Celebrating Recent Work by Walter Frisch

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by Walter Frisch

Harold Arlen and His Songs is the first comprehensive book about the music of one of the great song composers of the twentieth century. Arlen wrote many standards of the American Songbook, including "Get Happy," "Over the Rainbow, "Stormy Weather," "Come Rain or Come Shine," and "The Man That Got Away" - that today rank among the best known and loved. Author Walter Frisch places these and other songs in the context of a long career that took Arlen from Buffalo, New York; to Harlem's Cotton Club; to Broadway stages; and to the film studios of Hollywood. Even with their complex melodies, harmonies, and formal structures, Arlen's tunes remain accessible and memorable. As Frisch shows, he blended influences from his father's Jewish cantorial tradition, his experience as a jazz arranger and performer, and peers like Gershwin, Kern, and Berlin. Arlen always emphasized the collaborative nature of songwriting, and he worked with the top lyricists of his day, including Ted Koehler, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin.

Harold Arlen and His Songs is structured around these and Arlen's other partnerships, analyzing individual songs as well as the shows or films in which they appear. The book also treats Arlen's performances of his own music as a vocalist and pianist through numerous recordings and appearances on radio and television. A final chapter explores the interpretations of his songs by great singers, including many who worked with him, among them Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

About the Author

is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, Germany, and China. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Professor Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Schubert to Schoenberg. He has written numerous articles and two books on Brahms, including Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984) and Brahms: the Four Symphonies (1996, 2003). He served as editor of the volume Brahms and His World (1990, 2009) and was the founding president of the American Brahms Society in 1983. He is the co-author, with George S. Bozarth, of the Brahms article in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000).

About the Speakers

is an acknowledged master of the American Songbook and one of the top performers of popular music working today He is as entertaining as he is musically savvy, and his audiences feel they’ve been to a terrific party where the music and the stories have been equally great. Eric melds jazz and pop, whether at the piano leading a trio or quartet, or as a standup vocalist. A Resident Artist at New York's legendary Birdland Jazz Club, he will return in early 2024 with Sean Smith on bass and vocalist Barbara Fasano. The trio enjoyed a 2-week Artist Residency at Italy's Monteverdi Tuscany in Autumn of 2022. With his enviable command of both pop and jazz repertoire, Eric performs and records with some of the world’s finest jazz musicians.

is Associate Professor of Music/Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He is interested in the relationship between the social and the aesthetic as articulated in music and sound. He has written on a wide range of music from fusion (jazz-rock-funk) to Hawaiian music, heavy metal, and enka. His current project is focused on the sounds of anthropogenic activity in the ocean and its impact on the more-than-human. His first book, titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funkand the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press, 2011), is a study of fusion music of the 1970s framed by insights drawn from cultural studies, popular music studies, jazz studies, and ethnic studies. His second book, Listen But Don’t Ask Question: HawaiianSlack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific (Duke University Press, 2019), is a transPacific ethnographic study into the ways in which Kanaka Maoli and non-Hawaiian guitarists articulate Hawaiian values and notions of belonging.

is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.

is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982, serving six years as department chair (1999-2005) and was President of the American Musicological Society. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart's music, and Brahms's slow movements. Her most recent publications, after the monograph-length article on “variations” in New Grove 2, concern biography (Haydn and his multiple audiences), chronology (Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets), history (marriage in Don Giovanni), Enlightenment aesthetics (Haydn’s Creation), and the opus concept (“Six of One”), and she is completing studies of Haydn’s Metastasio opera L’isola disabitata and of music and melancholy. Her most recent work concerns Haydn's "poetics of solar time."

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Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities