David Carson Berry, Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907–1914, by Charles Hamm, Contemporary Music Review 19/1 (2000): 157–66. NB: Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, part 1 (2000) is a theme issue, titled “Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music,” ed. by John Covach and Walter Everett. Contemporary Music Review 2000, Vol. 19, Part 1, p. 155 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only © 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V: Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Malaysia. The Platform * A Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914, by Charles Hamm David Carson Berry 157 *In this section we bring together reviews, miscellaneous articles, and responses from readers to subjects and particular articles published in previous issues. Short pieces on all matters concerned with contemporary music will be welcomed, especially those that may stimulate further discussion or provide the basis for a future issue. [po 156 is blank] Contemporary Music Review 2000, Vol. 19, Part I, pp.157-166 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only © 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Malaysia. A Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914, by Charles Hamm David Carson Berry The 1990s are proving to be propitious years for publications about Irving Berlin and his music. Recent biographies include those by L"aurence Bergreen (1990); Berlin's eldest daughter, novelist Mary Ellin Barrett (1994); and Edward Jablonski (in press). Musical analyses of a half-dozen Berlin songs occupy a chapter of Allen Forte's 1995 study of the popUlar-ballad repertory, and an examination of songs spanning Berlin's career is forthcoming from Philip Furia, who already considered some of these in his 1990 book on Tin Pan Alley lyricists. A complete edition of Berlin's published and unpublished lyrics is under preparation by Robert Kimball and Berlin's youngest daughter, Linda Emmet. Multiple historiographic and musical engagements with Berlin's initial years have issued from Charles Hamm, including various articles (1993b, 1994a, and 1996), a threevolume critical edition of his early songs with an extensive introductory essay (1994b), and the book currently under re:view, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot (1997). It is probably no coincidence that this new constellation of texts began appearing after the songwriter's death - at age 101 - in 1989. Berlin owned the rights to his songs, and was notorious for withholding permission for their inclusion in critical studies and other publications. For this very reason, the chapter on Berlin in Wilder 1972 was the only one devoid of musi<;al examples, and an earlier proposed anthology of his lyrics never came about due to the pUblisher's inability to meet his excessive monetary demands (Bergreen 1990,571). Even daughter Barrett has admitted that (to some, at least) the Berlin of later years could appear to be a disagreeable, out-of-touch old man who said no and guarded the use of his songs ... U 157 158 David Carson Berry beyond reason" (Barrett 1994, 294). Ironically, were it not for his passing, we might not have the wealth of information and insight that is currently unfolding. Mu.ch of this insight has come from Hamm, a past president of the American Musicological Society and a preeminent scholar of American popular music who is well-known for Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (1979), a standard survey text in the discipline. His meticulous research on and acumen about Berlin's songs offer a welcome relief from the musically vapid writings usually devoted to pop-music celebrities that sometimes display little regard for historical fact. 1 A songwriter of Berlin's stature and talents deserves a higher level of discourse, and this is what Hamm provides. Songs from the Melting Pot (hereafter SMP) represents the culmination of his intensive Berlin research, subsuming his earlier writings on the topic and focusing on music composed during the period covered by his Early Songs edition: 1907-1914. The book and the anthology are essentially companion volumes, and readers of SMP will want Early Songs nearby for frequent consultation. If the roughly seven years Hamm canvasses seem all too brief considering the length of Berlin's prodigious career, it should be emphasized that these were the formative years of his professional life, spanning from his first published song to his first full-length musical show; the songs written during this time are thus worthy of special attention. This was also a period in which Berlin concentrated his efforts on uindividual" songs, as opposed to those tailored for complete shows, thus placing the material in a somewhat different category; indeed, these songs are even different musically: the use of "melodic sequence and other devices common to nineteenth-century classical music and light opera" increased toward the end of this time, and the musical and lyrical representations of ethnicity, formerly common in his novelty songs, disappeared (221). Finally, considering that in this seemingly meager time span Berlin wrote the music and/ or lyrics to nearly 300 published and unpublished songs, one must realize that to expand the years of inquiry would be to dilute the effort by drastically decreasing the percentage of songs that could be examined. Hamm's approach to the material is not so much one of "analysis" (as associated with the discipline of music theory) as it is of ucriticism" in the sense promulgated by Joseph Kerman, which may be summarized as "a broadly based interpretive strategy that, while not eschewing analysis altogether, appropriates it only in association with a historically and culturally fthick' description of the work in question," a description that "take[s] into account the life and possible intent of the composer, the intended audience, [and] the cultural and aesthetic norms and semiotic traditions for the communication of meaning at a given time and place" A Review afIrving Berlin 159 (McCreless 1997, 20-21). Something of this approach is conveyed even by the book's titular term "melting pot," which of course refers to the mythical notion that cultural differences disappear as immigrants such as Berlin, who departed Western Siberia and arrived in New York City at age 5, become"Americanized." For Hamm the term is precise and significant, and refers to the three stages by which immigrants adapt to a new and alien cultural climate: contact, accommodation, and assimilation. In successive chapters of his book, he tracks these stages in Berlin's early songs by "(1) identifying and describing the song repertories with which he came into contact during his formative years; (2) discussing ways in which these repertories represented an accommodation to a 'mainstream' American music; and (3) tracing Berlin's own assimilation of various of these stylistic elements into what became a mainstream popular style itself" (x). The feature of Hamm's study that most distinctively shows how interpretation is influenced by the social domain is his taxonomy of musical geme. The songs Berlin wrote between 1907-1914 are, in some ways, a homogenous group: they are virtually identical in terms of their published piano / vocal format; they tend toward major keys and moderate tempi; and most follow early-century Tin Pan Alley formal models. Yet audiences of the time perceived these songs as fitting within various gemes, and publishers often advertised them in such a manner. Hamm argues that discerning these original "meanings" requires examining more than just the sheet music. True, in the popular music of this ｴｩｭﾷｾ (unlike in the later rock era) the piano/vocal score was chronologically prior to performances and recordings, but it cannot serve as ali unequivocal Urtext as does notated music of the classical tradition. In popular music, performers have greater input in (re-)shaping a work, and therefore Hamm proposes that the "contemporary perception of the geme of a song, and hence its meaning, was shaped most importantly by its performance and by the venue in which this performance took place. Conversely, stylistic differences written into these pieces were more a matter of the songwriter's sense of who would perform a given song and where than of any abstract ideas about geme" (19). For the repertory Hamm investigates, geme is defined both by stylistic features of the music and lyrics, and by contemporary cultural conventions, the mode and occasion of performance, and (perhaps especially) the perceived identity of the song's protagonist. In short, geme results from the intersection of text and context, and consequently the projection and perception of geme can change from performance to performance. 2 Any number of Hamm's examples illustrate this view, but let us· consider "That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune" (1909). The song features a protagonist who becomes obsessed with Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" (Sechs Lieder ohne Worte, Ope 62, no. 6) and wants to be "loved" and 160 David Carson Berry "squeezed" to its music; Berlin's chorus begins with a quotation of its famous opening melody. As the dialect of the lyrics would have suggested to contemporary audiences, the protagonist is an African American; this identity is confirmed by the stereotypical vocal delivery_ in a period recording by Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan. Thus the intended meaning of the song revolved around this particular protagonist's "elitist" pretensions. The song's humor was predicated on the audience apprehending the dichotomy between the protagonist's culture and the society that spawned Mendelssohn and his melody. Accordingly, the genre as received by early-twentieth century listeners would have been that of a "coon" song (an offensive term in common usage at the time): that is, an ethnic / novelty song that features a stereotypical black protagonist to comic or satirical effect. However, one today might perform the song quite differently, evoking "white" performing traditions and omitting "racist" elements (as did Joan Morris and William Bolcolm in a 1985 recording). So performed, the Mendelssohn quotation might suggest the refinement of a protagonist who is the "true" heir to the song's cultural tradition (not merely a poseur), and thus the song might be interpreted as a high-class romantic ballad. Through the drastic change in performance mode, the very genre of the song is altered. As this example suggests, period recordings provide an important supplement to the printed score, helping Hamm reconstruct the meanings of Berlin's songs as projected by performers and received by audiences at the time of their composition. 3 Their consultation is especially useful in deducing the identity of a song's protagonist, .since accents and dialects were usually exaggerated in performance. Hamm's genre conclusions are also guided by a host of other factors, inclu9-ing depictions of the protagonist(s) by the sheet-music's cover art, and song descriptions given by company advertisements and show reviews. For those more familiar with the study of the classic repertory, where the notated score is taken to represent the ideal musical object, Hamm's use of seemingly"secondary" sources in the determination of genre might seem suspect, but he frequently reminds us that the contemporary interpretation of a Berlin song was not a matter of "how it looked on paper, in musical notation, but how it sounded in performance" (106). If this statement seems to open a Pandora's box of taxonomies, with multiple labels flying out and affixing themselves to each and every song, it only serves to illustrate the fluidity of genre boundaries in the pop-music landscape. Nonetheless, Hamm is quite reasonable and precise in determining genre; he considers only the interpretation(s) most likely, given the culture of the intended audience, and he always provides the reader with the texts and contexts prompting his decisions. Having explicated the critical apparatus guiding Hamm's work, we turn now to the book's organization, which is based on these very classi- A Review afIrving Berlin 161 fications. In accordance with the view that the place of performance is an important factor in a song's perception, three of the five chapters (I, 4 and 5) "are organized around the early twentieth century's most important performance venues for popular songs: the vaudeville house, the home circle, and the legitimate theater" (19). The remaining chapters, 2 . and 3, "discuss songs that make reference of one sort or another to African Americans and their culture" (19), and so derive their content from the identity of the protagonist; the first of these offers an extension of the genre definitions begun in chapter 1, and the second provides a detailed history of "Alexander's Ragtime Band." A few examples will serve to illustrate the focus of these chapters. Songs written for the vaudeville stage, which comprise the majority of Berlin's early material, are usually "novelty songs." These have narrative lyrics that develop a comical, satirical, or suggestive scenario, and most feature protagonists of a specific ethnic group - particularly Italians, African-Americans, and Jews (a group to which Berlin himself belonged). Their content complemented the ethnic comedy prevalent in vaudeville houses, with their largely working-class, multicultural audiences. Songs featuring African-American protagonists range from novelty songs to ragtime, but most distinctive are those "about black musicians": . first-person narratives in which an observer comments on African-American music-making in a positive manner (recall that "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is considered "the best band in the land"). The lyrics bear "no trace of caricature or condescension" and Hamm has found no other songs of the era that so enthusiastically endorse the musicianship of black performers (79-80). Indeed, he even suggests that the recurring protagonist "Ephraham" might have been Berlin's alter ego. Songs for the "home circle" refers to ballads (though many were performed professionally as well). Ballads became one of Berlin's most acclaimed genres in later years, but were written infrequently at this time. The subgenre that Hamm argues to have been more Berlin's own creation than any other was the "rhythmic ballad," which made references to music associated with African Americans, such as the cakewalk and ragtime, yet featured "unequivocally white" protagonists - usually women depicted as more sexually free than their counterparts in Victorian ballads. The heyday of the subgenre only came in the 1920s, as epitomized by non-Berlin songs such as "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and "I Wanna Be Loved By You." Songs for the "legitimate theater" were those used in shows that moved away from vaudeville toward the more respectable enterprises of the revue and musical comedy. Berlin's music became increasingly inter-:polated into such shows and Watch Your Step, his first full-length book musical, debuted in December 1914. This production marks the end of the 162 David Carson Berry period surveyed by the book, and Hamm emphasizes the transformation of technique and orientation that transpired during this time, culminating in the creation of the successful show. The above summarizations of selected chapter content are greatly abridged; they simply provide an inkling of the topics covered so that those unfamiliar with Hamm's text (and perhaps Berlin's songs) may have a few concrete examples of the range of material covered. However, in determining the success of a book, what one covers is ultimately subordinate to how one covers it; we tum now to Hamm's manner of introducing and explicating gemes and individual songs and his ability to present the interaction of text and context he takes to impute meaning. Not surprisingly, a primary strength of SMP is its exegesis of the social contexts within which these songs were created. For example, before discussing material written for vaudeville, Hamm provides an informative overview of the history, structure, and audiences of the shows, complete with descriptions of acts that might appear on a given bill and how their placement and content were coordinated. Encountering this preamble, the reader is likely to recall how many other books on early Tin Pan Alley routinely evoke vaudeville without explaining its atmosphere and organization in such detail. Likewise, in the chapter on the ballad repertory, Hamm's survey of the history and stylistic traits of both the Hhighclass ballad of Victorian America and its pseudo-folk "popular relative helps ground our understanding of the not-so-virtuous protagonists in Berlin's "rhythmic ballads,1I as well as his later turn to more sophisticated fare. Hamm also challenges revisionist views when they conflict with contemporary assessments of Berlin's music. For example, during the mid-century Ragtime Revival and afterward, ragtime became associated with only a small corpus of piano compositions; early "ragtime songs" were precluded from the canon and the very term was viewed as an oxymoron. But Hamm reminds us that not only do these songs have musical traits in common with ragtime, they were indeed accepted as ragtime by composers, performers, critics, and audiences in the first two decades of the twentieth centuryll (81), and one must regard them in these terms. 4 Hamm's careful attention to the historical and musical facts of Berlin's own life is equally exceptional. Though SMP is not a biography per se, it reveals much about the songwriter's early history and working methods, not only within relevant portions of chapters but also in its preface and lengthy introduction (both of which provide biographical and ideological information essential to understanding the rest of the book). Hamm's attention to historical accuracy is especially overt in his chapter on Alexander's Ragtime Band," the 1911 song that became an icon for the ragtime erall (102).5 Though devoting so much print to a ll ll II II II A Review afIrving Berlin 163 single song might seem to disrupt the flow of genre discourse that characterizes most of the book, it is certainly warranted. This song is of great importance to the history of American popular music, yet prior accounts have often included Ufactual mistakes and outright fabrications" (116), engineered as they were for the popular press by authors with a penchant for the journalistic uhook." Hamm systematically discredits common myths, clarifying issues of chronology, composition, and initial reception. The foregoing summarizes Hamm's success with contexts, but what about the texts - the songs themselves? A common reproach of critical writing on popular song is that it often relies too heavily on the verbal dimension, engaging the lyrics much mote than (or even to the detriment of) the music. Given the priority of the protagonist in Hamm's definition of genre, it is clear that he too privileges this component of a song. However, his advocacy of the dominance of words over notes is not only ideological; he holds that this relative weighting is appropriate for the syllabic songs of the vaudeville stage and early musical comedy, in which "[t]he chief emphasis was on the text, as the performer sketched and developed a comic or satirical vignette, often in dialect; although the music might color the lyric with hints of an appropriate ethnic style or develop a catchy refrain that would stick in the listener's memory, its most important function was to serve as a frame for the lyric" (181). Accordingly, when Hamm mentions the musical characteristics of such songs - the Italian insinuations of a tarantella-like meter and modal mixture in "Angelo" (1910); the use of moderate-tempo, Landler-like waltzes in songs about Germans; the evocation of Jewishness via minor-key elements and melodic augmented seconds in uYiddle, On Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime" (1909) ....:.- these comments are usually brief and clearly subordinate to his assessments of the lyrics. Hamm does engage in purely musical considerations when the subject warrants. For example, in considering which version of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" came first, the song or the piano two-step, he expertly contrasts the unorthodox harmonic/ sectional organization of the piano score with the standards for marches and rags, demonstrating the likelihood that the song came first and was only later adapted for piano. But for the most part such examinations are simply not the point of the book, and in fact Hamm is critical of the "completely text-based" (i.e., scorebased) analyses of Berlin's songs found in Forte 1995 (221-222). Hamm's pretermission may be the one attribute some readers (particularly those in the music-theory community) will find disappointing. This is especially true as the chronology advances and, by Hamm's own assessment, Berlin's music incorporates additional "European" elements and becomes more musically autonomous, making it amenable to precisely those 164 David Carson Berry Schenkerian analytic techniques Forte applies. For example, Hamm describes "Spanish Love" (1911) as Ucom[ing] as close to the style of European operetta as anything Berlin had written," and he mentions the effectiveness of its Usustained, legato vocal line" and "high-note climaxes" (195). If we were to examine the song from a Schenkerian perspective, we would find in its chorus a middleground linear connection of two of these high notes, d 2 and f2, across 13 measures, comprising stepwise descent and register transfer. In other words, the legato line and the climaxes mentioned by Hamm are in fact ingeniously connected, showing Berlin's growing attention to larger-scale melodic design as he refined his craft. Such observations, born of analysis, may not be included in Hamm's work, but they certainly support his conclusions about Berlin's evolving style. A final and noteworthy attribute of the book is its appendices, which list all songs written by Berlin up to late 1914 and the many recordings made of these. Appendix 1 is devoted to the 190 published songs; while similar lists exist, Hamm's is more accurate in its citation of collaborators, its precise chronology complete with copyright dates, and even in its song titles (taken from the first page of the sheet music, not the less-reliable cover).6 Appendix 2 manages to track those somewhat-vaporous unpublished songs, some of which remain only as titles in Berlin's own song lists; these 100-plus entries are taken from a variety of sources, all of which are documented. Appendix 3 provides Uthe first comprehensive and professionally prepared discography of early recordings of ｂｾｲｬｩｮＧ s songs" (xi); this was compiled not by Hamm but by Paul Charosh and provides complete information about the discs (and cylinders) it lists over 500 total. The appendices do contain a few mistakes. For example, "Hey Wop" (1914) and "It Can't Be Did" (1910), cited in the main body of "the book as unpublished songs, are absent from Appendix 2, and "Angelo" (1910), another unpublished song, is mistakenly placed in Appendix 1. But a few errors, inevitable in comprehensive lists that have probably seen countless drafts, should not distract from the usefulness and importance of these long-overdue inventories. On the whole, SMP represents an outstanding contribution - one that will be embraced not only by advocates of Irving Berlin, but also by many students of American popular music in the early years of the twentieth century. Hamm provides the socio-cultural infrastructure necessary to support an understanding of songs created for specific audiences, but at the same time he is always sensitive to musical styles and evolution; he is ever mindful that these songs are not only "cultural artifacts" but music. Through his intimate understanding and expert navigation of both text and context, he has presented us with the single finest book on Irving Berlin ｾ of whatever time period - yet published. A Review aflrving Berlin 165 References Barrett, Mary Ellin. 1994. Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bergreen, Laurence. 1990. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. New York: Viking; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Forte, Allen. 1995. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Furia, Philip. 1990. The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furia, Philip, with Graham Wood. Forthcoming. Irving Berlin: A Life in Song. New York: Schirmer. Hamm, Charles. 1979. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hamm, Charles. 1980. uThe Phonograph as Time-Machine," in The Phonograph and Our Musical Life: Proceedings of a Centennial Conference [7-10 December 1977], ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock, 61-64. Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music. Hamm, Charles. 1992. uprivileging the Moment of Reception: Music and Radio in South Africa." In Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven PaulScher, 21-37. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Hamm, Charles. 1993a. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin [review]," American Music 11/2: 245-50. U Hamm, Charles. 1993b. UIrving Berlin's Early Songs as Biographical Documents," Music;al Quarterly 77/1: 10-34. Hamm, Charles. 1994a. uGeme, Performance and Ideology in the Early Songs of Irving Berlin," Popular Music 13/2: 143-50. Hamm, Charles. 1996. Alexander and His Band," American Music 14/1: 65-102. U Hamm, Charles. 1997. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914. New York: Oxford University Press. Hamm, Charles, ed. 1994b. Irving Berlin: Early Songs, 1907-1914, 3 vols. Music of the United States of America, vol. 2. Madison, WI: ｒｾａ Editions. Jablonski, Edward. Forthcoming. Irving Berlin: American Troubadour. New York: Henry Holt & Co. McCreless, Patrick. 1997. URethinking Contemporary Music Theory." In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel, 13-53. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Wilder, Alec. 1972. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Notes 1. See for example the review of Bergreen 1990 in Hamm 1993a; despite Bergreen's seemingly well-documented discourse (with copious Ifnotes on sources" appended at the 166 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. David Carson Berry end), it is in fact quite deficient in terms of both musical understanding and general scholarship. The ideology of Ifprivileging the moment of reception" permeates much of Hamm's work; see especially Hamm 1992. This view of the phonograph as a musicological time machine" was advanced by Hamm two decades earlier as a way of gaining insight into Stephen Foster's music (Hamm 1980). Hamm has long suggested looking at contemporary perceptions rather than revisionist definitions of styles; in Hamm 1979 he similarly reminds the reader that while current jazz historians exclude Berlin and other popular songwriters from the category of jazz composers, the view from 1920s New York was quite different (333). This chapter first appeared, with only occasional rewording, as Hamm 1996; the current version is distinguished primarily by the addition of a newly discovered letter from Berlin, appended at the end. Those desiring even more detail about these songs may consult the critical notes in Hamm 1994b. If