer. “Bending” the guitar strings at
the frets produced a moaning, mournful sound in keeping with the general feeling of the
blues.
The object of the blues is not so much to tell a story, as in the white folk ballad of
country music, as to express pure emotion—verbal meaning is less important than vocal
expression. The voice sometimes moans and sometimes shouts, is often hoarse and raspy,
and always twists and bends the pitch. Instead of hitting a tone directly, the singer usually
approaches it by sliding from above or below. In addition, a particular scale, called the
blues scale, is used in place of a major or a minor scale. The blues scale has seven notes,
but the third, fifth, and seventh notes are sometimes flat, sometimes natural, and
sometimes in between. The three “in-between” notes are called blue notes. The blues
scale is an integral part of virtually all African-American folk music, including the work
song and the spiritual, as well as the blues.
Although there have been and are many great blues singers—Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Lead Belly, Nina Simone, and B. B. King, to name just a few—perhaps the
greatest of them all was Bessie Smith, called the “Empress of the Blues.” A native of
Chattanooga, Tennessee, Smith was “discovered” singing in a bar in Selma, Alabama,
and was brought to New York to record for Columbia Records. The blues recordings she
made between 1924 and 1927 catapulted her to the top of the popular music world. In her
first full year as a recording artist, her disks sold more than 2 million copies, and she
became the highest-paid black artist, male or female, of the day. In fact, all of the great
blues singers who achieved recording success during the 1920s were women, perhaps
because so many blues texts have to do with male–female relations and are written from
the woman’s perspective. Tragically, Smith’s career was cut short by a fatal automobile
accident in 1937.
“Lost Your Head Blues” (see Listening Guide), recorded in 1926 in New York,
reveals the huge, sweeping voice of Bessie Smith. (Perhaps the closest modern
equivalents are Adele and Amy Winehouse.) She was capable of great power, even
harshness, one moment and then in the next breath could deliver a phrase of tender
beauty. She could hit a note right on the head if she wanted to, or bend, dip, and glide
into the pitch, as she does, for example, on the words days, long, and nights in the last
stanza of “Lost Your Head Blues.” In this recording, Bessie Smith is backed by Fletcher
Henderson (piano) and Joe Smith (trumpet). The piece begins with a four-bar
introduction, after which the voice enters and the twelve-bar blues harmony starts up,
with one full statement of the pattern for each of the five stanzas of text. Smith
continually varies her melody above the repeating bass by means of vocal inflections and
off-key shadings. Her expressive vocal line, the soulful, improvised responses played by
the trumpet, and the repeating twelve-bar harmony carried by the piano are the essence of
the blues.
To say that the blues has had a great impact on popular music is tantamount to
saying that the ocean is large. Besides blues specialists, such as Robert Johnson (1911–
1938) and B. B. King (1925–2015), virtually every pop singer has embraced or borrowed
the conventions of the genre at one time or another. So, too, have all the jazz greats, from
Louis Armstrong (“Gut Bucket Blues”) at the beginning of the twentieth century to
Wynton Marsalis (Marsalis and Clapton Play the Blues) at the beginning of the twenty-
first. Equally important, it was from the blues and its offspring, rhythm and blues, that
rock and roll was born.
d. Early Jazz
Jazz has been called “America’s classical music.” Like America itself, jazz is an
amalgam, a mixture of many different influences. Foremost among these, of course, are
the traditional musical practices of Africa, as manifested in the gospel music and blues of
African-Americans in the South. But jazz also contains European elements: marches and
hymns, in addition to fiddle tunes and dances from the British Isles, as preserved in the
folk music of white Appalachia. The complex rhythms, percussive sounds, and bending
vocal style of African-American music merged with the four-square phrasing and strong,
regular harmonies of the AngloAmerican tradition to produce a dynamic new sound.
Jazz is a lively, energetic music with pulsating rhythms and scintillating
syncopations, usually played by either a small instrumental ensemble (a combo) or a
larger group (a big band). Jazz originated as African-American popular music, much of it
improvised spontaneously. And, like most pop music today, musicians learned jazz by
listening to others play it (in this case, in cafés and clubs) or from recordings, but not
from written notation. Yet, during the twentieth century, jazz came to demand great
technical virtuosity and developed its own body of music theory and historical criticism
—both hallmarks of an art in a mature “classical stage.” For this reason, jazz is now often
called “America’s classical music.” Today, there are concert halls to hear jazz, such as
Preservation Hall in New Orleans and Rose Hall in Lincoln Center, New York, a bastion
of traditional classical music. Even the archetypical jazz club, the Blue Note Café in
downtown New York City, now has multiple outlets stretching from Milan to Tokyo.
What began about 1910 as an alternative-culture music produced by minority outsiders
has, over a century later, gone mainstream and engendered a global audience.
Ragtime music was an immediate precursor of jazz and shares with it many of the
same rhythmic features. For black musicians, “to rag” meant to play or sing music in a
heavily syncopated, jazzy style—with “ragged time.” Ragtime music originated in
brothels, saloons, and dance halls during the 1890s, and the jaunty, upbeat sound of
ragtime captured the spirit of that age. Most rags were written by black pianists who
played in houses of ill repute because it was almost impossible in those years for black
musicians to find employment elsewhere. First published in 1897, piano rags took
America by storm, with more than 2,000 titles appearing in print by the end of World
War I. Sold as sheet music of a thin page or two, piano rags moved quickly from the
saloon into middle-class homes, where musically literate amateurs played them on the
upright parlor piano.
The undisputed “King of Ragtime” was Scott Joplin (1868–1917). The son of a
slave, Joplin managed to acquire for himself a solid grounding in classical music while he
earned a living playing in honky-tonk bars in and around St. Louis, Missouri. In 1899, he
published “Maple Leaf Rag,” which sold an astonishing 1 million copies. Though he
went on to write other immensely popular rags, such as “The Entertainer” and
“Peacherine Rag,” Joplin gradually shed the image of barroom pianist and moved to New
York to compose rag-based opera.
“Maple Leaf Rag,” which was immensely popular at the turn of the twentieth
century, is typical of the style of Joplin and his fellow ragtime composers. Its form is
similar to that of an American military march of those same years, consisting of a
succession of phrases (strains), each sixteen bars in length. The harmony, however, is
distinctly European, moving in purposeful chord progressions with slight chromatic
inflections—Joplin knew his Schubert and Chopin! Yet, what makes ragtime so
infectious is its bouncy, syncopated rhythm. Syncopation, of course, is the momentary
displacement of an accent from on the beat to off the beat. In piano ragtime, the left hand
keeps a regular “um-pah, um-pah” beat, usually in duple meter, while the right hand lays
on syncopations against it. In the following example from “Maple Leaf Rag,”
syncopation (S) occurs when long notes (either an eighth note or two sixteenth notes tied
together) sound off (between) the steady eighth-note beats of the bass.
As you follow the Listening Guide, you may be interested to know that “Maple
Leaf Rag” is performed here by composer Scott Joplin himself. This recording was
originally made in 1916—not on a vinyl record, but on a mechanical piano roll, and only
later transferred to vinyl and ultimately to digital format. You’ll likely be surprised by the
slow tempo, but as Joplin warned in one of his publications, “Never play ragtime fast.
Although jazz sprang up almost simultaneously in towns up and down the
Mississippi River, its focal point and probable place of origin was New Orleans. This city
was the home of many early jazz greats—King Oliver (1885–1938), Jelly Roll Morton
(1890–1941), and Louis Armstrong (1901–1971)—and it also boasted an exceptionally
dynamic and varied musical life that encouraged the development of new musical styles.
Culturally, New Orleans looked more toward France and the Caribbean than it did toward
the Anglo-American North. The city air was filled not only with opera tunes, marches,
and ballroom dances from imperial France but also with African-American blues and
ragtime, as well as Cuban dance rhythms. The end of the Spanish-American War (1898)
brought a flood of used military band instruments into secondhand shops in New Orleans
(then the closest American city to Cuba) at prices that were affordable even to
impoverished blacks. Musicians, black and white alike, found ready employment in
ballrooms of the well-to-do, in the bars and brothels of Storyville (a thirty-eight-square-
block red-light district in the center of the city), and at parades, picnics, weddings, and
funerals associated with the many New Orleans societies and fraternal orders. Music was
everywhere. And so, today, whether in the middle of the street, in jazz clubs, or in
Preservation Hall, New Orleans–style jazz remains ubiquitous.
What marks the sound of New Orleans jazz? Syncopation combined with a free
treatment of melody. A given march, rag, blues, or popular melody is playedwith off-beat
accents and a spontaneous sliding into and around the pitches of the tune. The rag had
strains of sixteen bars; many popular songs of the period had four four-bar phrases; and
the traditional blues, as we have seen, consisted of a steady stream of twelve-bar units.
Within the square, formal confines of these four-, eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-bar
patterns, the New Orleans jazz combo found a security that allowed solo instruments the
greatest sort of freedom of expression. The melody was usually played in some jazzed-up
way by a cornet or trumpet; a clarinet supported this lead instrument and further
embellished the tune; a trombone added counterpoint against the melody in a lower
range; down below, a tuba set the harmonies if the group was marching, but if it did not,
that job was handed over to a string bass, piano, banjo, and/or guitar. These same
instruments (tuba, string bass, piano, banjo, and guitar), along with the drums, formed the
rhythm section because they not only set the harmony but also helped the drums give out
the beat in a steady fashion. Finally, New Orleans–style bands, then and now, rarely play
from written music. Instead, they count, or feel, when the chords must change, and they
improvise and refashion the tune to make it fit those changes.
When the U.S. government closed the brothels and gambling houses of Storyville
in 1917, many places of employment for jazz musicians disappeared. Performers began to
look elsewhere for work—in New York, Chicago, even Los Angeles. One of those who
eventually made his way to Chicago was Louis “Satchmo” (short for “Satchelmouth”)
Armstrong. Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901, and, in 1923, he followed his
mentor, King Oliver, to Chicago to join the latter’s Creole Jazz Band. By this time,
Armstrong was already recognized by his peers as the best jazz trumpeter alive. He soon
formed his own band in Chicago, the Hot Five, to make what became a series of
landmark recordings. When the vogue of classic New Orleans–style jazz gave way to the
sound of the swing band about 1930, Armstrong moved to New York, where he fronted
(played as featured soloist in) a number of large bands. He was an early practitioner of
“scat singing”—singing nonsense syllables in jazz style—and eventually became known
as much for the gravelly sound of his voice, in songs such as “Hello Dolly” and “Mack
the Knife,” as for his trumpet playing. His last years were spent in almost continual
travel, sent around the world by the U.S. State Department as “Ambassador Satchmo.”
He died at his home in Queens, New York, in 1971.
Although cut in Chicago, Armstrong’s early discs are classics of New Orleans–
style jazz. The tune “Willie the Weeper” was recorded by Armstrong’s expanded band,
his Hot Seven, in 1927 in Chicago. We’ll never know who “composed” the piece. Like
much folk music, and African-American music, in particular, “Willie the Weeper” was
worked out by the entire group, following two basic chord progressions—the first in a
major key and the second in a minor key. Certainly, none of “Willie the Weeper” was
ever written down in musical notation. As Armstrong’s drummer, Baby Dodds, said, “We
weren’t a bunch of fellows to write down anything.”
Instead, Armstrong and his Hot Seven relied on “head arrangements,” a
combination of aural memory (remembering the tune and the harmony) andspontaneous
improvisation, in which each member of the group took his turn as soloist. Here, the tune
in major is sixteen bars long, while the contrasting one in minor lasts eight bars. In a jazz
piece of this sort (see Listening Guide), each presentation of the tune is called a chorus
(different from a chorus in a song), whether played by a soloist or the entire ensemble.
The underlying chord progressions and the outline of the melody provide a framework
for the spontaneous improvisations of the players during each chorus. Call it what you
will—precise abandon, bonded independence, controlled chaos—the joyful exuberance
of these extraordinary musicians cannot be denied.
The recordings of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven sold as fast as they could
be pressed. Jazz became the rage of the 1920s, just as ragtime had been the craze at the
turn of the century. It was, in the words of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the “Jazz Age.” So
popular had jazz become that it was now performed in ballrooms, large dancehalls, and
movie theaters, in addition to the smaller bars and supper clubs where New Orleans–style
jazz had its home. And, just as the small supper club gradually gave way to the ballroom,
so, too, did the small jazz combo cede pride of place to the big band. To be heard above
the stomping and swaying of many hundreds of pairs of feet, an ensemble larger than the
traditional New Orleans combo of five or seven players was needed. Thus was born the
big-band era—the glory days of the bands of Duke Ellington (1889–1974), Benny
Goodman (1909–1986), Count Basie (1904–1984), and Glenn Miller (1904–1944).
Though not “big” by the standard of today’s marching band, the big band of the
1930s and 1940s was at least double the size of the New Orleans–style jazz combo. In
1943, for example, Duke Ellington’s orchestra consisted of four trumpets, three
trombones, five reed players (men who played both clarinet and saxophone), plus a
rhythm section of piano, string bass, guitar, and drums—a total of sixteen players. Most
big-band compositions were worked out ahead of time and set down in written
arrangements called “charts.” The fact that jazz musicians now for the first time had to
play from written notation suggests a desire for a more disciplined, polished, orchestral
sound. The addition of a quintet of saxophones gave the ensemble a smoother, more
blended quality. The new sound had little of the sharp bite and wild syncopation of the
earlier New Orleans–style jazz. Rather, the music was mellow, bouncy, and flowing. In a
word, it “swings.” Swing, then, can be defined as a popular style of jazz played by a big
band in the 1930s and 1940s. The recent revival of “swing dancing” shows that an
elegant yet distinctly jazzy dance style can enjoy enduring popularity.
e. From Tin Pan Alley to Broadway
Today, the music business is a global industry, with publishing houses, big-time
stars, recording contracts, licensing deals, concert tours, and streaming music services.
The point of origin of the business, however, can be seen by dropping a pin on a Google
map at the intersection of Broadway and West 28th Street in New York City. Here,
beginning around 1900, the music publishing industry arose as a business opportunity to
serve and profit from Americans hungry for the latest popular songs.
Imagine music before the phonograph, radio, and streaming music. How would
you have heard what was new and have chosen the songs you liked? Songs could be
sampled, not on your phone, but rather by going to a music store where a song plugger,
like young George Gershwin, for example, peddled (plugged) them by singing and
playing the piano. If you liked what you heard, you could buy a printed copy and take the
song home to try out on your piano.
But songs needed to be created and printed, and these all-in-one music stores
provided those services, too. Songwriters sold new songs under contract to the store,
which then printed them as sheet music and sold them to the public. So numerous did
these stores become west of Broadway on 28th Street that the stretch came to be
nicknamed Tin Pan Alley because the song pluggers sounded like a crowd banging on tin
cans. Look at, and you can see the music stores crowded cheek by jowl. Look closely at
the bottom right, where you’ll see “William Morris.
Fast forward to the present. That very same William Morris store, founded in
1898, became William Morris Agency, grew until it merged with Endeavor Talent
Agency in 2009, and, ultimately, in 2013, bought media giant IMB for $2.3 billion.
Today, William Morris Agency represents, among other singer/songwriters, Taylor Swift,
Usher, Justin Timberlake, and Bruno Mars. From humble beginnings, this small shop on
West 28th Street has grown into a media powerhouse.
So, too, with Broadway. Those same music stores that published songs also
booked singers and comedians at the theaters being built north along Broadway. This
nexus of music stores and theaters became the show business center of New York City,
with its epicenter at Times Square, the junction of 42nd Street and Broadway.
Jazz, classical, Broadway, opera, Tin Pan Alley songs— George Gershwin (1898–
1937) could compose them all. Gershwin was born to Jewish immigrant parents, Rose
and Morris Gershovitz, in New York on September 26, 1898. His mother did what many
upwardly mobile middle-class matrons then did in America: She bought her family an
upright piano on an installment plan. But, of all the family members, only young George
could play the instrument, picking out every sort of rag, march, and show tune by ear.
Soon he was taking formal lessons in classical music, studying Mozart, Chopin, and
Debussy. By the age of fifteen, music had become Gershwin’s life, so he quit high school
and took a job as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, earning fifteen dollars a week. In
1919, Gershwin stopped plugging the music of others and began to promote his own.
With his hit song “Swanee,” he became both rich and famous at the age of twenty-one.
Mother Gershovitz hadn’t wasted her money on classical piano lessons. Although
son George wrote numerous Broadway shows during the 1920s, he increasingly turned
his attention to traditionally classical genres. In three largescale orchestral compositions
(Rhapsody in Blue, 1924; Piano Concerto in F, 1925; and An American in Paris, 1928),
he created something called symphonic jazz, a fusion of jazz idioms with the textures and
forms of the classical symphony. Later, in 1935, he extended this fusion of jazz and
classical to the genre of opera with Porgy and Bess. But the venue for the New York
premiere of the “opera” in October 1935 was not an opera house but a Broadway theater.
Called an opera, Porgy and Bess takes the conventions of opera (sung, rather than
spoken, recitatives, for example) and mixes in Broadway show tunes and jazz idioms. Its
signature song is “Summertime.”
Porgy and Bess revolves around aspects of African-American life in a fictitious
section of Charleston, South Carolina, called “Catfish Row.” Throughout the opera,
“Summertime” (see Listening Guide) functions as a musical idée fixe a tune that just
won’t go away. It sounds first and most memorably as a lullaby that Clara sings to her
child, and then as a counterpoint during the explosive craps game. It is reprised in Acts II
and III. Folk elements include the suggestion of a pentatonic scale (here, A, C, D, E, G),
the absence of a leading tone (a leading tone gives music a Western “classical” sound),
and perhaps the minor mode as well. To the extent that an element of jazz is audible, it
depends on the performance, and on how much liberty the singer and players take with
the rhythm and with sliding between the pitches—that is, on how much they jazz it up.
Although George Gershwin died suddenly in Hollywood at the age of thirtynine,
his music endures. From his purely instrumental symphonic tone poem An American in
Paris emerged a story line for a film (1951) and a Broadway show (2014), both of which
had that same name. Mixed in among instrumental dances are favorite Gershwin show
tunes, including “I’ve Got Rhythm” and “‘S Wonderful.” Although the shows may be
about an American in Paris, the music is entirely that of Broadway.
f. Bebop
By the end of the Swing Era, about 1945, many of the best young performers felt
that playing from written big-band charts limited their creativity. They wanted to return
to a style in which improvisation was more important than composition and in which the
performer, not the composer or arranger, was king. Choosing their playing partners
carefully, they “jammed” in small, select groups in nightclubs in midtown Manhattan and
in Harlem, and in so doing created a new, virtuosic style of jazz.
Bebop, or “bop,” is angular, hard-driving jazz played by a small combo without
written music. It derives its name from the fact that the fast, snappy melody sounds like
the words bebop, bebop said quickly. A typical bebop ensemble consists of a quintet of
trumpet, saxophone, piano, double bass, and drums—many fewer players than in a big
band. The best soloists, among them saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920–1955) and
trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), had astonishing technique and played at
breakneck speed. They also ornamented the melody with so much embellishment that the
original tune soon became unrecognizable. Finally, bebop introduced much more
complex accompaniments. In place of the basic triads of the scale, accompanists now
used seventh, ninth, and eleventh chords, making the harmony obscure and dissonant.
Not all big-band musicians had the ability or the interest to play this new style—
to “make the (chord) changes,” as they called it. Bebop was for an elite few. But its small
audience was less interested in what was being played than in how it was being played.
Perhaps the most gifted of the bebop artists was Charlie “Yardbird,” or “Bird,”
Parket, the subject of Clint Eastwood’s film Bird (1988) and most recently the chamber
opera Yardbird (2015). Parker was a tragic figure, a drugaddicted, alcoholic, antisocial
man whose skills as an improviser and performer were nonetheless greater than those of
any other jazz musician save Louis Armstrong. Indeed, the lives of Armstrong and Parker
make an interesting comparison. Both were born into the extreme poverty of the ghetto—
Armstrong, in New Orleans, and Parker, in Kansas City—and both rose to the top of their
profession through extraordinary talent and hard work. But Armstrong, an extrovert,
viewed himself as a public entertainer as much as an artist. Parker, in contrast, didn’t care
if people liked his music and managed to alienate everyone around him, including,
finally, his longtime friend and playing partner, Dizzy Gillespie.
He would die of the effects of his many excesses, alone and broke, at the age of
thirty-four. Parker’s personal life may have been a mess, but his inventive style of
playing irrevocably changed the history of jazz. In 1950, Parker teamed up with another
bebop icon, Dizzy Gillespie, to create their version of a sentimental love song called “My
Melancholy Baby” (1912), which by then had become a standard. A standard is a tune so
influential that it inspires other musicians to record their own interpretations of it, each
new version being what is called a cover. It isn’t uncommon for a standard to be recorded
by more than 100 different artists. By creating and recording what became a string of
standards, Parker and Gillespie solidified bebop as a legitimate form of jazz. They
wanted to be wildly original; the standard provided the listener a clear base from which to
appreciate their originality.
“My Melancholy Baby,” a tune written on Tin Pan Alley in 1912, is typical of the
standards of the early twentieth century (see Listening Guide). Like most standards, its
structure is straightforward: a sixteen-bar melody divided into four, fourmeasure phrases
(ABAC). After a four-bar introduction by pianist Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker plays
the tune more or less “straight,” with only moderately complex elaborations. But, when
Dizzy Gillespie enters for the second chorus, the ornamentation becomes more complex,
with racing thirty-second notes. The complexity continues through the third and final
chorus, which Monk and Parker divide. What results is a music more for listening than
for dancing. Bebop is the “chamber music” of jazz, a style designed to appeal to only a
small number of knowledgeable listeners.
g. Other Jazzes: Cool and Modal
By 1950, jazz was no longer young; indeed, it had been around for nearly fifty
years. Moreover, by mid-twentieth century, one could no longer speak of “jazz” and
mean one specific style. The general term jazz might refer to one of three subgenres: New
Orleans–style jazz, swing, or bebop. Bebop was at the vanguard, but it was not loved by
all—with its fast tempos and biting attacks, bebop was almost too hot to handle. An
immediate reaction appeared in the form of cool jazz, which sought to soften bebop’s
hard-driving sound with a more relaxed feel and less frenzied solos. Its leader was
trumpeter Miles Davis and his seminal album, Birth of the Cool (1949). Davis played in a
low range, with a more lyrical tone and softer dynamics. Seated alongside Davis during
much of the late 1950s was John Coltrane, who initiated yet another kind of jazz, called
modal jazz.
Modal jazz is a complex style that grew out of the extended harmonic language
used in bebop accompaniments. Most traditional music, whether classical, pop, or early
jazz, revolved around chord progressions moving sequentially through the basic triads
(tonic, subdominant, dominant, for example) of the major or minor scale. So deeply
ingrained are those progressions that we don’t even notice them, other than to
subconsciously think, “Yes, that’s the way music ought to go.” Modal jazz, however,
changes the supporting harmonies in three ways: It uses modes (scales other than major
or minor); it emphasizes chords other than dominant and subdominant (although the tonic
remained primary); and it slows down the rate of harmonic change compared to the
frenetically fast chord changes in bebop. Because they were less constrained to make one
or two chord changes every bar, as in bebop, performers of modal jazz felt freer to extend
the melody line on whatever chord or scale they happened to be.
The high priest of modal jazz was John Coltrane. “High” is the appropriate word
here, because not only is Coltrane thought by jazz aficionados to have been the greatest
of the great jazz creators, but also he, Parker, and Davis were heroin addicts whose lives
were cut short by that drug. Like Parker, Davis, and most other New York jazz artists at
the time, Coltrane demonstrated musical originality by crafting new pieces out of
standards. Thus, on his path breaking album of modal jazz entitled My Favorite Things
(1960), Coltrane improvised entirely on preexisting tunes by Broadway greats Richard
Rodgers, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, creating an entire album of nothing by
covers. America was singing tunes such as Rodgers’s “My Favorite Things” and
Gershwin’s “Summertime.” What Coltrane did with them, however, was very different
from what listeners expected.
One of the hit tunes in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music is “My
Favorite Things,” immortalized by Julie Andrews. The song consists of an initial melody
(A) with three similar phrases, beginning with “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on
kittens,” followed by the refrain, “These are a few of my favorite things.” After three
such stanzas, a contrasting fourth stanza of not-favorite things (“When the dog bites,
when the bee stings”) provides a brief minor-key foil (melody B), which turns to cheery
major at the end with the triumphant words, “but then I don’t feel so bad.”
Then came the Coltrane transformation: What had been a delightfully simple,
upbeat Broadway song became under his fingers a darker, unpredictable series of abstract
embroideries, influenced by the practices of Indian sitar music (Coltrane had studied the
sitar and named his son, Ravi, in honor of Ravi Shankar, “An Indian Raga for the Sitar”).
As we join Coltrane’s long improvisation (see Listening Guide), we hear his soprano
saxophone play a recognizable version of the tune, supported by chord changes in the
piano, although those chords are no longer simple triads but more complex seventh and
ninth chords. Thereafter, Coltrane overlays increasingly elaborate arabesques above a
repeating harmony of just two chords, one built on the tonic and the other built on the
supertonic (the second degree) of what is called a Dorian mode, set here on the pitch E.
But forget the complicated music theory, and just listen to the music.
During the 1960s, beatniks used to say “far out, man,” and that piece of modal
jazz by Coltrane is indeed far out—an example of the most free and experimental type of
jazz ever created. But, in subsequent decades, jazz went from being “far out” to “close
in”—closer to the mainstream of music. During the 1970s, what was selling was not jazz
but rock, so jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis, added an electric bass and strong
drumming with a backbeat to create jazz-fusion, a blend of jazz and rock. The moral of
the story as it pertained to jazz and its listening audience is this: any popular music
without a catchy tune or a finger-snapping beat won’t be popular for long.
No sooner did jazz-fusion try to bring a beat back to jazz than smooth jazz
removed it, first with the legato sounds of saxophonist Kenny G in the 1980s and 1990s,
and more recently with the mellow tones of trumpeter Chris Botti, beginning around
2000. Thus, the pendulum for jazz continues to swing between hot and cool, heavy beat
and weak beat, choppy and smooth. To bebop or not to bebop still seems to be the
question.
h. The Broadway Musical
“Broadway,” New York, isn’t just a state of mind or a musical style, but a real
place, a neighborhood of theaters. Originally connected to Tin Pan Alley at 28th Street,
the strip of nearly forty theaters runs up the West Side along Broadway as far as 54th
Street. Some of these theaters are home to dramatic plays and comedies, but about forty
theaters regularly host Broadway musicals.
The Broadway musical (also known as the Broadway show) is a form of
American popular musical theater that emerged shortly after 1900. A musical is based on
a “book” (the libretto) that contains the lyrics (the rhyming verse used in the songs). Most
of the dialogue in a musical is spoken, but the emotional high points are sung. In musical
genealogy, then, the Broadway musical is a distant cousin of the eighteenth-century
comic opera, which also had spoken dialogue. The earliest Broadway musicals were
written by native-born Americans—most notably, George M. Cohan (Little Johnny
Jones, 1906, which included “Give My Regards to Broadway”) and Jerome Kern
(Showboat, 1927). The oft-revived Showboat, with its signature song “Ol’ Man River,” is
especially noteworthy in that it includes strains of uniquely American music: specifically,
blues, jazz, and the Negro spiritual (Africanized hymn).
The collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and lyricist
Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960) marked the beginning of a golden era for American
musical theater. In a span of less than two decades, this gifted team produced a
succession of blockbuster musicals, beginning with Oklahoma! (1943); continuing with
Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951); and concluding with
The Sound of Music (1959). Their success was unparalleled at that time: Oklahoma!
originally ran for 2,248 performances, and The King and I ran for 4,625 performances.
Rodgers and Hammerstein struck gold by blending tasteful (if sentimental) lyrics with
uplifting (if square-cut) melodies. “Broadway songbooks” (printed collections of musical
theater standards) are filled with such hits as “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”
(Oklahoma!), “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Carousel), “Some Enchanted Evening”
(South Pacific), “Getting to Know You” (The King and I), and “My Favorite Things”
(The Sound of Music)—all Rodgers and Hammerstein creations.
We usually think of the “British Invasion” as the arrival of The Beatles and their
fresh sound in America in 1963. But a second musical invasion came just a few years
later with the arrival on Broadway of the megahits of Englishman Andrew Lloyd Webber
(Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera). These showcased not
only sweeping melodies and lush, Romantic orchestrations, but also dazzling scenic
effects—Broadway as spectacle.
Today, diversity seems to be the watchword on Broadway. Although Phantom of
the Opera continues to play nightly, theatergoers can also see revivals of earlier American
musicals (The King and I and Bernstein’s On the Town); works in the traditional mold
(Chicago and Wicked); adaptations of popular movies (Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion
King); musicals built from earlier pop music (Jersey Boys, Beautiful, and Mamma Mia!);
and even musicals with religious themes (Book of Mormon and Amazing Grace). To get
to the core of the Broadway musical, let’s examine three of the most critically acclaimed
and financially successful shows of the second half of the twentieth century, three
Broadway classics.
Leonard Bernstein, educated at Harvard and at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia,
was one of the great composer– conductor–interpreters of the twentieth century. As a
composer, the protean Bernstein created symphonies and ballets, as well as a film score
and four musicals. As a conductor, he was affiliated with the acclaimed New York
Philharmonic for nearly half a century. And, as a virtuoso pianist, educator, and advocate
for the arts, he even influenced presidents, especially John F. Kennedy. America has
never enjoyed a more dynamic musical leader than the lionesque Bernstein.
When Bernstein’s West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, it became the
musical sensation of the decade. The show succeeds by mixing old and new: Standard
Broadway numbers are infused with Modernist music, and an ancient tale gets a modern,
urban setting. In Bernstein’s retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story, the feuding
Montagues and Capulets are replaced by New York street gangs—the all-American Jets
and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The starcrossed lovers are Tony, former leader of the Jets,
and Maria, sister of the Sharks’ leader. They meet at a dance held in a high school gym.
Afterward, they rendezvous on Maria’s fire escape (Juliet’s balcony) and sing the show-
stopping duet “Tonight” (see Listening Guide). In the lyrics of “Tonight,” the past,
present, and future seem to converge in a world made suddenly beautiful by the presence
of the beloved. The heartbeats of the young couple are transformed into music; the tempo
continually fluctuates, as slower, lyrical phrases rapidly quicken with intense emotion
and then slow down again. At times, the melodies are underscored by punchy, syncopated
accompaniment in the brass and strings, evoking Latin musical styles in a reference to
Maria’s heritage. The two lovers take turns singing to each other and then sing together in
unison, illustrating their perfect compatibility. Like Romeo and Juliet, Tony and Maria
may love each other with ardent passion, but they are destined for tragedy. At the end of
the next day, Tony is killed after an ill-fated attempt to make peace between the gangs,
leaving Maria to grieve over his body.
Who wrote the lyrics for Bernstein’s West Side Story? Surprisingly, Stephen
Sondheim, who would go on to become a leading composer of the music of many
productions on Broadway. A private student of both Broadway legend Oscar
Hammerstein and twelve-tone Modernist Milton Babbitt, Sondheim has a talent for
weaving the witty verbal utterances that are characteristic of good musical theater into the
intricate musical textures found in symphonic music. He is widely credited with raising
the quality of American musical theater in the late twentieth century by seamlessly
combining Modernist musical techniques with his own pithy type of poetry. Sondheim’s
musicals vary widely in style, incorporating everything from Gershwin-inspired jazz
harmonies, to Stravinsky-like dissonance, to Viennese waltzes, in addition to the standard
Broadway tune.
Although Sondheim is the creator of several important musicals, among them A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) and Into the Woods (1987), one
show in particular, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), is touted as
a musical masterpiece of operatic proportions. The book is based on a nineteenth-century
“penny dreadful” story of a demonic barber who cuts the throats of his clients and then
bakes them into meat pies. Sondheim’s version of the popular thriller is especially
elaborate; it has been likened to opera (and, indeed, performed by opera companies) and
was successfully adapted for film in 2007. Atypical for Broadway, the three-hour tragedy
contains very little spoken dialogue, places great technical demands on the singers, and
incorporates dissonant, Modernist musical elements. Sondheim’s operatic musical is
complex in a variety of ways: It calls for elaborate stage machinery (a giant, multilevel,
revolving barbershop/pie shop), and the dramatic structure interweaves intricate subplots
about subsidiary characters whom Todd has met throughout his life. But stage effects and
dramatic complexity seem almost secondary to the brilliance of the music.
The score of Sweeney Todd adroitly leads the audience through Sweeney’s grisly
story. The ghostly curtain raiser, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” is a chilling chorus
sung directly to the audience. The melody of the choral refrain (“Swing your razor”)
employs the opening pitches of the Dies irae, the Gregorian chant used for the Mass of
the Dead. This is just one of many subtle references to other musical genres and traditions
that Sondheim deftly folds into his monumental score. Slowly, out of these initial
snippets of text and Minimalist fragments of melody, the composer begins to unify
motives, instruments, and singers into massive walls of sound for both chorus and
orchestra.
No review of Broadway would be complete without a more thorough discussion
of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the most successful of all musical-theater composers, at least
in terms of profit and public recognition. The list of blockbuster musicals by Lloyd
Webber is even lengthier than that of Rogers and Hammerstein: Among them are Jesus
Christ Superstar (1970), Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984), and
Phantom of the Opera (1986). Like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Lloyd
Webber was classically trained in music, attending Oxford University and the Royal
Academy of Music in London. But, unlike his American competitors, who incorporate
elements of Modernism in their scores, Lloyd Webber brings essentially a Romantic
sound to his musicals. We all remember “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (Evita),
“Memory” (Cats), and “The Music of the Night” (Phantom) because Lloyd Webber gives
us what we want to hear: beautiful, aria-like tunes, and lush, Romantic orchestrations
with powerful brasses and surging strings. Combine these with spectacular stage effects
created by director Tim Rice, and one has a formula for success
Indeed, Phantom of the Opera has achieved a success unrivaled in the history of
musical theater, making its composer a billionaire. Premiering in 1986 in London and
then in 1988 in New York, Phantom of the Opera is by far the longest running of all
Broadway musicals, having enjoyed more than 11,000 consecutive performances before
15.5 million people in New York alone. Indeed, with showstopping songs such as “The
Music of the Night,” “Think of Me,” and “All I Ask of You,” the production has lost
none of its popular appeal. Worldwide, the musical has been performed in 145 cities
(Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Istanbul were added in 2015) and has grossed nearly $6
billion.
Worldwide may be the key word here. Originally, the Broadway musical focused
on the problems of the proverbial American man in the street and his “gal,” both of
whom just happened to live in New York City. Today, the musical has gone global. It is
conceived with an eye toward general themes appealing to an international market and is
thus another manifestation of the shrinking and homogenization of our musical world.
i. The Dawn of Film Music
Moving pictures were first introduced in 1897 by the Lumière brothers, Auguste
and Louis, in Lyon, France. They used their invention mostly as a novelty, to document
life in Lyon and around the globe. But the technology soon took root as entertainment in
the United States. By the early 1910s, storefront “nickelodeon” theaters—so named
because admission cost a nickel—had sprung up in towns and cities across America.
Most early films were short but were not “silent.” A musical accompaniment was
typically improvised by a pianist, often with a percussionist rendering the sound effects.
By the early 1920s, most U.S. cities had dedicated movie “palaces,” some seating
up to several thousand moviegoers. As films grew in popularity, they also expanded in
length and complexity of plot. The stars of the day were early cinematic greats, such as
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Lillian Gish, and directors D. W. Griffith, Fritz
Lang, and Sergei Eisenstein, among others. In the movie palaces especially, film sound
was elaborate, with a prepared score compiled from bits of existing orchestral works
played live by a large theater orchestra or by an organ equipped with special sound
effects.
Talking pictures were introduced in 1926, when the Vitaphone company
experimented with synchronizing a phonograph with the film projector. Because this
format was unstable and easily desynchronized, it was soon replaced with a format that
encoded both sight and sound together, permanently fixed in the filmstrip itself. The new
technology also allowed filmmakers for the first time to create a sound track that
contained three elements: dialogue, sound effects, and music. A desire for realism drove
the integration of dialogue and sound effects. But, without a visible source of sound, such
as a piano or an orchestra, music seemed an “unnatural” addition.
Although it had been heard continuously in silent movies, music in the early
sound film was initially confined to pockets of uncontested space during which people
weren’t speaking—credit sequences, chases, or action sequences. Music written for these
sections in films were called cues. A film score could be made up of any number of
individual cues that could last any length of time, usually until a scene change. As
audiences became accustomed to synchronized sound and music being integrated into the
cinematic experience, composers like Max Steiner and Erich Korngold began to develop
underscoring, expanding the presence of music so that it could be heard even under
dialogue.
By the late 1930s, cues had become longer and more frequent. Often a thematic
cue was attached to specific people, places, or ideas and repeated like a Wagnerian
leitmotif throughout the film to emphasize or contribute to the story line. The classic
Hollywood score was also orchestral, because the orchestra lent an aura of class to a
medium that was still struggling to shed its reputation as cheap entertainment. Orchestral
sound also registered well in theaters when it was projected through speakers that might
be of uneven quality. Many composers and musicians working in Hollywood in the 1930s
and 1940s were European émigrés well versed in concert-hall genres, especially opera.
They adjusted the instrumentation of their film scores as opera composers did: quieter
under dialogue, fuller and louder in stretches without it.
A classic example of a Golden Age Hollywood film score is Max Steiner’s for
David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939), a highly acclaimed Civil War epic
based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel. The score has many important
“classical” features, heard during nearly three hours of film and including over ninety
cues, a dozen themes, and an overture, almost all of it in late-Romantic style. Within the
first twenty minutes of the film, one theme (see Listening Guide) is prominently
presented in the opening credits and then clearly attached, like a leitmotif, to a place: the
Southern plantation Tara, around which most of the action takes place. As it soars again
from beneath the dialogue between two of the film’s central characters, Scarlett O’Hara
and her father, the music establishes the importance of Tara in the emerging narrative.
j. Experimentation: 1950s–1970s
After World War II, the subject matter of films changed dramatically. American
cinema, in particular, settled into a gritty style of realism and film noir, dark and
brooding. Much like realist opera of the late nineteenth century, films began to examine
the seamier side of life—murder, crime, poverty, and addiction. These themes played
especially well to disillusioned Cold War audiences, as did science fiction films that
fostered and exploited new fears of atomic energy.
The musical scores for these films changed dramatically, too. Noir films, with
criminals, detectives, nightclubs, or all of the above—films like The Big Combo (1955),
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and Touch of
Evil (1958)—featured the hard, bebop jazz of the 1950s nightclub. In the 1960s,
composer Henry Mancini lightened and Latinized jazz for comedies like Breakfast at
Tiffany’s (1961) and The Pink Panther (1963). Sci-fi films of the 1950s and 1960s, such
as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956), also turned away
from classic orchestral sound by incorporating electronic instruments, oscillators, and
eerie-sounding theremins into their scores. Bernard Herrmann, who scored The Day the
Earth Stood Still, went on to collaborate with director Alfred Hitchcock, providing
musical scores that were either atonal (Vertigo, 1958) or persistently dissonant (Psycho,
1960) for many of Hitchcock’s iconic psychological thrillers. In Psycho, Herrmann uses
dissonance to create tension in the nervous Prelude (see Listening Guide) and also to
literally act as a sound effect, as in the film’s famous shower scene (see Listening Guide).
Experimental sounds, electronic guitar riffs, bells, ocarinas, human cries, and
wordless choirs were also heard in scores, most notably accompanying the popular
“spaghetti westerns” of Sergio Leone, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966),
scored by Ennio Morricone and informally dubbed “best theme tune ever.” Other new
sounds erupted from cinema screens at midcentury, including rock and roll. Although
initially confined to “teen pics” like Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Blackboard
Jungle (1955), or films starring Elvis Presley (Jailhouse Rock, 1957; G.I. Blues, 1960;
Blue Hawaii, 1961), the trend persisted into the 1960s and 1970s in both B films (Easy
Rider, 1969) and mainstream dramas (The Graduate, 1967; American Graffiti, 1973).
The structure of the sound track was modified as well, often displaying a single
instrumental theme, or theme song, like The Pink Panther theme or the theme for James
Bond films, beginning with Dr. No (1962), instead of the Steiner “leitmotif” model of a
separate theme for every character. Because the average length of a film credit sequence,
where the theme was introduced, was close to the average length of a pop song (three
minutes), this monothematic format worked for marketing purposes as well.
k. The Era of TV Music
In the 1950s and 1960s, as television eroded movie attendance and the 1948
court-ordered divestment of studio-owned theaters decimated studio profits, the studios
pushed for films and TV shows with themes that could be marketed and sold separately.
Selling stand-alone musical themes, extracted from films and TV productions, and
arranged in any number of ways, proved very profitable for the film studios.
Much as the phonograph had made concert music available in the home, TV
brought the movies home, too. Television literally recycled films, but it also developed its
own programming. Much of it drew on existing film genres—westerns, detective shows,
teen dramas—and TV music followed suit. Some shows had jazzinfluenced theme music,
like Henry Mancini’s theme for the detective series Peter Gunn (1958–1961). Jazz
sounded especially good through the small speakers of the average home TV set, much
better than a tinny orchestra.
Film composers frequently wrote for television, importing new cinema sounds to
that medium. Electronic instrumentation, too, was introduced to the small screen in the
1950s, in shows like The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), whose theme was written by
Bernard Herrmann of Psycho fame; My Favorite Martian (1963–1966); Lost in Space
(1965–1968); and Star Trek (1966–1969), whose theme made longtime film orchestrator
Alexander Courage famous. The monothematic formula worked well for television, as
music provided continuity between weekly episodes that were different in content.
The film studios continued trying to counter the threat of television with bigger
movies, wide-screen formats like Cinerama and Vistavision, and better, louder sound
tracks. Magnetic tape offered improved sound quality—a “high-fidelity” sound—but
converting the optical sound track to a magnetic one, which required new cameras,
projectors, and theater speakers, was too expensive to adopt on a large scale. The
magnetic tape revolution did find its way into the film sound track, but not until the late
1960s, and in a very different way.
When film directors like Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), Dennis
Hopper (Easy Rider), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), and George Lucas (Star Wars)
began to cut and paste together their own sound tracks from preexisting and prerecorded
music, a radically new method of “composing” film music was born. This compilation
method profoundly altered the construction of film music by giving directors and music
supervisors, rather than composers, the ability to shape a film’s music. Kubrick used a
mix of classical music—Modernist compositions by Hungarian composer Gyorgi Ligeti
(Requiem, Atmospheres, Lontano, Lux Aeterna) and some nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Romantic orchestral pieces by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, and Aram
Khatchaturian (Suite from the ballet Gayane)—in the compilation for 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968). In contrast, Easy Rider’s sound track rocked to the music of ten pop
songs, including Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” and “Born to Be Wild.
