American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 [Hardcover] Review

Yes, the man is opinionated, and one may argue with some of his more controversial and unsparing critiques.His analyses are grounded in a thorough understanding of music, and he does not retreat from criticizing the most popular. I think that the whole topic is perhaps more subjective than Wilder lets on, but at least he's forthright about his opinions, and provides hundreds of musical annotations to illustrate his views. I'll also agree with the reviewer who criticizes Wilder's view that post-50's popular music was written by "amateurs." Still, this is widely regarded as a must-have for the student of popular music, and it's an excellent, albeit somewhat technical critique of popular music's "golden age."Recommended!

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Product Description:
When Alec Wilder's American Popular Song first appeared, it was almost universally hailed--from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Down Beat--as the definitive account of the classic era of American popular music.It has since become the standard work of the great songwriters who dominated popular music in the United States for half a century.Now Wilder's classic is available again, with a new introduction by Gene Lees.
Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, American Popular Song focuses on the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and have made it an authentic art form. Wilder traces the roots of the American style to the ragtime music of the 1890s, shows how it was incorporated into mainstream popular music after 1900, and then surveys the careers of every major songwriter from World War I to 1950.Wilder devotes desparate chapters to such greats as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen.Illustrated with over seven hundred musical examples, Wilder's sensitive analyses of the most distinctive, creative, and original songs of this period reveal unexpected beauties in songs long forgotten and delightful subtleties in many familiar standards.The result is a definitive treatment of a strangely unsung and uniquely American art.

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