Show Tunes: America's Art Songs?

In preparing the music for Master Chorus Eastside’s upcoming Simply Gershwin concert on May 19, I’ve been pondering the apparent disconnect in classical music between the European art song and American show tunes, Tin Pan Alley hits and parlor songs.  Some of these tunes clearly exist only for their entertainment value (not necessarily bad!) and only go skin deep, but others just as clearly achieve depths of expression, poetry and style that set them on a par with the best European art songs.  Could it be that the classical world is missing a bet when it overlooks these American gems?

I, like every other budding voice major, studied gobs of art songs, especially from that old standby, Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias.  How many of us have heard Caro mio ben massacred in student recitals?!  And yet it can be lovely when in the hands of an accomplished performer, such as Montserrat Caballe. This number is all about loving and receiving only scorn in return!

Art songs, whether Italian or German or French or whatever, are nearly always about love: requited, unrequited, accepted, rejected, longed for, delighted to be free of, you name it, they sing about it, with passion, lyricism, and sophistication.

Is that so different from, say, Jerome Kern’s Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man, or Harold Arlen’s Let’s Fall in Love, or George Gershwin’s Love Walked In?

This doesn’t begin to touch Bess, You Is My Woman Now, from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, or Kern’s Ol’ Man River from Showboat, or Bernstein’s Maria from West Side Story or Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma.  They are so stunning, so obviously a cut above, and so wonderfully evocative of the American spirit that even though they hale from Broadway (even Porgy and Bess in the beginning), their place in the art song genre has long been accepted.  But I would argue that many other show and parlor tunes should be reexamined as legitimate art songs that capture the essence of the American soul.  I’ve watched the faces of many MCE members as we’ve prepared choral arrangements of some of these numbers.  This music speaks to us!

So enjoy a true classic right now: Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm.  If this isn’t art song, then nothing is!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside