Tin Pan Alley, Gershwin and Irving Berling

Master Chorus Eastside’s Simply Gershwin concert on May 19 focuses mainly on the music and poetry of George and Ira Gershwin, but it also includes tunes from some of his contemporaries, including those who were Tin Pan Alley musicians.

Tin Pan Alley occupied the place in turn-of-the-20^th-century musical America that the recording and media industry occupy today: a way to popularize music for the masses.  It was an actual place in New York—28^th Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues—during an actual time—late 1800s through at least the 1930s—where an actual industry flourished—the music publishing business.  Today a plaque marks the area.

But it was much more than that; it was a symbol of American musical energy.  And it marked a cultural shift.  Because of Tin Pan Alley, publishers moved from producing sheet music mainly for professionals to producing for the burgeoning number of every-day Americans who took up piano playing after the Civil War.  They demanded music to play for pleasure, and publishers were happy to provide it.  And because popular styles ranged from blues to jazz to Broadway, Tin Pan Alley aided the mixing of African American music into the mainstream.

Companies contracted with composers and lyricists to write songs for popular consumption, and then hired song pluggers to promote those songs to publishers, producers, music stores, performers, and anyone else who might buy.  It is thought that the sound of all those pluggers pounding away all day on tinny pianos was the source of the name Tin Pan Alley.  George Gershwin became a song plugger at age 15 and scored his first national Tin Pan Alley hit at age 19 with Swanee.

The list of Tin Pan Alley composers is long and stellar: George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, to name a few; and of course the immensely successful Irving Berlin.

His biggest Tin Pan Alley hits include numbers we still sing today: Alexander’s Ragtime Band, God Bless America, and a little number called Blue Skies.  It first appeared in 1926 in a Broadway show, but it was apparently inspired by the birth of his daughter.  MCE will perform a choral arrangement that skips with giddy joy and indulges in some playful musical witticisms in the middle section.  Here it is performed by the Walt Whitman High School Chamber Singers.

Did you catch the quick little musical quotations in the scat-singing middle section?  If you can name them, add them to the comment box below!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside