20th Century Greats Part 4 with Howard Goodall – Cole Porter
Once again in this series, Goodall's persistent theme holds: classical music had drifted into a narrow and increasingly inaccessible cul-de-sac, too esoteric and avant-garde for all but its most devoted followers, even as popular music was often dismissed as vulgar and banal by comparison. Goodall's argument throughout the four episodes is that it was popular composers and songwriters — Herrmann, Bernstein, The Beatles, and here Cole Porter — who kept the older musical ideas alive and accessible, effectively becoming the "new classics" of the century while academic classical music retreated from its audience.
Cole Porter will best be remembered for three things: he wrote great tunes, he wrote clever and often risqué lyrics, and he wrote both together, seemingly as one act. He found his winning formula on Broadway in the late 1920s and rode it for three decades. Where the theatrical tradition had rested heavily on the 3/4 time of European dance and operetta, Porter drew instead on the 4/4 pulse and syncopated rhythms of blues and jazz — a shift in feel, as much as metre, that gave his songs a loose, conversational swing quite unlike the stiffer dance forms that had dominated the musical stage before him, and which shaped Broadway song-writing for decades after.
Goodall's other key point concerns harmony. Broadway convention held that happy songs belonged in major keys — cheerful sentiment / cheerful harmony. Porter broke that rule repeatedly, setting witty, often ebullient lyrics in minor keys and threading them with a progressive, chromatic use of semitones that unsettled the expected mood even as the words stayed light. This deliberate mismatch became one of his signatures.
His lyrics, too, were not just clever in isolation: his gift lay in developing and varying a song's central idea across successive verses, rather than repeating a fixed formula. Songs such as "You're the Top," "Anything Goes" and "Let's Do It" show this catalogue-like, ever-extending wit in full flow, each verse topping the last with a fresh, often outrageous comic rhyme — and each carried along by that same syncopated, jazz-inflected rhythm.
In Part 2, we began with a brief look at three families of instrument: bowed and plucked strings such as the vielle, viol and lute; early flutes and other wind instruments; and the beginnings of the pipe organ. We were reminded that the organ, which took recognisable shape in the seventeenth century, still needed to be pumped by hand or foot well into the twentieth.
Last month we'd had a first glimpse of the theorbo, the largest of the lute family — around fourteen strings and up to two metres tall. This month Brandon Acker explored its origins, construction and repertoire, and explained that it's really two instruments in one: a fretted neck, played much like a modern guitar, for chords and melody, and a second, longer extended neck of open bass strings, plucked with the thumb, that functions rather like the bottom octave of a harp. This dual nature is beautifully demonstrated in the campanella technique — spreading a scale across several strings, some fretted and some open, so that each note keeps ringing under the next, producing an overlapping, bell-like shimmer
Our next meeting is at Startforth Community Centre on Friday 25 September at 10:00.