Genre, performance and ideology in the early songs of Irving Berlin

Abstract

Irving Berlin's 200-odd songs written between 1907, the date of the first one, and late 1914, when his first complete show for the musical stage (Watch Your Step) opened at New York's Globe Theatre, are virtually identical to one another in their published piano/vocal format. Like other Tin Pan Alley songs of the early twentieth century, most of them consist of a brief piano introduction, a few bars of vamp, then several verses, each followed by a chorus. All are in major keys and most have a tempo marking of moderato. Piano introductions are drawn from either the first or last phrase of the chorus, the vamp anticipates the melodic beginning of the verse, and both verse and chorus are usually made up of four 4-bar phrases in C or four 8-bar phrases in other metres.

Here for the Hearing

“…2. See Hamm (1994) for a discussion of how genre can be shaped by changes in performers' interpretations and audience perception.…”

Genres of Nationhood: The ''Musico-Literary'' Aesthetics of Attachment and Resistance

“…In accord with the ideological frame of the Jewish American Bildungsroman, Berlin's early songs, as Charles Hamm has pointed out, were usually written as the expression of a single protagonist "whose identity was encoded into the text and music, then projected, clari ed, or even changed in the act of performance." 57 In these songs, familiar ethnic identities are reinforced rather than contested, and the single-voiced style tends to operate, as Bakhtin has noted with respect to literary genres, "centripetally." Its meanings pull toward an of cial, ideological centrality.…”

Musical Similarity as Conceived by “Avid Recreational Music Listeners”

“…19 Speaking about popular music in a broad sense, Middleton 20 discusses how numerous musical and extramusical codes in a piece of music, or at least the degree to which they are present or absent, as well as how they are used, can communicate to listeners (1) a musician's adherence to the conventions of a specific genre and (2) the genre to which a work belongs. In turn, as pointed out by Hamm, 21 listeners perceive the piece, or the amalgamation of various codes, on the basis of contextualized judgments and perceptions about genre conventions.…”