Listening for America

October 1, 2019
A user-friendly guide to appreciating show tunes. Composer/conductor Kapilow's (What Makes It Great: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers, 2011, etc.) popular NPR program, What Makes It Great? inspired this lively and highly informative look at what makes musical show tunes great. Using 16 of his favorite songs by eight of Broadway's greatest songwriters, he focuses on the "intersection between history and music," employing a "close-focus musical reading" of each song to demonstrate how they are "deeply meaningful reflections of an evolving America finding its voice." Kapilow includes basic musical notations to show how the songs' notes, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms fit together to fashion masterpieces. Each chapter is a gem of explication and informed opinion. Jerome Kern's "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," from Show Boat, "turns on the relationship between black music and white music." The "landmark" show, Kapilow writes, "radically widened the dramatic range of the Broadway musical." The final cadence in Kern's "All the Things You Are," from Very Warm for May, a "complete flop," is "one of the most remarkable in the American Songbook." George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," from Girl Crazy, with its gay, Jewish, and Native American sensibilities, is the "voice of a southern black community in a work that would ultimately become the quintessential American opera." Harold Arlen "became famous overnight thanks to the success of a single song," "Stormy Weather," from The Cotton Club Parade of 1933. Before The Wizard of Oz film was released in 1939, studio head Louis B. Mayer wanted to cut out Arlen's iconic "Over the Rainbow." Kapilow considers Stephen Sondheim "one of the greatest innovators in the history of the musical theater." The author also discusses Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, and Leonard Bernstein, and the prologue contains useful information about minstrel shows, vaudeville, revues, operetta, ragtime, the blues, and jazz. A seamless blend of music, history, and biography.

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Starred review from October 14, 2019
Composer and music journalist Kapilow (All You Have to Do Is Listen) recounts the 20th-century history of American popular music in lyrical prose. Focusing on the development of 16 songs and their composers—including George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” and Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow”—Kapilow chronicles the evolution of pop music from blues and jazz to Broadway musicals as well as the cultural forces that shaped the music. With the 1927 song “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” Jerome Kern created a distinctively American voice by weaving African-American work songs and spirituals into a 32-bar blues Broadway musical song. Harold Arlen embraced the blues as a rich source of inspiration for “Stormy Weather,” which premiered at the Cotton Club in 1933. Richard Rodgers, with his partner Oscar Hammerstein, wrote such musicals as Carousel that reflected a post-WWII world in which audiences yearned for music to reflect the moral values of society. In “Tonight,” from West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein expressed his hope for a future of racial harmony. Kapilow works in musical notations in each chapter to illustrate the ways that the music itself incorporated various styles as it developed. Kapilow’s melodious writing hums with the vibrant music of American history and American popular culture.

October 11, 2019

According to conductor, composer, and NPR commentator Kapilow, well-known songs from 20th-century Broadway musicals embody the American social experience. To illustrate his point, he chooses eight male, mostly Jewish composers-lyricists (Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim) and 16 of their songs, which often infused African American-inspired styles such as jazz and blues into a 32-bar pop song format. Kapilow contends that the songs reflected their social and historical contexts. Though at times effectively making a direct connection between the music and its settings (e.g., Bernstein's "I Can Cook Too" and World War II), for the most part, the author isn't as successful. He describes songs that offer stilted views of issues such as race (Kern's "Can't Help but Lovin' dat Man," Bernstein's "Tonight," and Gershwin's "Summertime") and songs by Porter, Gershwin, and Berlin that ignored major events including the Great Depression to create escapist fantasies. VERDICT While Kapilow doesn't quite make his case, he has written an engaging, informative, and provocative book that is recommended for fans of Broadway musicals.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

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