Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The author is a professor of the theory of music at Yale. As such, he's on to something here, but in his hands American popular music becomes little more than an academic subject. Missing in his heavyhanded academese is the accessability that has made these songs so popular in the first place. As a pianist who plays these songs over and over and who takes them seriously as a pre-eminent American contribution to world culture, I learned little except some biographical facts (inexplicably, though he has a gender-oriented chapter on women in this genre, he leaves out Dorothy Fields, one of the best in either sex). Additionally, the book is not inexpensive and no discount is offered. My thanks to Amazon for its liberal return policy.Note: There's an enthusiastic five-star review of this book which I suspect was written by the author or a close friend. It's undeserved. Alex Wilder's American Popular Music is much the better book, and much cheaper, too!
Click Here to see more reviews about: The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950: A Study in Musical Design
In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz.
Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.
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