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The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love)
Paperback
Music Instruction: GeneralMusic Reference
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ISBN13: 9781493070947
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: Apr 1 2023
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.09 Depth: 8.98
Language: English
In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook--that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s--is a foundational text of American pop music. Rare indeed is the song that doesn't in some way draw on this magnificent corpus, and rare is the person who hasn't heard at least a few of its most enduring melodies.
Enter Steven Suskin, who has been writing about music since the days that Rodgers, Arlen, and Berlin still roamed the streets of Manhattan. In this carefully curated and cheerfully opinionated guidebook, Suskin surveys 201 of the most significant selections from the Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems. Year by year, he puts songwriters and their contributions in their context, and explains what makes each song such a distinctive treat--whether felicitous melody, colorful harmony, compositional originality, or merely the sheer, irreducible joy of listening to it. Old and new favorites await all readers of this painstakingly compiled, enthusiastically written catalog.
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