Wilder shores
Benny Green
The death last week of the composersongwriter Alec Wilder calls to mind the book he published in 1972, American Popular Song; the Great Innovators, 19001950. Too many books are described as extraordinary by over-zealous reviewers hysterical with the excitement of publication date, but Wilder's vast work deserved the description better than any other written on the subject. Only last week The Times obituary categorised the book as 'remarkable', and remarkable it certainly was, although not at all in the way intended either by the obituarist or by Wilder himself, who appears to have believed that with American Popular Song he had delivered authentically magisterial verdicts on his contemporaries. He had in fact done something quite different and far more revealing, although if I am to justify that remark, I had better fill in the landscape.
Wilder's book was an attempt to deliver qualitative judgments on the great, American songwriters, from Berlin and Gershwin down to Van Heusen and Loesser. An army of hacks had preceded him in the field. but where Wilder's book differed from all its rivals was in its consistent use of textual examples. In other words, Wilder was assuming in his readers the ability to read music, to follow the convolutions of harmonic sequences, to possess a sufficiently comprehensive mental repertoire of songs to be able to understand the process by which the author might weigh the virtues of one item against the deficiencies of another. American Song attempted, then, to be an intensely, uncompromisingly scholarly work dedicated to an area of musical expression previously devoid of any such approach. For in spite of the fact that the popular songs he was discussing had played a dominant part in the social history of the times, had come to the attention of artists as disparate as Joyce and Osbert Sitwell, Wodehouse and John O'Hara, Cardus and Scott Fitzgerald, Priestley and Coward, Howard Spring and Edmund Wilson, they had always remained in that cultural limbo between classical music and the lesser plant life of Tin Pan Alley. Wilder's book broke new ground, especially for musicians, which is why, of the 500 books I have reviewed in this publication, American Song was the one I reached out for with the most delight.
Now Wilder was himself a songwriter of some minor distinction. It is true that over the years there has developed about him that aura of inverted snobbery which says that because a man's work is not frequently performed, that work is profound, subtle. brilliant and so on, and that only the coarsenesses of the market-place have prevented his triumph. But Wilder. who really did rather well with so slender a song-writing talent, produced only one item, 'I'll Be Around', which has any prospects of survival, and even that song owes much to the considerable evangelising performed on its behalf by Sinatra.
Wilder's distinctly limited commercial success could have worked in two ways upon him; it might have induced humility, or it might have inspired bitterness. On the evidence of American Popular Song, it is hard to guess which of those two conditions caught up with him. In The Times last week, the book was described as 'scholarly'. Let us see of what this scholarship consisted: I've examined, and very carefully, all of Richard Rodgers's songs up to 1970. And since I must be honest, I can find no whole song about which I want to talk, or whose merits I am impelled to praise.
I know I am treading on sacred ground when I speak slightingly of 'Soon', George Gershwin's famous song from 'Strike Up the Band'. I must say what I believe, and it is that even as a pop song I find 'Soon' almost totally a contrivance. It contains none of the elements I so admire in a great song: unexpectedness, subtlety, wit, inevitability. Perhaps it does have the latter, but in this case it comes off as expectedness. It has boldness, to be sure, but here it borders on coarseness.
'I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart' I remember so vividly as played by Duke Ellington's band that I have difficulty reassessing it as a song. It's a swinging piece of music, but for the first half of the release and, were the lyric better written. I might be more inclined to think of it as a song than I do.
Further manifestations of Wilder's 'scholarship' include his contemptuous dismissal of the Wodehouse — Kern 'Just My Bill', the verdict that 'The Folks Who Live on the Hill is 'without special interest', his erroneous definition of Berlin's 'Lazy' as an ABCD formula when it is in fact of ABCDEFGH design, his belief that jazz musicians select their vehicles according to the number of notes in the original song, his modest 'improvement' of Gershwin's melody in 'That Certain Feeling', the dismissal of 'You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me' as 'workaday', and so on for more than 500 pages across whose closely-printed textual quotations there never once falls the softening shadow of humility, Throughout his work of 'scholarship'. Wilder repeatedly lets the reader know how brave he is. He must be honest. He must say what he believes. He must be frank about this. Well, there sometimes come moments when reviewers too must be frank, when even obituarists, those monumental masons of the literary landscape, must say what they think. And I admit that when I first read of Wilder's death, what I heard instantly in my mind's ear was not the melodic line °I'll! Be Around' but the grumbling of a disappointed man ,
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