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Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new,
annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by
David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and
photographs by Louis Ouzer. Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a
Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction
and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz
pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Alec
Wilder is a rare example of a composer who established a reputation
both as a prolific composer of concertos, sonatas, and operas, and
as a popular songwriter [including the hit "I'll Be Around"]. He
was fearsomely articulate and had a wide and varied circle of
friends ranging from Graham Greene to Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz.
Letters I Never Mailed, hailed at its first publication [in 1975,
by Little, Brown], tells the story of Wilder's musical and personal
life through unsent "letters" addressed to various friends. In it,
he shares his insights -- and sometimes salty opinions -- on
composing, musical life, and the tension between art and
commercialism. Thisnew, scholarly edition leaves Wilder's original
text intact but decodes the mysteries of the original through an
annotated index that identifies the letters' addressees, a
biographical essay by David Demsey, and photographs by renowned
photographer and lifelong friend of Wilder, Louis Ouzer. David
Demsey is Professor of Music and coordinator of jazz studies at
William Paterson University and an active jazz and classical
saxophonist. He is co-author of Alec Wilder: A Bio-Bibliography
[Greenwood Press] and has contributed to The Oxford Companion to
Jazz.
"Wonderful"-The New York Times. "Provocative, opinionated, and
never dull"-Down Beat. "A singular book."-Studs Terkel. When it was
first published, Alec Wilder's American Popular Song quickly became
a classic and today it remains essential reading for countless
musicians, lovers of American Song, and fans of Alec Wilder. Now,
in a 50th anniversary edition, popular music scholar Robert Rawlins
brings the book fully up-to-date for the 21st century. Whereas
previous editions featured only piano scores, the format has been
changed to lead sheet notation with lyrics, making it accessible to
a wider readership. Rawlins has also added more than sixty music
examples to help complete the chapter on Irving Berlin. One of the
most fascinating features of the original edition was Wilder's
inventive use of language, often revealing his strong and sometimes
irreverent opinions. Wilder's prose remains relatively unaltered,
but footnotes have been provided that clarify, elucidate, and even
correct. Moreover, a new chapter has been added, discussing
fifty-three songs by numerous composers that Wilder might have well
included but was not able to. Songs by Ann Ronnell, Fats Waller,
Jule Styne and many others are capped off with an examination of
ten of Wilder's own songs.
This is the definitive work on the great songwriters who dominated the classical era of American popular music. Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, the book draws on over 700 musical examples to demonstrate the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and transformed it into an authentic art form. Tracing its roots to 1890s ragtime, Wilder shows how the American style was incorporated into mainstream popular music and developed into the brilliantly inventive, and often musically subtle, crowd-pleasers of Kern, Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, and Rodgers.
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