: popular song, jazz, and classical. Here, music critic Howard Husock recalls how Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and dozens of other Tin Pan Alley songsters created a lively style of popular music that appealed to Americans of all ages, only to see the audience fragment after World War 11. Terry Teachout chronicles the long quest of jazz musicians for cultural "respectabil- ity"; he describes some of the surprising effects. And music scholar
K. Robert Schwarz traces the history of the nation's...
When Rudy Vallee exclaimed, "Heigh-Ho, Everybody!" through his trademark megaphone, his audience of young (mostly female) fans erupted in screams. The appearance of Vallee and his Connecticut Yan- kees at Keith's 81st Street Theater in February 1929 had attracted hundreds of delirious teen-agers, as well as a contingent of New York's Finest (on horseback) to contend with them. No popular singing star had ever created such tumult. It was, wrote one show business reporter, "an explosion...
Trumpeter Harry James was uneasy as he warmed up backstage at New York's Carnegie Hall on the evening of January 16, 1938. "I feel like a whore in a church," he told a colleague. He had every reason to be nervous. Benny Goodman's swing band, with James on trumpet, was about to play a full-length concert-the first such performance ever given in America's most prestigious concert hall by a jazz group.
If anyone was prepared to bring jazz to Carnegie Hall, it was Benny Goodman. Known from...
After two years as a teacher in the United States during the 1890s, noted Czech composer Antonin Dvorak issued a surprising challenge to his hosts.
"Just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvel- ous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce," he said, "and has made an honorable place for itself in literature. ..,so it must assert itself in the other arts, and especially in the art of music."
In Dvorak's time, as today, American classical music...
then centuries old.)
The single most important develop- ment in the history of European music, according to Joseph Machlis in The En- joyment of Music (Norton, 5th ed., 1984), was the emergence between 850 and 1150 A.D. of polyphony-the use of two or more melodic lines. Polyphony re- quired ever more precise forms of nota- tion. Music, says Machlis, "took a long step from being an art of improvisation and oral tradition to one that was care- fully planned and that could be preserved accurately."...
Ferry Boat Over The Broad Waters Of San Francisco Bay." After Dewey lost, a reader asked
Life '5 editor, "How does it feel out on that limb?" The reply: "Crowded."
WQ SPRING 1988
48
Chartered jetliners, 30-second TV "spots," exit polls, and image con- sultants-all these characterize the contemporary U.S. presidential election campaign. America has come a long way since the last "old- style" contest four decades ago. The year 1948 saw Harry Truman's sur...
"He looked to me like a very little man as he sat. . . in the huge leather chair." Thus, Jonathan Daniels remembered Harry S. Truman waiting to be sworn in as the 33rd president of the United States on the evening of April 12, 1945. Daniels' general impression was shared by other Americans then and long afterward.
Hairy Truman was not, in fact, an unusually small man. When he took the oath of office, he stood about 5' 9" and weighed 170 pounds. Yet, somehow, to contemporary critics,...
Gloom hwg like a great invisible fog over the Democratic delegates who gathered in Philadelphia during the dog days of July for the party's 1948 national convention. They saw nothing ahead but certain defeat in November. They behaved, reported the Associated Press, "as though they [had] accepted an invitation to a funeral."
Three weeks earlier, during an exuberant session in the same city, the Republicans had triumphantly nominated "the next president of the United States,"...
his victory, the au-thors said, Truman had broken through his "outer shell of submissiveness and ti- midity." Yet, they insisted, the "new" Truman was still a mediocrity-an inept politician and an uninspiring leader.
As surprising as it may seem to Arner- icans who now remember Truman as the jaunty, straight-talking man from Mis- souri, this harsh post-1948 assessment was widely shared at the time. Truman's "approval" rating in the polls never ex- ceeded 32 percent...
A LONG L OF CELLS
Lewis Thomas has a theory that mankind is "going through the early stages of a species' adolescence. If we can. ..shake off the memory of this century. . . we may find ourselves off and running again." His optimism stems from the "high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell." From "that first micro- organism, parent of us all," man's development has mirrored the process that creates each of our bodies, with myriad cells replicat-...