Word: songfulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Sing us a song with social significance; There's nothing else that will do. It must be packed with social fact Or we won't love...
Since the late Brooks Bowman wrote the nationally successful East of the Sun, Triangle songsmiths have had a hard song to beat. Fol-De-Rol is at least full of very good ones, complete with new-fangled long coda endings. When Your Heart's on Fire, by Dixon Morgan and C. E. Davis, seems particularly tuneful, and the ballet music has real distinction...
Subtitled Song of a New Race, Composer Still's newest work purports to "point musically to changes wrought in a people through the progressive and transmuting spirit of America." Its four movements are labeled "Yearning," "Sorrow," "Humor" and "Aspiration." Pleasantly sentimental in the moments when it was not jazzy, the score was more impressive in its clear professional instrumentation (Composer Still once orchestrated for Paul Whiteman) than through its intrinsic musical qualities. Minus its jazz content it might possibly have been a better symphony; minus its symphonic pretensions, its jazz moments would certainly have been better jazz...
Deep in the jungle, Bring 'Em Back Blynn discovers the bird-girl warbling away in the midst of an enthusiastic chorus of birds. Any opera scout but one named Lucius B. Blynn would have recognized the tune as Saint-Saëns' Nightingale song. Caught in a bamboo cage, she is taken to the U. S., twittering bird notes to a feathered crony named Ewyscray, venturing Gallic asides to Press-agent Jack Oakie. Before the ensuing complications are ironed out, the bird-girl trains her upper-register fluidity on the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor...
Lacking a feather-skirted heroine (see above), I'll Take Romance follows a familiar cinema routine, its guiding milestones clearly visible from the outset. All along the dusty way are conveniently spaced settings for the Drinking Song from La Traviata, the duet from Madame Butterfly, the finale to the third act of Martha, the Gavotte from Manon and the Old Red Rooster arietta from She'll Be Comin' 'round the Mountain. The title song is a sweet-and-dreamy for the radio groundlings...