An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 15 | THE BROADWAY MUSICAL THROUGH WORLD WAR II 371

Boulanger—in his 1911 ballet Petrushka. The musical depiction of the foal’s birth

also resembles Petrushka’s evocation of a Russian peasant fair: shimmering harp,

celesta, glockenspiel, and high strings are gradually joined by the woodwinds and

brass in a pulsating wash of pandiatonic sound, in which all the notes of the dia-

tonic scale are sounded together.

Ironically, it is this musical style—indebted to Stravinsky, a denizen of Paris

when Copland was studying there in the 1920s—that came to be emblematic of

the American West. Copland never scored a cowboy picture; nevertheless, his

manner of applying Russian modernist technique and vocabulary to musical

materials from the Anglo-American tradition in his two cowboy ballets, Billy the

Kid and Rodeo, and his music for the two Steinbeck fi lms, both set in California,

came to be heard as an evocation of the West. After The Red Pony, most Holly wood

westerns sported soundtracks with Coplandesque music. Among the best is

Elmer Bernstein’s music for The Magnifi cent Seven (1960); the memorable title

music echoes both Copland and, through him, Stravinsky.

But Copland’s infl uence on Holly wood extended even further, setting the

example of an accessible modernist idiom fl exible enough to be applied to all

sorts of motion pictures. Copland’s fi lm scores proved that musically unsophis-

ticated audiences would accept modernist music when it was used intelligently

and appropriately for cinematic purposes. Movies, Copland hoped, could be a

means of disseminating modernist music to people who might never hear it

in a concert hall but who, through this exposure, could come to have a greater

appreciation for new musical trends.

In the decades since Copland’s Hollywood period, that is exactly what has hap-

pened, as movies, and later television programs, have made mass audiences famil-

iar with avant-garde musical techniques that otherwise only a small number of

listeners would hear. In that sense, the movie industry has played an important

role in dismantling the cultural hierarchy in force earlier in the twentieth cen-

tury. The music of the United States after World War II would inhabit a much

more fl uid cultural space, not easily polarized into highbrow and lowbrow.

THE BROADWAY MUSICAL THROUGH

WORLD WAR II

Between the onset of the Great Depression and the end of World War II, a signifi -

cant shift in the aesthetic of the musical comedy placed new demands on show

songs. That shift in taste is nowhere more apparent than in the career of Richard

Rodgers, which is marked by two long-term collaborations with major lyricists.

Between 1919 and 1942 Rodgers worked w ith Lorenz Hart in the creation of twenty-

six Broadway shows and nine Holly wood fi lms, among them some of the most

successful musicals of that time: Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms

(1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and Pal Joey (1940). Typically for shows of the

time, none of these has seen more than the occasional revival since its initial run.

Yet the many memorable songs of Rodgers and Hart—“Manhattan,” “Blue Moon,”

“With a Song in My Heart,” “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is

a Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” to name only a few—are ever-

green standards.

Rodgers and Hart

pandiatonicism

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