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.
- ISBN10 0195014456
- ISBN13 9780195014457
- Publish Date 21 September 1972
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 27 April 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 544
- Language English