![]() Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “ The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). So, with squads of scholars arriving on the field after the battle, to tend the wounded and bury the dead, we have a renewed chance not just to get the story right but to get the stature right, to figure out who ranks where and why. Once it has been won, everybody gets a medal. When you are in the middle of a battle, as Wilder was, it is important to sort out the fighters from the freeloaders. (He preferred Harold Arlen, who knew jazz inside out, to Gershwin-a shocking view then.) These days, a smiling, everyone-together spirit inflects the appreciative albums and Lincoln Center celebrations Tynan’s “et al.” covers a lot of talents, big and small. ![]() The first wave of rediscovery had ukases and prohibitions-Alec Wilder wrote off essentially all of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and almost everything self-consciously “jazzy” in Gershwin. Embattled memory takes things apart complacent nostalgia squashes them back together. On the other, the essential work of discrimination is lost in a blanketing cloud of nostalgia. On the one hand, the music is, mostly, out there. Like all victories in art, this one has a double-edged result. Their music is now taken up routinely by the same rock singers who once seemed to have overshadowed them, with some (Van Morrison singing “A Foggy Day”) oddly good, some (Rod Stewart singing “Someone to Watch Over Me”) oddly bad, and some ( Bob Dylan singing “The Night We Called It a Day”) just odd. Prompted, perhaps, by the publication, in the early seventies, of Alec Wilder’s groundbreaking study, “ American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950,” the old songwriters have come to have a new presence, and their songs even a collective brand name: the American Songbook. Now those recordings, and the songs they illuminate, are everywhere. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, you had to haunt London record shops to find Ella Fitzgerald’s Gershwin or Cole Porter albums. Back in 1976, the incomparable drama critic Kenneth Tynan wondered in his diary when someone was “going to take a deep breath and declare that, at some time in the thirties, the serious music tradition finally withered, curled up and died of sterility and malnutrition and that the greatest composers of the twentieth century are Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Kern, Gershwin, et al.” This view, bold enough at the time to be fit only for a diary, has by now become commonplace.
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