The Great American Songbook

Master Chorus Eastside has begun rehearsals for our upcoming March concert called The Great American Songbook, a catchall term that has become current in recent years.  I love the phrase, it has music in its rhythm and flow.  And my chorus LOVES the music; rehearsals are energetic, to say the least!  But what exactly is the great American songbook?  It brings to mind a songbook of course, and you can actually find a songbook by that title for sale at Amazon, with more than 100 standards from “the Golden Age of American song.”  But when was the golden age of American song?  And can it really be contained in a single book?

The phrase as it is used nowadays is, in a way, a songbook, or rather, songbooks, but it is more than that.  It is a genre, even a kind of metaphor of a time, a way of singing and composing and playing music, of style.  The time, by most definitions, was the 1920s through the 1950s, although some stretch it to include the parlor songs of the late 19^th century.  Some commentators think that the rock music explosion that began in the 1960s killed off the genre, but others disagree and include later lyrical singers and composers such as Carole King and Billy Joel.

I wasn’t able to pin down when the phrase came into common usage.  Michael Feinstein, probably the most visible modern proponent of the Great American Songbook, says that no one knows when it first appeared, but it has become an increasingly common term in the last twenty or so years.

(See: http://classact.typepad.com/robert_d_thomasclass_act/2014/07/memoir-michael-feinstein-building-and-preserving-the-great-american-songbook.html)

The phrase doesn’t occur in any of my American music history text or reference books, several with copyright dates from the very early 2000s.  But the composers and lyricists and performers are certainly written up there: Harold Arlen, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, George and Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Tommy Dorsey, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Glenn Miller, Lena Horne, Cole Porter...

And the songs are there: Stormy Weather, Stardust, Georgia On My Mind, Embraceable You, Fascinating Rhythm, Singin’ in the Rain, You’re the Top, It Had to be You, It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), Satin Doll...

And the styles are described there: Tin Pan Alley composers and producers (see my blog of April 24, 2013), theater, popular and parlor songs, movie and radio music and, of course, jazz, lots of jazz, because jazz is a uniquely American creation that spawned music of harmonic complexity and melodic expressiveness closely married to sophisticated lyrics full of poetic word play and wit.

I would argue that the Great American Songbook is, or is becoming, the popular American equivalent of classical art songs.  Consider how many art songs came from stage productions—opera—or were written for intimate parlor entertainment as well as concert recitals: the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Debussy, Fauré, the vast array of Italian art songs by Carissimi, Monteverdi, Antonio Scarlatti, and many, many more.  Their subjects are mostly about love—love fulfilled, love spurned, unrequited love, love recovered from (sound familiar?)—in music of harmonic complexity and melodic expressiveness closely married to sophisticated lyrics full of poetic word play....

My New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines art song in part as “a song intended for the concert repertory, as distinct from a folk or popular song.  An art song traditionally is a setting of a text of high literary quality...[with] accompaniment specified by the composer...”

Certainly there are differences between this definition and the Great American Songbook genre.  But music never stays still, and definitions change over time.  Perhaps, fifty years from now, no one will notice the difference!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside