American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950

Amazon.com Price: $69.30 (as of 10/11/2019 08:13 PST- Details)

Description

When Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song first gave the impression, it was once almost universally hailed–from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Down Beat–as the definitive account of the classic era of American popular music. It has since develop into the usual work of the great songwriters who dominated popular music in the USA for half a century. Now Wilder’s classic is to be had again, with a new introduction by Gene Lees.
Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, American Popular Song specializes in the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and have made it an authentic art form. Wilder traces the roots of the American style to the ragtime music of the 1890s, shows the way it was once incorporated into mainstream popular music after 1900, and then surveys the careers of each and every major songwriter from World War I to 1950. Wilder devotes desparate chapters to such greats as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. Illustrated with over seven hundred musical examples, Wilder’s sensitive analyses of the most distinctive, creative, and original songs of this period reveal unexpected beauties in songs long forgotten and delightful subtleties in many familiar standards. The result is a definitive remedy of a strangely unsung and uniquely American art.

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