278 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
adventure. The demand for love songs on Broadway was great, both in revue and
in musical comedy, since the plots of virtually all of the latter involved charac-
ters seeking someone to love. As one New York tunesmith put it, the songwriter’s
craft lay chiefl y in saying “I love you” in thirty-two bars.
Songwriters approached love from a variety of angles. Richard Rodgers and
Lorenz Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still” (1927) dwells on the experience of love at
fi rst sight by suspending time—freezing the frame, in effect. Hart responds to
the short phrases of Rodgers’s melody, which hint at breathlessness, with lyrics
consisting almost entirely of one-syllable words, each a section of the aaba
chorus ending with the title words. George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”
(1924), in contrast, is pure anticipation, as a woman reveals her romantic dream
of a future love. Both songs depend on time-worn clichés, which are then tran-
scended by the songs’ graceful, self-aware expression.
The new emphasis on this kind of romantic love accompanies the rise of indi-
vidualism. Before around 1880, most Americans had little reason to doubt that the
ties linking people to their family, community, church, and occupation formed
the main social reality of their lives. Between 1880 and 1900, however, these con-
nections began to loosen, and from the 1920s on, Americans were increasingly
likely to dow nplay traditional social ties and defi ne themselves in personal terms.
By the end of World War I, song writers were absorbing this spirit of indi-
vidualism. The portrait of love that came to dominate the Broadway stage and
Tin Pan Alley concentrated on lovers who were infatuated and preoccupied with
each other beyond anything else, who dwelled in a world of two—sometimes
only one, if the love affair had ended, as in Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing
Called Love?” or, as in the Gershwins’ “The Man I Love,” if it had yet to begin.
Family, friends, society, and community barely existed in this world.
The new subject matter called for new musical expression, especially in the
realm of harmony, where an enriched musical vocabulary that Edward MacDow-
ell had called a “shadow language” had appeared. Using chords with sevenths,
ninths, and added or altered tones, song writers tapped into harmony’s power of
suggestion in a way that intensifi ed emotions, especially that of yearning.
The enriched harmony of the classic American popular song came primar
ily from the songwriters’ contact with the European classical sphere. Kern,
Gershwin, Rodgers, and Porter all received classical training, and German
and Russian compositions of the later nineteenth century and early modern
French works were part of their musical experience. Composers such as Liszt,
Tchaikovsky, Puccini, and Ravel had enlarged the harmonic vocabulary of Western
music in general, and popular songwriters borrowed from their palettes. The
kinship between European romanticism and the idiom of the American popular
song is refl ected in the way songwriters use chromaticism to intensify progres-
sions that lead the listener, in a regular pattern of tension and release, from one
phrase to the next. Further enriching that European-style harmony, however,
was a native element: the blues, evident not only in the blue notes of the melodies
and harmonies but also in the new, more improvisational vocal styles embraced
by popular singers.
Popular songs of the golden era celebrated individuals who loved with a
passion strong enough to overshadow other social connections. And the music
suggested that love with such high expectations had to be more dynamic than
stable. Whatever the lyrics might say, the harmonic richness that bathed themromance and
individualismenriched harmonyEuropean infl uencesblues infl uences172028 11 254 - 279 _r 3 _sd.indd 278 28 / 01 / 13 5 : 27 PM