Proceeding from a comprehensive study of the original sheet music of nearly one hundred songs, the author examines Van Heusen’s output from the standpoints of several parameters, beginning with harmony, progressing to linear-melodic aspects including melody construction itself, and lastly addressing the integration of all the previous into formal schemes. This essay is intended to enrich the reader’s understanding of the craft of this talented artist, through a survey of his compositional techniques and mannerisms. His songs are also highly interesting as music, and often embody ingenious compositional designs. He attained great critical and commercial success with both film and non-film songs, many of which have become standards. Jimmy Van Heusen (1913–90) was a significant popular songwriter in the U.S., during the middle third of the twentieth century. Regarding the latter category, I consider how chromatic passages can complement the larger-scale designs of songs, through definition and elucidation of four ways in which Berlin used chromaticism on this level: in changes between parallel modes, in exactly-transposed segments or phrases, in tonicized segments or phrases, and in sectional key changes. Included in the former category are immediate or directly applied types of chromaticism-i.e., local passing and neighboring tones, blue notes, applied dominants, neighboring and passing chords, and so forth. Species of chromaticism, of both smaller and larger scales, are then scrutinized. I begin with a more thorough inspection of the “black-key” argument, and the types of pentatonicism that would result from such an approach. However, the principal aim of the article is to interpret the expressive and structural uses of a vital component of Berlin’s songs, as well as of the Tin Pan Alley repertory in general: chromaticism. In doing so, I explode the myth that a transposing lever motivated his musical choices, and propose instead the opposite: that it was a very musical ear that guided any lever-twisting that might have occurred. Because exaggerated references to the piano lever have been so prominent in the Berlin literature, I occasionally return to such a possibility in order to expose its logical inconsistencies vis-à-vis the particular type of chromaticism under discussion. Annotated appendices provide information on many more. In the main text, 70 songs are cited, spanning a half century, from 1908 to 1957 many are examined in detail, and occasionally in more than one context. My goal is to delimit the various types of expressive chromaticism that enrich so many of his melodies to consider the ways in which they function, and how they impinge upon a listener’s interpretation. In this article, I set aside received hyperbole and meticulously examine the musical results of Berlin’s labors. Over the years, journalistic writers of minimal musical knowledge have succeeded in greatly exaggerating both circumstances-especially through their claims about the compositional benefits that supposedly accrue from using a transposing piano. Those who have written about songwriter Irving Berlin (1888–1989) have frequently fixated on two facts, both related to his lack of proficiency on the piano: first, that he preferred to play on the black keys and second, that he used a “transposing piano”-i.e., one fitted with a lever that shifted the position of the strings vis-à-vis the hammers, allowing any selected key to be heard while the notes of another key are being fingered.
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