About the Book
Without any formal training in music composition, Irving Berlin took a knack for music and turned it into the most successful songwriting career in American history. Berlin was the first Tin Pan Alley songwriter to go uptown to Broadway with a complete musical score (Watch Your Step in 1914); he is the only songwriter to build a theater exclusively for his own work (The Music Box); and his name appears above the title of his Broadway shows and Hollywood
films (Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn), still a rare honor for songwriters. Berlin is also notable due the length of his career in American Song; he sold his first song at the age of 18 and passed away at the age of
101 having outlived several of his own copyrights. Throughout his career, Berlin showed that a popular song need not be of a lesser quality than songs informed by the principles of "classical" music composition. Forty years after his last published song many of his songs remain popular and several have even entered folk song status, something no other 20th-century American songwriter can claim. As one of the most seminal figures of twentieth century, both in the world of
music and in American culture more generally, and as one of the rare songwriters equally successful with popular songs, Broadway shows, and Hollywood scores, Irving Berlin is the subject of an enormous
corpus of writing, scattered throughout countless publications and archives. A noted performer and interpreter of Berlin's works, Benjamin Sears has unprecedented familiarity with these sources and brings together in this Reader a broad range of the most insightful primary and secondary materials. Grouped together according to the chronology of Berlin's life and work, each section and article features a critical introduction to orient the reader and contextualize the materials within the
framework of American musical history. Taken as a whole, the writings - many by Berlin himself -- provide a new perspective on Berlin that highlights his musical genius in the context of his artistic
development.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Musical Demon - Early Years
1.1 A Trip to Chinatown with Irving Berlin, Ward Morehouse
1.2 "Alexander" & Irving, Edward Jablonski
1.3 Excerpt from Alexander and His Band, Charles Hamm
1.4 The Boy Who Revived Ragtime, Rennard Wolf
1.5 Review of Watch Your Step by "Madam Critic"
1.6 Excerpt from First Nights and First Editions, Harry B. Smith
1.7 "Watch Your Step": Irving Berlin's 1914 Musical, Margaret Knapp
1.8 Ghost of Verdi Interviewed: Tells How He Suffers Nightly
1.9 Fond Memory: Those Old Music Box Revues, Robert Baral
1.10 Letter about The Music Box, Robert Benchley
1.11 "Yes, We Have No Bananas" in Grand Opera Setting, S.I. deKrafft
Part Two: Blue Skies - Middle Years
2.1 Memoir, George S. Kaufman
2.2 Letter from Jerome Kern to Alexander Woollcott from The Story of Irving Berlin
2.3 Excerpt from Musical Stages, Richard Rodgers
2.4 Excerpt from chapter The March of Time in A Song in the Dark, Richard Barrios
2.5 Unity in Word and Tone in Two Ballads by Irving Berlin, Howard Pollack
2.6 The Origins of Easter Parade, Benjamin Sears
2.7 "Gawd Bless A-M-E-R-I-K-A", Cleve Sallendar
2.8 "No Right to a Personal Interest in 'God Bless America'," Berlin is Told, Variety
2.9 Excerpt from Stokowski, Here for Concert Tonight, Praises Martial, Folk Songs; Likes to Play for Soldiers, Nashville Tennessean
2.10 Irving Berlin Orders Song Word Change, Richmond Afro American
2.11 Excerpt from Musical Stages: An Autobiography, Richard Rodgers
2.12 Excerpt from Who Could Ask for Anything More, Ethel Merman, as told to Pete Martin
2.13 Annie Get Your Gun, Brooks Atkinson
2.14 Verse to Halloween, Harold Arlen & Ralph Blane
2.15 Excerpt from The Hollywood Musical, John Russell Taylor and Arthur Jackson
2.16 Excerpt from Steps in Time, Fred Astaire
Part Three: The Melody Lingers On - Later Years
3.1 A Ninetieth-birthday Salute to the Master of American Song, Joshua Logan
3.2 First Encounters: Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, Nancy Caldwell Sorel
3.3 Excerpts from Top Hat and Tales, Mark Steyn
3.4 Berlin at 100: Life On a High Note, Marilyn Berger
3.5 Bit of Blues for Ballads of Berlin, Murray Kempton
3.6 Genius Without Tears, Josh Rubins
3.7 Irving Berlin (1888-1989), Arthur Maisel
3.8 Cartoon: September 22, 1989, Edward Sorel
Epilogue: Berlin on Songwriting
4.1 How to Write Ragtime Songs, Irving Berlin
4.2 Song and Sorrow Are Playmates, Irving Berlin
4.3 Irving Berlin Gives Nine Rules for Writing Popular Songs, Frank Ward O'Malley
4.4 Excerpt from Words and Music From Irving Berlin, Isaac Goldberg
4.5 How to Write a Song Hit, Irving Berlin
Biographical Highlights
Suggested Reading
Index
About the Author :
Benjamin Sears is a singer who, with pianist Bradford Conner, specializes in the "Great American Songbook" in particular the songs of Irving Berlin. Sears & Conner have made four CDs of Berlin's music together and lecture regularly on American songwriters and the great performers of their music.
Review :
"What a wonderful glance into the musical past! Benjamin Sears has assembled, organized and notated a fan's paradise of writing on and by Irving Berlin. And what a spectrum: from the master giving hints on how a song should be written, to a famous critic completely mis-judging Berlin's greatest theater score. This takes you back to another time and place, and brings Irving Berlin alive again. All in all, a great read." --Ted Chapin, President, Rodgers
& Hammerstein
"The Irving Berlin Reader is an engrossing documentary biography that will delight both the casual music lover and the hardcore Berlinophile. Item after item brings up fascinating details about not only Berlin's life and work but also the workings of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood at the height of the studio system--and Berlin was at the forefront of each of those institutions when it reached its artistic peak. To understand Irving Berlin is to
understand almost everything important about a wide swath of America's popular music history." --Larry Hamberlin, author, Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era
"A valuable collection of commentary by and about a great American songwriter, compiled by a unique performer-scholar with a long and special affinity for his subject." --Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater
"Gives us several shades of Irving, and a sense of who he was behind the self-imposed public mask, at least in the early years." --Playbill.com
"Thanks to Magee and Sears as well as to other scholars, Irving Berlin's ever-trenchant Jewish inspiration continues to be revealed as a major aspect of his mighty achievement." --The Forward
"Give[s] lively accounts--more detailed than conventional biographies have managed--of two fascinating moments when Berlin rose above the ranks of his peers: The 1910s, when he was the new pop phenom, and World War II, when he became an actor on the stage of world history in a way that no other American songwriter has." --Los Angeles Times
"Sears collects articles, anecdotes, analyses and reminiscences that build a compelling, if
necessarily incomplete, portrait of Berlin." --Times Literary Supplement
"The Irving Berlin Reader is an excellent resource. It offers detailed yet accessible discussions of Berlin's music alongside insightful passages about his personality. his relationships, and his place in American popular culture. As such, it will be useful to scholars, students, and casual readers alike." --Notes
"Sears's short but elegant introductions guide the reader through his life and work, and the volume promises to be a standard reference work for musical theatre students and scholars." -- New Theatre Quarterly
"Not only has his archival research helped significantly to enrich our knowledge of all these pieces, but Magee's insights into the contexts in which they were presented - such as the impact of the establishment of Manhattan's Times Square area on early musical theatre - also have implications for our understanding of the genre more broadly." -- lNew Theatre Quarterly
