Jewish Contributions to Tin Pan Alley

Jewish Contributions to Tin Pan Alley

I recently attended the second in a series of lectures given by Jordan Klapman on the Jewish contribution to Tin Pan Alley. I regret missing the first in the series and hope to make it for the 3rd. Some notable points from this lecture:

1) It is easy to detect clear Klezmer influences in the music of the period. For example, Klapman played a recording of the Eddie Cantor classic “Lena From Palestina” which has clear origins in the Klezmer standard “Noch a Bisl” (A Little More). Other examples are “And the Angels Sing” recorded by Benny Goodman which owes its origins to “Der Shtiler Bulgar” (A Quiet Bulgar).

2) Prior to 1920 and the advent of records and radio, songs were sold as sheet music. People would purchase the songs and learn to perform them themselves. With the advent of records, sheet music sales declined markedly, and with the advent of radio, even more so.

3) Radio originally refused to pay artists for airing their works. They claimed they were transmitting ‘ether’ (an antiquated term for radio waves). It took ASCAP 7 years of legal proceedings to force radio to pay royalties to ASCAP members. This has strong parallels to file sharing technologies which claim innocence by the defence “we’re transmitting bits.”

4) With the decimation of the sheet music market, music was reduced to a pulp industry. The emphasis was on quantity over quality in the hopes that one song would meet with fame. The advent of radio further exacerbated this problem in that now audiences could tire of music much more rapidly than before. Thus composers were forced to produce more in order to keep themselves in the public eye.

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