29 July 2008
Tin Pan Alley: Creating “Music Standards”
Composers and lyricists together developed the “standard” American song
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
During the 1920s and 1930s professional tunesmiths, working within a set of forms inherited from 19th-century popular music and influenced by the craze for ragtime and jazz music, wrote some of the period’s most influential and commercially successful songs. These composers, many of them Jewish immigrants, found in music an industry comparatively free of the social prejudice that often blocked their advancement in other fields. Their efforts yielded many standards, songs that have remained in active circulation until this day.
The American “Musical Standard”
During the 1920s and 1930s, composers and lyricists fused earlier song structures to produce a verse-refrain form which, in the hands of more inventive composers, allowed for all sorts of interesting variations. While the verse came to be regarded as mere introduction, the refrain, the part that is usually considered “the song,” typically comprised four sections of equal length, in the pattern A B B A.
• The A section presents the main melody, the basic pattern of the lyrics, and a set of chord changes to support them.
• The music of the A section is then repeated with new lyrics; often some slight melodic changes will be introduced, making this A, i.e., a variation of A.
• The B section, or “bridge,” is then introduced. The bridge presents new material – a new melody, chord changes, and lyrics.
• Finally, the A melody and chord changes are repeated with new lyrics and sometimes with further melodic alterations or with an addition called a “tag,” producing an A, a second variation of A.
Listeners familiar with this form might typically expect that an A section should at some point be followed by a contrasting section with different chords, words, and melody (the bridge), and that the performance would likely end with the A section heard again. Composers, singers, and arrangers – the individuals whose choice of key, tempo, instrumental accompaniment, and so on matched a given singer’s vocal strengths to a particular song – became adept at fulfilling these expectations while introducing just enough unexpected variation to keep the listener’s attention. The best Tin Pan Alley composers could work creatively within these structural limitations.
Tin Pan Alley songs did not, by and large, deal directly with the troubling issues of their times; popular songs and the musical plays and films in which they appeared instead typically aimed to help people escape the pressures of daily life. Both in lyrical content and performance style, the Tin Pan Alley song explored the ideal of romantic love. Unlike the old European ballads – in which the action of characters was often narrated from a vantage point outside the singer’s own experience – the first-person lyrics characteristic of Tin Pan Alley songs (suggested in such song titles as “What’ll I Do?,” “Why Do I Love You?,” “I Get A Kick Out of You,” and “Somebody Loves Me”) allowed the listener to identify his or her personal experience more directly with that of the singer. Tin Pan Alley songwriters by and large adopted a down-to-earth manner of speech, as in songs like “Jeepers Creepers, Where’d You Get Those Peepers?,” that suggested that any working stiff could experience the bliss of romantic love or, through the “torch song,” suffer the heartbreak of a romance gone sour.
The development of a singing style called crooning reinforced these links between popular music and personal experience. Listening to the early recordings of vaudeville performers such as Eddie Cantor or Al Jolson, whose exaggerated styles were developed for performances in large theaters, one feels that one is being “sung at” (sometimes even “shouted at”). A Bing Crosby or Fred Astaire recording, made after the introduction of the electric microphone in the mid-1920s, is an altogether different sort of musical experience, a private experience. The singer’s silky, gentle, nuanced voice invites you to share the most intimate of confidences; it speaks to you alone. Sometimes, the listener imaginatively enters the voice of the singer, and a kind of psychological fusion occurs between two individuals who will never actually meet face to face.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
