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Taking a Chance on Love - The Life and Music of Vernon Duke (Paperback)
Loot Price: R850
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Taking a Chance on Love - The Life and Music of Vernon Duke (Paperback)
Series: American Popular Music Series
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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When his friend George Gershwin persuaded Vladimir Dukelsky to
change his name to Vernon Duke, what the music world already knew
became apparent to the public at large - the man had two musical
personas - one as a composer, the other as a tunesmith. One wrote
highbrow music, the other lowbrow. Yet the two sides complemented
each other. Neither could function without the other. Born and
classically trained in imperial Russia, Vladimir Dukelsky
(1903-1969) fled the Bolshevik Revolution with his family,
discovered American popular music in cosmopolitan Constantinople,
and pursued his budding interest to New York before his passion for
classical music drew him to Paris, where the impresario Serge
Diaghilev hired him to compose a ballet for the Ballets Russes.
Taking a Chance on Love immerses us in Duke's dizzying
globe-hopping and genre-swapping, as financial concerns and musical
passions drive him from composing symphonies to writing songs, from
brilliant successes to Broadway flops, and from performing with
classical performers to writing books and articles. Throughout, as
he crisscrosses the landscape of American music, collaborating with
lyricists such as Howard Dietz, Ira Gershwin, and Sammy Cohn, the
incomparable Vernon Duke emerges clearly from these pages:
sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating, always entertaining.
Although Vernon Duke has entered the canon of American standards
with such songs as ""Taking a Chance on Love,"" ""I Can't Get
Started,"" and ""April in Paris,"" little is known about the
composer with two personas. Taking a Chance on Love brings the
intriguing double life of Dukelsky/Duke back into the spotlight,
restoring a chapter to the history of the Great American Songbook
and to the story of twentieth-century music.
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