This article was downloaded by: [Pinnolis, Judith S.] On: 8 December 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 930876817] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Music Reference Services Quarterly Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t792306936 A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman Judith S. Pinnolisa a Reference Librarian, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Online publication date: 08 December 2010 To cite this Article Pinnolis, Judith S.(2010) 'A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman', Music Reference Services Quarterly, 13: 3, 139 — 142 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10588167.2010.527758 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2010.527758 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Book Reviews 139 Downloaded By: [Pinnolis, Judith S.] At: 20:56 8 December 2010 book focused on synthesis and critique could also enhance the usefulness of the text. Nonetheless, this book should be considered an outstanding introduction to the study of experience in music education for scholars and those with interest in exploring music learning as experience. In comparison with How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002) and Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) by Lucy Green and Songs in Their Heads: Music and its Meaning in Children’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) by Patricia Shehan Campbell, this book provides needed breadth, but lacks the detail of those works. This book provides insight into the impact on musical learning, and how it relates to real world musical practices, and it would be a beneficial source for any prospective or practicing music educator. Daniel Hellman Assistant Professor of Music Education Missouri State University Springfield, MO David Lehman (2009). A FINE ROMANCE: JEWISH SONGWRITERS, AMERICAN SONGS. (Jewish Encounters). New York, NY: Nextbook. 249 pp., $23.00. ISBN 978-0-8052-4250-8 (hardcover). While well written and entertaining, A Fine Romance loses momentum for an academic audience based on whether it is a fictional account mixed with personal memoir, or a clever method book that makes dry facts and lists of names of songs easier to digest and remember by making the stories more personalized. The ‘fine romance’ is the romance of the American Jewish songwriter with America, and Lehman’s romance with their music. As he states, “This is the story of a romance, mine, though scarcely mine alone, with an America of the imagination and the primarily Jewish men and women who got to write the book, the lyrics, and the music for the dream” (p. 27). No doubt about it—Lehman is an enthusiast and a great storyteller. However, the book feels like the long (and sometimes winding, sometimes rambling) monologue of an avid fan reveling in the minute details gathered during a lifetime of collecting the stories, rather than in getting to the point. It is sometimes difficult to separate the facts from fiction; the created artifice from the artists. So how or what do we learn? He creates imaginary conversations with many of the artists; some already long deceased, with text in quotes as if they had a conversation. For example in his (fantasy?) conversation with Sammy Cahn, Lehman uses such phrases as “when I encountered Sammy . . .” (p.103) or “I asked Sammy . . .” (p. 104). It’s difficult to know Downloaded By: [Pinnolis, Judith S.] At: 20:56 8 December 2010 140 Book Reviews whether there had actually been a real interview, as Lehman mentions that he had decided “I had better talk to these people, to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne and the rest while there was still time. That’s when I started this project” (p. 115). But what part of the conversation was ‘true’ enough that we learn something real about Cahn? Conversations in the book are often used as a way for the author to insert personal comments, belying his personal pledge “. . . I will write it straight, leaving myself out of it” (p. 115). He also uses the conversational device to move from one personality or story to the next. A real interview with Richard Rodgers when Lehman was a student didn’t seem to garner much new insight on musical composition, although it must have been thrilling to the young fan. Not much in the book is actually new material in terms of scholarly research. While the presentation puts together material from a wide range of sources, condensing some central ideas really rather well, it may be difficult for an average reader not familiar with this material to tease it out. Since the book is reasonably short, the appeal of this book is that it can serve as a beginner’s (somewhat fictionalized) introduction to some of the complicated issues surrounding the story of the American-Jewish popular music songwriters in early twentieth century. Lehman writes about both the composers and lyricists. He is drawn to the music by a spectrum of questions surrounding the geniuses in both categories, as well as an obvious sense of his own childhood nostalgia. Broadway tunes and popular music seem to be the glue that ties all these memories together for him. Whether that will carry over to the reader is a question. While the book is broken into chapters, it’s hard to say it has “structure,” but rather some general themes, including his fictionalized “uncles” he made of some of the songwriters as an attempt to make them accessible. Even so, the book jumps around from topic to topic, punctuating paragraph or page with interspersed personal memoir, asides and miscellaneous details, such as how he and a friend made it to the Dylan concert at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric (or are those part of the fictional narrative effect?). At the end there is a chronology meant to put some of this all into perspective. Unfortunately, Lehman falls into the annoying, often-repeated-trap of writers on Jewish music, starting his time line at 1000 BCE with King David on his harp. Nevertheless, Lehman attempts to break up and squarely deal with some of the main issues that scholars have been facing on this part of American music history. What can be made of the fact that so many of America’s early twentieth century songwriters were Jewish? Is it relevant, and if so, why? How has this music intrinsically tied Jewish musical history to that of America? As Lehman puts it, his original question is: “In what sense is urban American popular music a Jewish phenomenon?” (p. 12). It is a great question. In a way he sums up the main intellectual arguments from the scholarly works, (and seems to get his main answers from the scholarly books and papers). Lehman clearly has read and absorbed those ideas, feels Downloaded By: [Pinnolis, Judith S.] At: 20:56 8 December 2010 Book Reviews 141 that he hears it – that he ‘gets it,’ –and since he loves the music, he wants to spread those ideas around to share with an audience within a popular book. The scholarly works that precede this one cover more specific ground. Lehman attempts to cover many areas. For example, if one is examining Jewish musical elements, a work such as Jack Gottlieb’s Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood (Albany, NY: State University of New York in association with the Library of Congress, 2004) will certainly provide the reader with more precision and better examples (including actual musical examples both written and in an accompanying CD). If one is interested in issues of identity and how musical theater was used to address and even help create American Jewish identities, Andrea Most’s Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) is more thorough. If you want to know the biographies of the great songwriters, many of the books referred to by Lehman are terrific. If you want to know more about the Black and Jewish music relationships, or those issues faced in the movie The Jazz Singer, there are many other articles and books that treat the issues with more depth. Lehman lets you know about these and other points of view. He doesn’t really get into the musical details, but he’ll enthusiastically connect the ideas with the music, which he does know. His special focus is on mood and lyric, but sometimes the ‘Jewish’ parts of the arguments are rather weak and stereotyped. Was angst in New York really an exclusively Jewish phenomenon amongst the millions of new immigrants from all over the world? Is a plaintive tone the only characteristic of Jewish music? Is chutzpah, gall, the exclusive trait of Jews, or of many who strove to be successful entrepreneurs in America? These named Jewish characteristics are really rather elusive traits, especially in music. On explicating the Jewish elements of these songs, Lehman misses the mark. And yet Lehman catches the essence of the connection: “The Jewish element in American popular song is a property not only of the notes and chords but of the words as well, or, more exactly, the union between words and music” (p. 7). Lehman clearly has accessed a huge recording collection to review much of the American musical repertoire. In modern blog fashion, he often pauses the topic narrative to tell the reader he’s listening to the music. How familiar he is with Jewish music outside of synagogue music is unknown. Someone reading this book might often have to reply “no” to his question “Hear it?” (p. 15) when he points to the similarity of a musical phrase in Porgy and Bess with a blessing over the Torah (Pentateuch). If you are not Jewish or well versed in Jewish Hebrew ritual, you may not be familiar with the melody that attends the quoted Hebrew text. To someone who does know that repertoire, it is clear that Gershwin took certain melodies or melodic fragments from synagogue song, but others would have to take that on faith. Downloaded By: [Pinnolis, Judith S.] At: 20:56 8 December 2010 142 Book Reviews Some of the asides meant to push further on Jewish issues, really don’t cut it. For example, Lehman mentions the use of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein, to raise spirits in a losing sports match in Germany in 2006. He thinks it an ironic choice that the song was played to an audience “in the heartland of the Holocaust . . .” for a song “. . . written by a couple of Ashkenazi Jews who lived to create such lasting works only because their prescient grandfathers had abandoned Europe and taken their families to the new world in advance of Czarist pogroms and Nazi death camps” (p. 137). The song was not just chosen for use in Germany during that soccer match. Lehman may not realize that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” spread from the UK to clubs throughout Europe during the 1960s and has been adopted by numerous soccer clubs. The stronger connection in Jewish terms, which Lehman doesn’t point out, may be that Hammerstein’s lyrics to “hold your head up high” and “walk on, with hope in your heart” (Amy Asch, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008], 317) premiered a few months after the liberation of Auschwitz when it became clear to Americans that “the final way” had been walked by millions. The strongest part of this book is the analysis of the song lyrics. Lehman’s attentiveness to the texts, their subtleties, their energies and hidden meanings, give us the truest sense of these song lyrics as the poetry of romance of, and to, America. He contextualizes the texts with the times, giving glimpses into meanings lost when out of the historical surroundings. Another fine section is his commentary on The Jazz Singer. Complex issues of identity and race co-mingle in this film for both the Black and Jewish communities and his discussion hits upon many of these. Finally, he quotes Elinor Wilner that “the great song lyricists were my first poets, and musical comedy was my text . . . Not only I, like millions of others, entranced by the language, the clever rhymes, the delightful melodies, and the dramatic voices, but here was my first exposure as well to poetic truth as opposed to conventional pieties” (p. 133). Apparently, David Lehman agrees. Recommended for public libraries. Judith S. Pinnolis Reference Librarian Brandeis University Waltham, MA