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Steinway reproducing piano from 1920. Harold Bauer playing Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, excerpt of 3rd movement. Duo-Art recording 5973-4.

A player piano (also known as pianola or autopiano) is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in the late 19th and early 20th century.^[1] Sales peaked in 1924, as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction via the wireless in the same period helped cause their eventual decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production.

Antecedents[link]

The idea of automatic musical devices can be traced back many centuries. The idea of using pinned barrels to operate percussion mechanisms (such as striking bells in a clock) was perfected long before the invention of the piano. These devices were later extended to operate musical boxes, which contain a set of tuned metal teeth plucked by the player mechanism.

An early musical instrument to be automated was the organ, which is comparatively easy to operate automatically. The power for the notes is provided by air from a bellows system, and the organist or player device only has to operate a valve to control the available air. The playing task is ideally performed by a pinned barrel, and the art of barrel organs was well advanced by the mid-18th century.

The pianoforte is a complex instrument, requiring each note to be struck with a different force to control the dynamics of the performance. The entire force required to sound the note must be given by the performer hitting the keys. It proved to be difficult for a player device to combine a variable percussive force and a controlled note duration. Barrels do not provide a percussive force, but a relatively gentle switching motion.

Early barrel pianos move the hammer back and forwards continuously as the operator turns the handle, but the hammers do not strike the strings until moved slightly forwards by a pin in the barrel. The hammers hit repeatedly until the pin is removed. This plays the note, but at a fixed dynamic and with a tremolo action quite unlike a pianist.

The development of the player piano was the gradual overcoming of the various difficulties of controlled percussive striking and note duration. The earliest practical piano playing device was probably the Forneaux Pianista, which used compressed air to inflate a bellows when the barrel pin opened a valve. This bellows struck the piano key and so played the note.

The acceleration of developments leading to the pneumatic 'player' device started in the 1840s and began to reach some recognizable device in the 1870s. The start of the player period can probably be seen as the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, USA. At this exhibition were a number of automatic player devices, including the Pianista, that contained the elements which would lead to the player.

The earliest description of a piano playing device using perforated paper rolls was Claude Seytre's French patent of 1842. The concept was sound, but the device described was impractical in the way it read the roll and operated the piano.

In 1847 Alexander Bain described a device that used a paper roll as a 'travelling valve' that allowed air to flow through the reeds of a reed organ. Simple reed and pipe organs using this sort of system are still being produced. However, the air flow is not sufficient to drive a piano mechanism. In 1848 Charles Dawson of England described a more complex travelling valve device which added little to Bain.

Hunt & Bradish of the USA, 1849, used a roll read by sprung fingers, the springs being strong enough to operate the piano mechanism directly. This device applied the entire playing strength to the paper, so would have shredded it rapidly, and the device would have had to be as wide as the piano keyboard!

In 1851 Pape, England, submitted a patent that recognized the need to remove the playing force from the paper, using light springs to read the roll and activate a more robust device which plays the note — a mechanical amplifier.

The first device to address the practical requirement of operating a piano mechanism was Forneaux's, of 1863. This recognized that a hard strike was needed to throw the hammer towards the keys. It used a traditional barrel, but tripped a pneumatic device that inflated bellows rapidly to operate the note. In 1871 a perforated cardboard book was substituted for the barrel, but it was still read using sprung fingers. This device entered manufacture, and is generally regarded as the first practical player device. It was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876.

Van Dusen's American patent of 1867 was the first to describe a pneumatic striker operated by a roll. It was probably based on the work of John McTammany.

A leap in thought occurred in the 1873 patent of the Schmoele brothers. They described a 'double valve' system which acted as a pneumatic amplifier, reading the roll electrically and operating the pneumatic with an electromagnet. They also exhibited at Philadelphia. With some modification, and pneumatic reading of the roll, this would become the final player piano some 20 years later, although the Schmoele brothers never benefitted from it.

In 1876, John McTammany exhibited a working player in Philadelphia that used a paper roll read using sprung fingers whose slight movement triggered a mechanical player device. This operated a reed organ. McTammany had been experimenting since the mid-1860s, and went on to be one of the key names in the early player industry. He claimed to be the inventor of the 'player', but not the 'player piano' - an important distinction.

As of 1876, in Philadelphia, three working devices were exhibited that between them contained almost all the components that the final player piano would require. However, it was to be 20 years before all these aspects were combined. Surprisingly, the missing component was the pneumatic reading of the roll. This was in all probability due to the lack of suitably flexible airtight material to translate the air flow into the mechanical movement needed to trigger the player device.

Development[link]

1876–1890[link]

Following the Philadelphia exhibition, the mechanical music business began to grow rapidly. Various companies were founded in the later 1870s to manufacture and sell automated reed organs. Most significant to the development of the player piano was the Aeolian Company, founded as the Mechanical Orguinette Company in 1878, initially as retailer of small reed organs made by the Munroe Organ Company and others.^{[citation needed]}

These instruments started out with valveless actions, the air flowing through the paper operating the reed directly. Throughout this period, the instruments grew larger and more complex, and valves were added to switch the air flow, so ensuring faster response and requiring smaller holes in the paper. The idea of incorporating the new player devices into pianos developed over this period. Needham filed a patent in 1880 describing a pneumatic player device in a piano.

The main technical development of this period was the double valve system, which enabled machines to switch the volume of air needed to operate piano actions. The valves effectively worked as amplifiers, a small air flow being used to switch a much larger volume of air.

Inventors persisted with the early cumbersome mechanical linkage systems for a long time, although the valve system was considerably simpler. The main reason for this appears to be that no suitable airtight thin leather was available to make the small pouches which inflate to operate the valves. By the late 1880s the development of suitable pneumatic materials and leathers had advanced sufficiently that effective and reliable player mechanisms were starting to enter the marketplace.

1890–1900[link]

In 1896, Theodore P Brown introduced and marketed the "Aeriol Piano", which was the first substantially complete player piano. That same year, Wilcox and White introduced their "Angelus" cabinet player, which was a modification of their earlier grand and upright player pianos. None of the early player pianos was a success, though John McTammany (self-proclaimed "inventor of the player") credited Brown as the first to organize, in a practical manner, the ideas others had developed over the previous 20 years.

Through the middle 1890s, Edwin S Votey developed his piano playing device, the Pianola. This was offered to the Aeolian Company to sell alongside their range of reed organs. It was launched in 1897, and very aggressively marketed over the following years. It was the advertising organized by Harry Tremaine and the Wilcox and White Company that established the market for piano playing devices. Without Tremaine's business acumen there probably would never have been a player piano industry.

In these early years the main demand was for cabinet players (devices rolled to the keyboard of an existing piano, to press the keys with mechanical wooden "fingers"), and it was some years before the public preferred to buy an entirely new self-contained instrument and trade in their old perfectly good regular pianos. As market demand changed, the "internal player" came back into view and was developed again, this time in earnest.

1900–1910[link]

The mechanism of a player piano.
1. Pedal. 2. Pedal connection. 3. Exhauster (one only shown). 4. Reservoir; high tension (low-tension reservoir not shown.) 5. Exhaust trunk. 6. Exhaust tube to motor. 7. Air space above primary valves. 8. Secondary valves. 9. Striking pneumatic. 10. Connection from pneumatic to action of piano. 11. Piano action. 12. Pneumatic motor. 13. Trackerboard (music roll passes over trackerboard).

The Pianola was advertised in one of the most high-profile campaigns ever, making unprecedented use of full-page color advertisements. It cost $250 (£65) (equivalent to over $6,000 (£4,000) in 2009 money). Other, cheaper, makes were launched. A standard 65-note format evolved, with 11+¹⁄₄-inch-wide (290 mm) rolls and holes spaced 6 to the inch, although several player manufacturers used their own form of roll incompatible with other makes.

Huge sums were spent: by 1903, the Aeolian Company had more than 9,000 roll titles in their catalog, adding 200 titles per month. Many companies' catalogs ran to thousands of rolls, mainly of light, religious or classical music. Ragtime music did feature, but not commonly: in this period, the player was being sold on its artistic capabilities to rich buyers.

The pioneer of this decade was Melville Clark, who introduced two key ideas: the full-scale roll which could play every note on the piano keyboard, and the internal player as standard. Both ideas were ridiculed by his competitors as unnecessary or impractical, but Clark rapidly won both battles.

By the end of the decade the piano player device was obsolete, as was the 65-note format. This was a major catastrophe for many small manufacturers, who had spent all their capital on setting up 65-note player operations, and the result was rapid consolidation in the industry.

A new full-scale roll format, playing all 88 notes, was agreed at an industry conference in Buffalo in 1908, the so called Buffalo Convention. This kept the 11¼-inch roll, but now had smaller holes spaced at 9 to the inch. Any player made anywhere in the world could now play any make of roll. Understanding the need for compatibility was the defining moment of the player industry. The consensus was key to avoiding a costly format war, which plagued almost every other form of entertainment media that followed roll music.

While the player piano matured in America, a young inventor in Germany, Edwin Welte, was working on a player which controlled all the aspects of the performance automatically, so that his machine would play back a recorded performance exactly as if the original pianist was sitting at the piano keyboard. This device, the Welte-Mignon, was launched in 1904. It created new marketing opportunities, as manufacturers could now get the foremost pianists and composers of the day to record their performances on a piano roll, allowing owners of player pianos to experience such a performance in their own homes on their own instruments, exactly as the original pianist had played it.

From the early days, manufacturers sought to create mechanisms which would pick out the melody of a musical composition over the background of the rest of the music in the same manner as a live pianist. The true player piano was designed to be a fully interactive musical experience rather than merely an automatic instrument, and hence they are fitted with interactive control levers intended for the "player pianist" or "pianolist" to create a music performance to their own taste. The player piano would provide aspiring pianists and music lovers with the technical dexterity they lacked whilst permitting them to control the musical performance interactively as if they were an accomplished pianist.

Aeolian introduced Metrostyle in 1901 and the Themodist in 1904, the latter being an invention "bringing out the melody clearly above the accompaniment."^[2] With sales growing rapidly, and the instruments themselves relatively mature, this decade saw a wider variety of rolls become available. Two major advances were the introduction of the hand-played roll, both classical and popular, and the word roll. The hand-played roll introduced musical phrasing into the roll, so that the player pianist did not have to introduce this by using the tempo controls — something that few owners ever felt much inclination to do. Word rolls made it simple to use the player to accompany singing in the home, a very popular activity in the years before radio and acceptable disc recordings became available.

The other major advance was the arrival of major commercial rivals for the Welte-Mignon: the Ampico and the Duo-Art systems, both launched around 1914. When World War I came in 1914 and German patents were seized in the US, these two companies were left to compete with each other. In England, Aeolian had a huge factory and sales network, so easily outsold the Ampico. It is estimated that perhaps 5% of players sold were reproducing pianos.

In America by the end of the decade, the new ‘jazz age' and the rise of the fox-trot confirmed the player piano as the instrument of popular music, with classical music increasingly relegated to the reproducing piano. Most American roll companies stopped offering large classical catalogs before 1920, and abandoned ‘instrumental' rolls (those without words) within a few years.

Things were somewhat different in England, where the Aeolian Company continued to promote classical material to a receptive public. Word rolls never became the norm in England, always being charged at a 20% premium over non-word rolls. As a result, post-World War I American and British roll collections look very different.

1920–1930[link]

1920–30 was the decade that saw the player piano reach its peak, and then its rapid decline. The peak sales of instruments and rolls were in the first few years of the decade. At one point, more than half of all pianos being made in America contained a player unit. The player piano was not an obscure by-line — it was the dominant force in the industry.

In the early 1920s, many pianists of note, in classical and popular fields, were called on to make rolls.

Little new technically arose through the 1920s. Perhaps the most significant was the launch of a significantly improved form of the Ampico system, the Ampico B, in 1926. This was accompanied by an automatic recording device that could record a pianist's note timings and dynamics.

The technical advances of the 1920s were instead in radio technology. The key development there was the introduction of amplification, so that it was possible to sit around the radio and listen as a family, unlike the earlier crystal sets which required the use of headphones. Amplification was also applied to the recording of 78 rpm records, the electrical recording systems introduced around 1925 allowing a major rise in sound quality. Radio and these new records rapidly eroded the market for the player piano, and it was declining from the mid-1920s onwards. Novel attempts to combine the appeal of the player piano and its new rivals were made by building radios and/or phonographs into player pianos themselves, but even this could not entice the public to continue buying player pianos.

When the Wall Street crash came in October 1929, the player piano was already in a very weak position, and sales effectively ceased. Only a few well-capitalized companies continued in business after this. Many of these companies were the result of consolidation throughout the 1920s, which had already seen the loss of most names, particularly in the roll-making field.

During this period player piano pneumatic technology was used as the basis for the aircraft training simulators by inventor Edwin Albert Link. This device, powered by suction and bellows, moved realistically in response to a pilot's operation of the controls. Link developed the flight simulator in his father's Binghamton, New York factory, which made coin operated pianos for commercial establishments and movie theater pipe organs. The Link Company commercialized the device in 1929. A British equivalent was the Silloth trainer, based on Duo-Art technology. Electronic descendants of these devices are now widespread.

1930–1950[link]

A few companies struggled on through the 1930s. In 1931 Aeolian purchased the American Piano Company, makers of the Ampico. To bring capital to the business, they sold off all their overseas assets, so the large piano factory at Hayes was closed and sold with one month's notice, to the Gramophone Company, also based in the town. The joint Aeolian-American operation stopped making new classical rolls and concentrated on popular material, and the final new rolls were issued in the late 1930s.

A major survivor throughout this was the QRS piano roll company, originally an offshoot of Melville Clarke's operation. Owned by the mid-1920s by Max Kortlander, and funded by his income as a composer, QRS continued to issue rolls, all of them created by J. Lawrence Cook, chief roll arranger from 1921 to 1961 (he supplemented his income as a postal worker). Thanks to QRS, roll repertoire is available from the 1930s and 1940s.

Other than QRS, the end of the 1930s had seen the end of the player piano era. The lingering roll production in England finally ceased in 1941 when paper rationing made it impossible to continue. The Aeolian Duo-Art recording machinery was destroyed by bombing during the World War II, as was the Welte factory in Freiburg.

However, the immediate aftermath of the war saw the growth of interest in this lost era. Richard Simonton purchased the surviving Welte-Mignon rolls from Edwin Welte, and the first disc recordings were made of the performances. The enthusiast era had, tentatively, begun.

1950–present[link]

A player piano performing

During the early 1950s, a number of collectors began to rescue player pianos and all the other instruments of the 1920s and earlier. Amongst them was Frank Holland, who formed his collection while working in Canada. On returning to England he located a number of like-minded enthusiasts and started to hold meetings at his house in west London. In 1959 this was formalized as ‘The Player Piano Group'. By the early 1960s, Frank Holland had formed the British Piano Museum (now the Musical Museum) in Brentford.

In America, another collector was Harvey Roehl, who was so enthused by the players that in 1961 he published a book called Player Piano Treasury. This sold by the tens of thousands, and was followed by books on how to rebuild and restore these instruments. Harvey Roehl's Vestal Press was a major driving force in raising awareness of the player piano within the general population.

Other societies worldwide were formed to preserve and study all aspects of mechanical music, such as the Musical Box Society International (MBSI) and the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors' Association (AMICA^[3]) in the USA.

In 1961, Max Kortlander died of an unexpected heart attack, and QRS was run by his wife until she sold the company to Ramsi Tick in 1966, in whom it found another stalwart champion whose business philosophy was not so much profit as to limit losses. QRS's presence ensured that owners of newly-awakened players could purchase rolls of the latest titles, so ensuring that the instrument remained current, not just a historical curiosity.

So great was the revival that in the 1960s, production of player pianos started again. Aeolian revived the Pianola, albeit this time in a small spinet piano suited to post-war housing. Other manufacturers followed, and production has continued intermittently ever since. QRS today offer a traditional player piano in their Story and Clark piano.

In recent years there has been greater focus on full rebuilding as original instruments finally stop working. Early enthusiasts could often get by with limited patching, but the repair requirements have slowly risen, although even to this day it is possible to find original 1920s' instruments that still work after a fashion — a tribute to their quality, and an indication of their continued popularity.^{[citation needed]}

Types[link]

Steinway Welte-Mignon reproducing piano (1919)

Whilst there are many minor differences between manufacturers a player piano is a piano that contains a manually controlled pneumatically operating piano player mechanism. It is intended that the operator manually manipulates the control levers in order to produce a musical performance. Various aids to the human operator were developed:

Split stack control

These instruments (the vast majority of all player pianos) have the pneumatic player mechanism divided into two approximately equal halves. The operator can lower the volume of either half of the keyboard independently of the other in order to create musical effects.

Theme control

These instruments have peripheral pneumatic hardware systems fitted which, when used in conjunction with special music rolls, are able to highlight those notes in the score which are intended to be accented away from those whose volume it is desired to subdue. Basic theme pianos subdue all notes and release full power to only those notes which are align with special music roll "theme" perforations. More subtle systems (such as Hupfeld's "Solodant" and Aeolian's "Themodist") have a graduated theme control where the background subdued level and the foreground melody level are both controllable. The nature of the mechanism is such that where a chord occurs notes to be emphasised have to be advanced slightly away from their neighbors in order for the mechanism to identify them.

Isolated theme

The hardware of these pianos is able to pick out the melody notes away from their background accompaniment within the entire range of the keyboard without the necessity for breaking up chords i.e. a software workaround. Manufacturers of these systems were the UK "Dalian" and "Kastonome" and the US "Solo Carola".

Reproducing pianos

These are fully automated versions of the player piano requiring no human manual control in order to produce the illusion of a live musical performance. This is achieved by the utilization of music rolls where tempo mapping is fully incorporated into the music rolls i.e. the note lengths of a live performance have been captured. This obviates any need for manual tempo lever manipulation. The volume dynamics are created by peripheral pneumatic expression accessories under control from system-specific music roll coding. This obviates the need for human manipulation of the manual dynamic control levers. Typically an electric motor provides power to remove the human operator from the necessity to provide motive power by treadling. Most reproducing pianos are capable of manual over-ride operation, and many are constructed for dual functionality both as regular player pianos and also as reproducing pianos. Numerous companies made these utilizing different technology. The first successful instrument was called the "Mignon" launched by Welte in 1904.

Orchestrions and Nickelodeons

These are automated instruments typically intended from use in a coin-operated commercial setting rather than any domestic one. Various manufacturers made numerous ranges of instruments featuring different combinations of pianos, organ pipework, percussion and other fittings. They were eventually superseded by the juke box following the introduction of effective electrical sound amplification.

Music rolls[link]

Music rolls for pneumatic player pianos, often known as piano rolls, consist of a continuous sheet of paper rolled on to a spool. The spool fits into the player piano spool box whereupon the free end of the music sheet is hooked onto the take-up spool which will unwind the roll at an even pace across the reading mechanism (the "tracker bar") The music score to be played is programmed onto the paper by means of perforations. Different player systems have different perforation sizes, channel layouts and spool fittings though the majority conform to one or two predominant formats latterly adopted as the industry standard.

Music is programmed via a number of methods.

1. the music is marked out on master stencil on a purely metronomic basis direct from the printed sheet music with the player-pianists being left to create their own music performance
2. the music stencil is created metronomically via a piano-keyboard operated punch machine
3. a live performance is played onto a special piano connected to an electronically operated marking mechanism, and a physical stencil is produced from this live output, either as-is or after some general regularisation of tempo where necessary
4. modern computer software and MIDI software can be used to create piano roll stencils for operating modern-day perforating machines and create new titles.

The player piano sold globally in its heyday, and music rolls were manufactured extensively in the USA, as well as most European countries, South America and Australia. Even New Zealand had their own home-grown roll brand and machinery. A large number of titles from all manufacturers survive to this day, and rolls still turn up regularly in large quantities.

It was reported that the last remaining mass producer of piano rolls in the world, QRS Music, temporarily halted production of the rolls on December 31, 2008.^[4] However, QRS Music still list themselves as the only roll manufacturer remaining, and claim to have 45,000 titles available with "new titles being added on a regular basis".^[5]

Preservation and restoration[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Roll scanning has made significant advances in recent years, applying technology to possibly the most obvious yet hardest of all conservation and preservation topics, the replication of aging and disintegrating piano rolls.

Roll scanning is the process of reading a music roll into a computerised form that can be used for any purpose, such as cutting new rolls or operating old or new instruments directly. This uses the same technology as domestic flatbed scanners, hence the term roll scanner. The ubiquity of computers makes scanning fundamental to the preservation of rolls of all types, as well as providing the basis for secondary activities such as operating instruments directly. Roll master re-creation is the process of understanding how the roll was originally manufactured so that errors arising from the scanning are removed, and the computer works to the same accuracy as the original perforators in the roll factory. This allows exact replica rolls to be made, and maximises the accuracy of any secondary activity.

Replication of the original master from which a perforated paper roll was created is the highest aim of roll scanning. Roll masters are not literally replicated, because they were originally large cardboard rolls, but re-created in a computerised form. The rationale is that starting with the master in this form, anything can be done with the music – cut new rolls, operate player pianos fitted with electronic valves, or simulate a performance for playing on modern instruments – all without introducing any errors.

This is the case because virtually all rolls were punched in fixed rows, where punches will occur only in one row or the next, but never in between: the roll is effectively a digital storage medium. Scanning simply counts the distance from the start of the roll to each note event, giving an analogue, and hence inaccurate, representation of the roll. If instead the rows are counted, the result is an exact representation of the original roll – a perfect digital copy. This can be done by applying knowledge about the original roll's creation to the scan.

Once the master computerised copy has been recreated, all of the information in the roll is retained, and anything done after this can be done with the accuracy of the original roll. When using the analogue version, all its timing errors are carried through to whatever you do with it. This is particularly true when making recut rolls, where imposing the punch-row spacing of the perforator over the (different) row spacing of the original roll causes surprisingly obvious and audible errors. However, even analogue uses of the scan, such as operating instruments directly, benefits from the recreated master because of the way it removes timing errors from the basic scan, and in so doing allows the accuracy of the scanner itself to be calibrated.

Roll scanning itself is not of major significance – it simply adds optical technology to the pneumatic, electrical and mechanical technologies previously used to extract data from perforated paper. The ability to store the extracted data on electronic media marked the start of the modern era of scanning, but did little more than act as a substitute for the paper roll. The most familiar such system is the Marantz Pianocorder, but at least two systems were produced, by Wayne Stahnke and Peter Phillips, to operate pneumatic pianos.

From having the performance in ‘streaming’ form on a tape to extracting the note events into a list in a computer is a fairly small step. Such computerisation of the scanned data adds the ability to edit and manipulate it. The key advance we are concerned about here is the manipulation that converts the analogue scan data to a replica of the perforation master.

The first serious and sustained roll master replication exercise was probably that of Wayne Stahnke, who described his by-then completed methods in the Mechanical Music Digest in March 1996, and used them to practical advantage in his Rachmaninoff-Bösendorfer CDs. He started with a pneumatic roll reader (from the mid-1970s, for the IMI Cassette Converter system and later projects) and later moved to an optical system. He has been offering commercial scanning and roll master re-creation since the mid-1990s.

Within UK Player Piano Group circles the topic of recreating roll masters was already well established by 1996. Rex Lawson had raised the topic as part of his work developing a perforation-level roll editor software suite for his Perforetur rolls, and the topic was publicly discussed in the PPG bulletin during winter 1994/5 when Rex explained precisely why rolls should be copied punch-for-punch, digitally.

Richard Stibbons started his roll-scanning attempts in the mid-1990s, and described his progress in PPG article “The PC Pianola” in December 1995. Soon afterwards he adopted the master replication idea, described very thoroughly in September 2000. This led directly to the launch of the Rollscanners group in February 2001.

The aim of this group has been to focus and publicise scanning efforts worldwide, encouraging sharing of progress and knowledge, a radical shift from the earlier essentially private attempts.

Modern implementations[link]

Player and control unit of Yamaha Disklavier Upright Mark III

Sequencer control unit of Yamaha Disklavier Upright Mark III

Later developments of the reproducing piano include the use of magnetic tape and floppy disks, rather than piano rolls, to record and play back the music; and, in the case of one instrument made by Bösendorfer, computer assisted playback.

Almost all modern player pianos use MIDI to interface with computer equipment. Most modern player pianos come with an electronic device that can record and playback MIDI files on floppy disks and/or CD-ROMs, and a MIDI interface that enables computers to drive the piano directly for more advanced operations. The MIDI files can trigger electromagnetic devices called solenoids, which use electric current to drive small mechanical pistons mounted to the key action inside the piano. Live performance or computer generated music can be recorded in MIDI file format for accurate reproduction later on such instruments. MIDI files containing converted antique piano-rolls can be purchased on the Internet.

As of 2006^[update], several player piano conversion kits are available (PianoDisc, Pianomation, etc.), allowing the owners of normal pianos to convert them into computer controlled instruments. The conversion process usually involves cutting open the bottom of the piano to install mechanical parts under the keyboard, although one organization — Logos Foundation — has manufactured a portable, external kit. A new player piano conversion kit was introduced in 2007-08 by Wayne Stahnke, the inventor of the Bosendorfer SE reproducing system, called the "LX".

Comparison to electric pianos[link]

A player piano is neither an electric piano, electronic piano, nor a digital piano. The distinction between these instruments lies in the way sounds are produced. A player piano is an acoustic piano where the sound is produced mechanically by moving keys which cause hammers to strike the piano strings, without using electric or electronic components to create the sounds.

See also[link]

• Barrel piano
• Mechanical organ
• Orchestrion
• Piano roll
• Punched tape

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Reblitz, Arthur A. Player Piano Servicing and Rebuilding. ISBN 0-911572-40-6 Lanham, Maryland: Vestal Press, 1985.
• Reblitz, Arthur A. The Golden Age of Automatic Musical Instruments. ISBN 0-9705951-0-7 Woodsville, New Hampshire: Mechanical Music Press, 2001.
• White, William Braid. Regulation and Repair of Piano and Player Mechanism together with Tuning as Science and Art. New York: Edward Lyman Bill, 1909.

External links[link]

• The Musical Museum in London, England
• The Music House Museum in Traverse City, Michigan, USA
• The Player Piano Group England
• UK pianola arranger and composer Adam Ramet England
• The Pianola Institute London, England

Look up player piano in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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Detail from the Statue of William Tell and his son in Altdorf, Switzerland (Richard Kissling, 1895)

William Tell (in the four languages of Switzerland: German: Wilhelm Tell; French: Guillaume Tell; Italian: Guglielmo Tell; Romansh: Guglielm Tell) is a folk hero of Switzerland. His legend is recorded in a late 15th-century Swiss chronicle.

It is set in the period of the original foundation of the Old Swiss Confederacy in the early 14th century. According to the legend, Tell — an expert marksman with the crossbow — assassinated Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of Habsburg Austria positioned in Altdorf, Uri.

Along with Arnold Winkelried, Tell is a central figure in Swiss patriotism as it was constructed during the Restoration of the Confederacy after the Napoleonic era.

The legend[link]

Tell's leap (Tellensprung) from the boat of his captors at the Axen cliffs 46°55′57″N 8°36′42″E / 46.9326°N 8.6118°E / 46.9326; 8.6118. Study by Ernst Stückelberg (1879) for his fresco at the Tellskapelle.

There are several accounts of the Tell legend. The earliest sources give an account of the apple-shot, Tell's escape and the ensuing rebellion. The assassination of Gessler is not mentioned in the Tellenlied, but is already present in the White Book of Sarnen account.

The legend as told by Tschudi (ca. 1570) goes as follows: William Tell, who originally came from Bürglen, was known as a strong man and an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri. Albrecht (or Hermann) Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village's central square, hung his hat on top of it, and demanded that all the townsfolk bow before the hat. On 18 November 1307, Tell visited Altdorf with his young son and passed by the hat, publicly refusing to bow to it, and so was arrested. Gessler — intrigued by Tell's famed marksmanship, yet resentful of his defiance — devised a cruel punishment: Tell and his son would be executed, but he could redeem his life by shooting an apple off the head of his son, Walter, in a single attempt. Tell split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.^[1]

But Gessler noticed that Tell had removed two crossbow bolts from his quiver, not one. Before releasing Tell, he asked why. Tell replied that if he had killed his son, he would have used the second bolt on Gessler himself. Gessler was angered, and had Tell bound. He was brought to Gessler's ship to be taken to his castle at Küssnacht to spend his newly won life in a dungeon. But, as a storm broke on Lake Lucerne, the soldiers were afraid that their boat would founder, and unbound Tell to steer with all his famed strength. Tell made use of the opportunity to escape, leaping from the boat at the rocky site now known as the Tellsplatte ("Tell's slab") and memorialized by the Tellskapelle.

The Hohle Gasse between Immensee and Küssnacht

Tell ran cross-country to Küssnacht. As Gessler arrived, Tell assassinated him with the second crossbow bolt along a stretch of the road cut through the rock between Immensee and Küssnacht, now known as the Hohle Gasse.^[2] Tell's blow for liberty sparked a rebellion, in which he played a leading part. That fed the impetus for the nascent Swiss Confederation. He fought again against Austria in the 1315 Battle of Morgarten. Tschudi also has an account of Tell's death in 1354, according to which he was killed trying to save a child from drowning in the Schächenbach river in Uri.^[3]

Earliest mentions (15th century)[link]

The first reference to William Tell appears in the White Book of Sarnen (German: Weisses Buch von Sarnen). This volume was written in 1475 by a country scribe named Hans Schreiber. It makes mention of the Rütli oath (German: Rütlischwur) of 1291, the Burgenbruch and Tell's heroic deeds.^[4]

A roughly equally early account of Tell is found in the Tellenlied, a song composed during the 1470s, its oldest extant manuscript copy dating to 1501. This song begins with the Tell legend, which it presents as the origin of the Confederacy, calling Tell the "first confederate". The narrative presented includes Tell's apple-shot, his preparation of a second arrow to shoot Gessler in the event of his killing his son, and his escape, but it omits the assassination of Gessler. The text then goes on to enumerate the cantons of the Confederacy, and it was expanded with "current events" in the course of the Burgundy Wars, ending with the death of Charles the Bold in 1477.^[5]

Early Modern period[link]

Chronicles[link]

Depiction of the apple-shot scene in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia (1554 edition).

Der Apfelschuss. Fresco by Ernst Stückelberg (1831–1903) in the Tellskapelle, Switzerland

Further reference to William Tell is found in Petermann Etterlin's Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation (German: Kronika von der loblichen Eydtgenossenschaft). Etterlin's 1507 chronicle is the earliest printed version of the Tell story.^[6]

An account of William Tell's deeds is also given in the chronicle of Melchior Russ from Lucerne. This book, which its author dates to 1482, is an incoherent compilation of older writings, including the Song of the Founding of the Confederation, Conrad Justinger's Bernese Chronicle, and the Chronicle of the State of Bern (in German, Chronik der Stadt Bern).^[7]

The version of the legend compiled by Aegidius Tschudi from Glarus in his monumental Chronicon Helveticum (ca. 1570) became the major model for later writers dealing with William Tell.^[8] Not only did Tschudi's chronicle become the main source for Johannes von Müller's History of the Swiss Confederation (German: Geschichte Schweizerischer Eidgenossenschaft, 1780), it also served as a model for Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell (1804).^[8] Tschudi is known to have manipulated documents.^[9]

Veneration[link]

A widespread veneration of Tell, including sight-seeing excursions to the scenes of his deeds, can be ascertained for the early 16th century. Heinrich Brennwald in the early 16th century mentions the chapel (Tellskapelle) on the site of Tell's leap from his captors' boat. Tschudi mentions a "holy cottage" (heilig hüslin) built on the site of Gessler's assassination. The church of Bürglen had a bell dedicated to Tell from 1581, and a nearby chapel has a fresco dated to 1582 showing Tell's death in the Schächenbach.^[10]

William Tell can be found in a Tell play (Tellspiel), whose first performance was probably in the winter of either 1512 or 1513 in Altdorf.^[7] The oldest existing written version of a Tell play is known as the Urner Tellspiel (The "Tell Play of Uri").^[11]

The Three Tells[link]

The Three Tells (die Drei Tellen, also die Drei Telle) were symbolic figures of the Swiss Peasant War of 1653. They expressed the hope of the subject population to repeat the success story of the rebellion against Habsburg in the early 14th century.

By the 18th century, the Drei Tellen had become associated with a sleeping hero legend. They were said to be asleep in a cave at the Rigi. The return of Tell in times of need was already foretold in the Tellenlied of 1653 and symbolically fulfilled in the impersonation of the Three Tells by costumed individuals, in one instance culminating in an actual assassination executed by these impersonators in historical costume.

Tell during the 16th century had become closely associated and eventually merged with the Rütlischwur legend, and the "Three Tells" represented the three conspirators or Eidgenossen Walter Fürst, Arnold von Melchtal and Werner Stauffacher.

In 1653, three men dressed in historical costume representing the Three Tells appeared in Schüpfheim. Other impersonations of the Three Tells also appeared in the Freie Ämter and in the Emmental.

The first impersonators of the Three Tells were Hans Zemp, Kaspar Unternährer of Schüpfheim and Ueli Dahinden of Hasle. They appeared at a number of important peasant conferences during the war, symbolizing the continuity of the present rebellion with the resistance movement against the Habsburg overlords at the origin of the Swiss Confederacy. Unternährer and Dahinden fled to the Entlebuch alps before the arrival of the troops of general Sebastian Peregrin Zwyers; Zemp escaped to the Alsace. After the suppression of the rebellion, the peasants voted for a tyrannicide, directly inspired by the Tell legend, attempting to kill the Lucerne Schultheiss Ulrich Dulliker. Dahinden and Unternährer returned in their roles of Tells, joined by Hans Stadelmann replacing Zemp. In an ambush, they managed to injure Dulliker and killed a member of the Lucerne parliament, Caspar Studer. The assassination attempt — an exceptional act in the culture of the Old Swiss Confederacy — was widely recognized and welcomed among the peasant population, but its impact was not sufficient to rekindle the rebellion. Even though it did not have any direct political effect, its symbolic value was considerable, placing the Lucerne authorities in the role of the tyrant (Habsburg and Gessler) and the peasant population in that of the freedom fighters (Tell). The Three Tells after the deed went to mass, still wearing their costumes, without being molested. Dahinden and Unternährer were eventually killed in October 1653 by Lucerne troops under Colonel Alphons von Sonnenberg. In July 1654, Zemp betrayed his successor Stadelmann in exchange for pardon and Stadelmann was executed on 15 July 1654.^[12]

The Three Tells appear in a 1672 comedy by Johann Caspar Weissenbach. The "sleeping hero" version of the Three Tells legend was published in Deutsche Sagen by the Brothers Grimm in 1816 (no. 298).

Reception 1789–1945[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2011)

An allegorical Tell defeating the chimera of the French Revolution (1798)

Sketches of Gessler and Tell by Ernst Stückelberg (1880)

Official seal of the Helvetic Republic

Throughout the long nineteenth century, and into the World War II period, Tell was perceived as a symbol of rebellion against tyranny both in Switzerland and in Europe.

Antoine-Marin Lemierre wrote a play inspired by Tell in 1766 and revived it in 1786. The success of this work established the association of Tell as a fighter against tyranny with the history of the French revolution.

The French revolutionary fascination with Tell was reflected in Switzerland with the establishment of the Helvetic Republic. Tell became, as it were, the mascot of the short-lived republic, his figure being featured on its official seal. The French Navy also had a Tonnant class ship of the line named Guillaume Tell, which was captured by the British Royal Navy in 1800.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe learned of the Tell saga during his travels through Switzerland between 1775 and 1795. He obtained a copy of Tschudi's chronicles and considered writing a play about Tell, but ultimately gave the idea to his friend Friedrich von Schiller, who in 1803–04 wrote the play Wilhelm Tell, first performed on March 17, 1804, in Weimar. Schiller's Tell is heavily inspired by the political events of the late 18th century, the French and American revolutions, in particular. Schiller's play was performed at Interlaken (the Tellspiele) in the summers of 1912 to 1914, 1931 to 1939 and every year since 1947. In 2004 it was first performed in Altdorf itself.

Gioachino Rossini used Schiller's play as the basis for his 1829 opera William Tell. The William Tell Overture is one of his best-known and most frequently imitated pieces of music; in the 20th Century, the "coda" of the Overture became the theme for the radio, television, and motion picture incarnations of The Lone Ranger, a fictional Western hero.

John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was inspired by Tell. Lamenting the negative reaction to his action, Booth wrote in his journal on April 21, 1865 "with every man's hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for and what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat."

Following a national competition, won by Richard Kissling, Altdorf in 1895 erected a monument to its hero. Kissling casts Tell as a peasant and man of the mountains, with strong features and muscular limbs. His powerful hand rests lovingly on the shoulder of little Walter, but the apple is not shown. The depiction is in marked contrast with that used by the Helvetic Republic, where Tell is shown as a landsknecht rather than a peasant, with a sword at his belt and a feathered hat, bending down to pick up his son who is still holding the apple.

The first film about Tell was made by French director Charles Pathé in 1900; only a short fragment survives.^{[citation needed]} A version of the legend was retold in P.G. Wodehouse's William Tell Told Again (1904), written in prose and verse with characteristic Wodehousian flair.

The design of the Federal 5 francs coin issued from 1922 features the bust of a generic "mountain shepherd" designed by Paul Burkard, but due to a similarity of the bust with Kissling's statue, in spite of the missing beard, it was immediately widely identified as Tell.

Adolf Hitler was enthusiastic about Schiller's play, quoting it in his Mein Kampf, and approving of a German/Swiss co-production of the play in which Hermann Göring's mistress Emmy Sonnemann appeared as Tell's wife. But on June 3, 1941, Hitler had the play banned. The reason for the ban is not known, but may been related to the failed assassination attempt in 1938 by young Swiss Maurice Bavaud^[13] (executed on May 14, 1941, and later dubbed "a new William Tell" by Rolf Hochhuth), or the subversive nature of the play.^[14][15] Hitler is reported to have exclaimed at a banquet in 1942: "Why did Schiller have to immortalize that Swiss sniper!"^[14]

Salvador Dalí painted The Old Age of William Tell and William Tell and Gradiva in 1931, and The Enigma of William Tell in 1933.

Charlie Chaplin parodies William Tell in his famous 1928 silent movie The Circus (film).

Reception after 1945[link]

Max Frisch in his "William Tell for Schools" deconstructed the legend, portraying the bailiff as a well-meaning administrator suffering from being placed in a barbaric back-corner of the empire, while Tell is a simpleton who stumbles into his adventure by a series of misunderstandings.^{[citation needed]}

Spanish playwright Alfonso Sastre re-worked the legend in 1955 in his "Guillermo Tell tiene los ojos tristes" (William Tell has sad eyes); it was not performed until the Franco regime in Spain ended.^{[citation needed]}

William Tell lives on as a hero in popular culture. He is still a powerful identification figure, and according to a 2004 survey, 60% of the Swiss believe that he existed.^[16]

Historicity debate[link]

François Guillimann, a statesman of Fribourg and later historian and advisor of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolph II, wrote to Melchior Goldast in 1607: "I followed popular belief by reporting certain details in my Swiss antiquities [published in 1598], but when I examine them closely the whole story seems to me to be pure fable."

In 1760, Simeon Uriel Freudenberger from Luzern anonymously published a tract arguing that the legend of Tell in all likelihood was based on the Danish saga of Palnatoki. A French edition of his book, written by Gottlieb Emmanuel von Haller (Guillaume Tell, Fable danoise), was burnt in Altdorf.^[17]

The skeptical view of Tell's existence remained very unpopular. Friedrich von Schiller used Tschudi's version as the basis for his play Wilhelm Tell in 1804, interpreting Tell as a glorified patriot assassin. This interpretation became very popular, especially in Switzerland, where the Tell figure was used in the early 19th century as a "national hero" and identification figure in the Helvetic Republic, and later in the beginnings of the Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, the modern democratic federal state that developed. When historian Joseph Eutych Kopp dared to question the legend in the 1830s, his effigy was burnt on the Rütli, a meadow above Lake Lucerne where — according to the legend — the oath was sworn that concluded the alliance between the founding cantons of the Swiss confederacy.

Historians continued to argue over the saga until well into the 20th century. In 1891 Wilhelm Öchsli published a scientific account of the founding of the confederacy (commissioned by the government for the celebration of the first National holiday of Switzerland on August 1, 1891), dismissing the story as fiction. Still, 50 years later in 1941, when Tell had again become a national identification figure, historian Karl Meyer tried to tie the saga's events to known places and events. Modern historians generally regard the saga to be fiction, since neither Tell's nor Gessler's existence can be proven. The legend also tells of a Burgenbruch, a coordinated uprising including the slighting of many forts; however, archeological evidence shows that many of these forts were abandoned and destroyed long before 1307–1308.

A possible historical basis of the legend was suggested by Arnold Schärer in 1986. He identified a Wilhelm Gorkeit of Tellikon (modern Dällikon in the Canton of Zurich) as the real William Tell. "Gorkeit", he claimed, was a version of the surname Armbruster (crossbow maker). Historians were not convinced, but the theory was once referred to by Rudolf Keller, at the time president of the nationalistic right Swiss Democrats, on 1 August 2004 in Basel.^[18]

Comparative mythology[link]

The Tell legend has been compared to a number of other myths or legends, specifically in Norse mythology, involving a magical marksman coming to the aid of a suppressed people under the sway of a tyrant. The story of a great hero successfully shooting an apple from his child's head is an archetype present in the story of Egil in the Thidreks saga (associated with the god Ullr in Eddaic tradition) as well as in the stories of Adam Bell from England, Palnatoki from Denmark and a story from Holstein.

Such parallels were pointed out as early as 1760 by Gottlieb Emmanuel von Haller and the pastor Simeon Uriel Freudenberger in a short leaflet with the title William Tell, a Danish Fable (German: Der Wilhelm Tell, ein dänisches Mährgen).^[19]

Rochholz (1877) connects the similarity of the Tell legend to the stories of Egil and Palnatoki with the legends of a migration from Sweden to Switzerland during the Middle Ages. He also adduces parallels in folktales among the Finns and the Lapps (Sami). From pre-Christian Norse mythology, Rochholz compares Ullr, who bears the epithet of Boga-As ("bow-god"), Heimdall and also Odin himself, who according to the Gesta Danorum (Book 1, chapter 8.16) assisted Haddingus by shooting ten bolts from a crossbow in one shot, killing as many foes. Rochholz further compares Indo-European and oriental traditions and concludes (pp. 35–41) that the legend of the master marksman shooting an apple (or similar small target) was known outside the Germanic sphere (Germany, Scandinavia, England) and the adjacent regions (Finland and the Baltic) in India, Arabia, Persia and the Balkans (Serbia).

The Danish legend of Palnatoki, first attested in the twelfth-century Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus.^[20] is the earliest known parallel to the Tell legend. As with William Tell, Palnatoki is forced by the ruler, (in this case King Harald Bluetooth), to shoot an apple off his son's head as proof of his marksmanship.^[21] A striking similarity between William Tell and Palnatoki is that both heroes take more than one arrow out of their quiver.^[20] When asked why he pulled several arrows out of his quiver, Palnatoki, too, replies that if he had struck his son with the first arrow, he would have shot King Harald with the remaining two arrows.^[20]

See also[link]

• Historiography of Switzerland
• Robin Hood
• William Wallace
• Arnold Winkelried

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Bergier, Jean-François. Wilhelm Tell: Realität und Mythos. München: Paul List Verlag, 1990.
• Fiske, John. Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology, 1877. Ch. 1: (On-line) Quotes Saxo Grammaticus, the ballad of William of Cloudeslee, and instances other independent occurrences.
• Head, Randolph C. "William Tell and His Comrades: Association and Fraternity in the Propaganda of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Switzerland." in The Journal of Modern History 67.3 (1995): 527–557.
• Keightley, Thomas. Tales and Popular Fictions: Their Resemblance and Transmission from Country to Country. London: Whittaker, 1834.
• Öchsli, W. Die Anfänge der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft. Zürich, 1891.
• Rochholz, Ernst Ludwig, Tell und Gessler in Sage und Geschichte. Nach urkundlichen Quellen, Heilbronn, 1877 (online copy).
• Salis, J.-R. v.: Ursprung, Gestalt, und Wirkung des schweizerischen Mythos von Tell; Bern, 1973.
• Schärer, Arnold Claudio, Und es gab Tell doch, Lucerne, 1986, ISBN 3-85725-106-9, OCLC 19264018.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William Tell

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Tell, William.

• Wilhelm Tell Festival, New Glarus
• William Tell, Swissinfo special
• The Legend of William Tell by Markus Jud.
• The birth of the Swiss Confederation.
• William Tell is a lie; "Coopzeitung" 28/2004, interview with historian Sablonier, Zurich, translated
• Translation of Grimm's Saga No. 298 "The Three Tells"

Irving Berlin
Background information
Birth name	Israel Isidore Baline (Beilin)
Born	(1888-05-11)May 11, 1888 Tyumen, Russian Empire
Died	September 22, 1989(1989-09-22) (aged 101) New York City, New York, United States
Genres	Broadway musicals, revues, show tunes
Occupations	Songwriter, composer, lyricist
Years active	1907–1971

Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989) was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907 and had his first major international hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Berlin's native Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania." Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his aim being to "reach the heart of the average American" whom he saw as the "real soul of the country."

He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him "a legend" before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". His Broadway musical and 1942 film, This is the Army, with Ronald Reagan, had Kate Smith singing Berlin's "God Bless America" which was first performed in 1938. Smith still performed the song on her 1960 CBS television series, The Kate Smith Show. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute, making it #1 on the charts.

Berlin's songs have reached the top of the charts 25 times and have been extensively re-recorded by numerous singers including Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Cher, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Rita Reys, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Doris Day and Ella Fitzgerald. Composer Douglas Moore sets Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters, and includes him instead with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, as a "great American minstrel"—someone who has "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe."^[1] Composer George Gershwin called him "the greatest songwriter that has ever lived",^[2]:117 and composer Jerome Kern concluded that "Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music."^[3]

Early life[link]

Belarussian immigrant[link]

Life in Belarus[link]

Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidore Baline on May 11, 1888, one of eight children of Moses and Lena Lipkin Baline. There are several possibilities concerning his birth city. It could be Tyumen (Tumen), any one of several villages near the city of Mogilyov, Belarus). His father, a cantor in a synagogue, uprooted the family to America, as did many other Jewish families in the late 19th century. In 1893 they settled in New York City. According to his biographer, Laurence Bergreen, as an adult Berlin admitted to no memories of his first five years in Russia except for one: "he was lying on a blanket by the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground. By daylight the house was in ashes."^[4]:10

Famous author and music historian Ian Whitcomb described Berlin's life in Belarus:

Life might have seemed irksome to Israel Baline: God was watching you everywhere. From the dawn bath to the night straw cot, everything was of religious significance. God was in the food and in the clothing. When Moses caught Israel pulling on his little shoes in a manner proscribed by the Talmud he beat him…

The floor of the Baline hut-home was of hard black dirt. Outside, the squiggly streets of Tyumen were either mud or dust according to the season. Lining the squiggles were horrid wooden huts. Sometimes wild pigs would rage into town and bite children to death…It was not a setting to sing about… Instead, cantor Moses took his children to the synagogue where, in soothing sing-song readings from the Talmud, the cares of the day were eased away. Life in Tyumen sounds pretty awful but, in later years, Irving Berlin said he was unaware of being raised in abject poverty. He knew no other life and there was always hot food on the table, even if it was God-riddled.^[5]

Whitcomb also describes further the turning point in Berlin's early life:

But, suddenly one day, the Cossacks rampaged in on a pogrom... they simply burned it to the ground. Israel and his family watched from a distant road. Israel was wrapped in a warm feather quilt. Then they made a hasty exit. Knowing that they were breaking the law by leaving without a passport (Russia at that time was the only country requiring passports), the Balines smuggled themselves creepingly from town to town, from satellite to satellite, from sea to shining sea, until finally they reached their star: the Statue of Liberty.^[5]:19

Nicholas II, the new Tsar of Russia, notes Whitcomb, had revived with utmost brutality the anti-Jewish pogroms, which created the spontaneous mass exodus to America. The pogroms were to continue until 1906, and thousands of other families besides the Balines would also escape, including those of George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, L. Wolfe Gilbert ("Waiting for the Robert E. Lee"), Jack Yellen ("Happy Days Are Here Again"), Louis B. Mayer (MGM) and the Warner brothers.^[5]:14

Settling in New York City[link]

They eventually settled on Cherry Street, a "cold-water basement flat with no windows,"^[5] on the Lower East Side. His father, unable to find comparable work as a cantor in New York, took a job at a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons on the side, and struggled to support his family. He died a few years later when Irving was thirteen years old. With only a few years of schooling, Irving found it necessary to take to the streets to help support his family.^[1] He became a newspaper boy, hawking The Evening Journal. On his first day of the job, according to Berlin’s biographer and friend, Alexander Woollcott, the boy “stopped to look at a ship about to put out for China. So entranced was he that he failed to notice a swinging crane, and he was knocked into the river. When he was fished out, after going down for the third time, he was still holding in his clenched fist the five pennies that constituted his first day's receipts, his contribution to the family budget.”^[1][6] His mother took jobs as a midwife, and three of his sisters worked wrapping cigars, common for immigrant girls. His older brother worked in a sweatshop assembling shirts. Each evening, when the family came home from their day's work, Bergreen writes, "they would deposit the coins they had earned that day into Lena's outspread apron."^{[4] :11}

Music historian, Philip Furia, writes that when eight-year-old "Izzy" quit school to sell newspapers in the Bowery, he no doubt would "hear the hits of the day drift through the doors of saloons and restaurants" that lined the streets of New York. He found that if he sang some of the songs while selling papers, people would toss him coins in appreciation, which gave him a vision of things to come. One night to his mother, he "confessed his life's ambition—to become a singing waiter in a saloon."^[7]:48

Before turning fourteen, according to Woollcott, he began to realize that "he contributed less than the least of his sisters... and he was sick with a sense of his own worthlessness."^[6] Bergreen writes that it was at this point that he left home to become a "foot soldier in the city's ragged army of immigrants." Berlin entered a lifestyle along the Bowery where an entire subindustry of lodging houses had sprung up to shelter the thousands of homeless boys choking the Lower East Side streets. "They were not settlement houses or charitable institutions; rather, they were Dickensian in their meanness, filth, and insensitivity to ordinary human beings."^[4]:15

Early jobs[link]

Berlin at his first job with a music publisher, age 18

With few survival skills and little education, he realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father's vocation: singing. He joined with a few other youngsters and went to saloons on the Bowery to sing to customers. These itinerant young singers were common on the Lower East Side. He would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping that customers would "pitch a few pennies in his direction." As Bergreen notes, "it was in these seamy surroundings that the runaway boy received his real and lasting education." Music became his sole source of income and he emerged culturally from the ghetto lifestyle, learning the "language of the street."

To survive he began to recognize the kind of songs that appealed to audiences: "well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable."^[4]:17 He began plugging songs at Tony Pastor's Music Hall in Union Square and finally, in 1906 when he was 18, working as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. Besides serving drinks, he sang made-up "blue" parodies of hit songs to the delight of customers. Berlin biographer Charles Hamm writes that "in his free time he taught himself to play the piano."^[8] When the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and pick out tunes.^[1] His first attempt at songwriting was "Marie From Sunny Italy," written in collaboration with the Pelham's resident pianist, Mike Nicholson. The sheet music to this song made history because of a printer's error in the score. The name printed on the cover read: 'I. Berlin.' ^[9] (Berlin never learned to play in more than one key and used a custom-made 1940 Weser Brothers piano with a transposing lever to change keys.)^[10]

Berlin admired the words to the songs but the rhythms were "kind of boggy". One night he delivered some hits by friend George M. Cohan, another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy," notes Whichtomb, "everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow. Some tarts said they felt proud to be American; a couple of thugs, who specialized in chewing off ears and breaking legs, gave Izzy the nod. And Connors, the saloon's Irish owner, said, 'You know what you are, me boy? You're the Yiddishe Yankee Doodle!'"^[5]:26

Nobel prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling, living up the coast during that period, "was shocked and intrigued by the screeching squalor he found in the dirty gray tenement canyons of immigrant New York," writes Whitcomb. "He thought it worse than the notorious slums of Bombay. But he was impressed and moved by the Jews, noting the little immigrant boys saluting the Stars and Stripes." Kipling wrote, "For these immigrant Jews are a race that survives and thrives against all odds and flags."^[5]:20

Recognition as songwriter[link]

Max Winslow (c.1883-1942),^[11] a staff member at music publisher Harry Von Tilzer Company, noticed Berlin's singing on many occasions and became so taken with his talent that he tried to get him a job with his firm. Von Tilzer described an episode in his autobiography:

Max Winslow came to me and said, "I have discovered a great kid, I would like to see you write some songs with." Max raved about him so much that I said, "Who is he?" He said a boy down on the east side by the name of Irving Berlin... I said, "Max, How can I write with him, you know I have got the best lyric writers in the country?" But Max would not stop boosting Berlin to me, and I want to say right here that Berlin can attribute a great deal of his success to Max Winslow."^[8]:viii

In 1908, at the age of 20, Berlin took a new job at a saloon in the Union Square neighborhood. There, he was able to collaborate with other young songwriters, such as Edgar Leslie, Ted Snyder, Al Piantadosi, and George A. Whiting, and in 1909, the year of the premiere of Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, he got his big break as a staff lyricist with the Ted Snyder Company.

Songwriting career[link]

Before 1920[link]

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911)[link]

From this early position, Hamm writes, his "meteoric rise as a songwriter" in Tin Pan Alley and then on Broadway, began with his first world-famous hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band," in 1911. As a result of his instant celebrity, he was the feature performer later that year at Oscar Hammerstein's vaudeville house, where he introduced dozens of other songs to the audience. The New York Telegraph wrote a story about the event, reporting that a "delegation of two hundred of his friends from the pent and huddled East Side appeared... to see 'their boy.'" The news story added that "all the little writer could do was to finger the buttons on his coat while tears ran down his cheeks--in a vaudeville house!"^[8]:ix

Richard Corliss, wrote about the song in a Time magazine profile of Berlin in 2001:

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911). It was a march, not a rag, and its savviest musicality comprised quotes from a bugle call and "Swanee River". But the tune, which revived the ragtime fervor that Scott Joplin had stoked a decade earlier, made Berlin a songwriting star. On its first release and subsequent releases, the song was consistently near the top of the charts: Bessie Smith, in 1927, and Louis Armstrong, in 1937; # 1 by Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell; Al Jolson, in 1947. Johnny Mercer in 1945, and Nellie Lutcher in 1948. Add Ray Charles's big-band version in 1959, and "Alexander" had a dozen hit versions in a bit under a half century.^[12]

Despite its success, the song was not initially recognized as a hit: at a private audition of the song to Broadway producer Jesse Lasky, Lasky’s response was uncertain, although he did put it in his “Follies” show. After a number of performances as an instrumental, the song did not impress audiences, and was soon dropped from the show’s score, causing Berlin to regard it as a “dead failure.” But later that year, after writing lyrics to the music, it played again in another Broadway Review, and Variety news weekly proclaimed the song "the musical sensation of the decade."^[4]:68 Composer George Gershwin, foreseeing its influence, said, "The first real American musical work is 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' Berlin had shown us the way; it was now easier to attain our ideal."^[2]:117

Sparking a national dance craze[link]

Enjoying early success c. 1911

Berlin was "flabbergasted" by the sudden international popularity of the song, and began to ask himself "Why? Why?" Berlin later wrote,

And I got an answer. The melody... started the heels and shoulders of all America and a good section of Europe to rocking. The lyric, silly though it was, was fundamentally right.^[4]:69

"Watch Your Step"

Furia writes that the international success of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" gave ragtime "new life and sparked a national dance craze." Two dancers who expressed that craze were Irene and Vernon Castle. In 1914, Berlin wrote a ragtime revue, "Watch Your Step," which starred the couple and showcased their talents on stage. That musical revue became Berlin's first complete score and Furia notes that "its songs radiated musical and lyrical sophistication." Berlin's ragtime songs, he adds, had "quickly come to signify modernism, and Berlin caught the cultural struggle between Victorian gentility and the purveyors of liberation, indulgence, and leisure with songs such as "Play a Simple Melody." That particular song, according to Furia, also became the first of his famous "double" songs in which two different melodies and lyrics are counterpointed against one another.^[7]

Variety called it "The First Syncopated Musical," where the "sets and the girls were gorgeous." But most of the success or otherwise of the show was riding on the Berlin name, according to Whitcomb. He notes that Variety... marked the show as a "terrific hit" from opening night alone:

Irving Berlin stands out like the Times building does in the Square. That youthful marvel of syncopated melody is proving things in 'Watch Your Step', firstly that he is not alone a rag composer, and that he is one of the greatest lyric writers America has ever produced.... Besides rags Berlin wrote a polka that was very pretty, and he intermingled ballads with trots, which, including the grand opera medley, gives Watch Your Step all the kind of music there is.^[5]:173

Whitcomb also points out the irony that Russia, the country Berlin's family was forced to leave, flung itself into "the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania":

... like a display of medieval religious frenzy; some seemed to be doing a dance of death. Lady Diana Manners, at a London ball reviving the Age of Chivalry, was escorted by Prince Felix Yusupov. This young man, a recent Oxford undergraduate, had an impeccable Russian noble lineage: a descendant of Frederick of Prussia, he was heir to the largest estate in Russia, he would be richer than the Tsar. He was exquisite and heavily bejewelled, but Lady Diana was irritated by his 'wriggling around the ballroom like a demented worm, screaming for 'more ragtime and more champagne'.^[5]:183

Lady Diana Manners was apparently not alone in her dislike of ragtime. A newspaper clipping found in Berlin's scrapbook included an article titled, "Calls Ragtime Insanity Sign":

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" is a public menace.... The authority for these statements is Dr. Ludwig Gruener of Berlin, a German [doctor] who has devoted twenty years' study to the criminally insane.... He says, 'Hysteria is the form of insanity that an abnormal love for ragtime seems to produce. It is as much a mental disease as acute mania—it has the same symptoms. When there is nothing done to check this form it produces idiocy'. He also stated that 90 percent of the inmates of the American asylums he has visited are abnormally fond of ragtime.^[13]:23

Simple and romantic ballads[link]

In future years he made every effort to write lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, once stating:

My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American, not the highbrow nor the lowbrow but that vast intermediate crew which is the real soul of the country. The highbrow is likely to be superficial, overtrained, supersensitive. The lowbrow is warped, subnormal. My public is the real people.^[1]

With Al Jolson, star of The Jazz Singer, c. 1927

Berlin also created songs out of his own sadness. In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of songwriter E. Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, "When I Lost You," was his first ballad. It was an immediate popular hit and sold more than a million copies.^[1] In 1916, he collaborated with Victor Herbert on the score of "The Century Girl."

He began to realize that the slang of ragtime would be an "inappropriate idiom for serious romantic expression," and over the next few years would begin to adapt his style by writing more love songs.^[7] In 1915 he wrote the hit, "I Love a Piano," which was an erotic, but comical, ragtime love song (Read lyrics).

By 1918 he had written hundreds of songs, mostly topical, which enjoyed brief popularity. Many of the songs were for the new dances then appearing, such as the "grizzly bear," "chicken walk," or fox trot. After a Hawaiian dance craze began, he wrote "That Hula-Hula," and then did a string of southern songs, such as "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam." During this period he was creating a few new songs every week, including numerous rags and songs aimed at the various immigrant cultures arriving from Europe. Furia tells of a train trip Berlin was on where he decided to entertain the fellow passengers. Later on they asked him how he knew so many hit songs, and Berlin would modestly reply, "I wrote them."^[7]:53

One of the key songs that Berlin wrote in his transition from ragtime to lyrical ballads was "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody," which was considered one of Berlin's "first big guns," according to historian Alec Wilder. The song was written for Ziegfeld's Follies of 1919 and became the musical's leading song. Its popularity was so great that it became the theme for all of Ziegfeld's revues, and later the theme song in the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld (Watch). Wilder puts it "on a level with Jerome Kern's "pure melodies," and in comparison with Berlin's earlier music, finds it "extraordinary that such a development in style and sophistication should have taken place in a single year."^[7]:53

World War I[link]

On 1 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson declared that America would enter World War I, and, as Whitcomb writes:

The beleaguered Allies would be rescued from the evil Central Powers by a noble American game-plan and a barrel of morals.... The whistle was blown, the game was on. There must be no shirkers or doubters in the team. Americans must pull together as one man or else. Said President Wilson: 'Woe to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution!' Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and, especially, German-Americans, must now be plain, straight-ahead Americans. Tin Pan Alley would do its duty and support the slogan at the time that "Music is essential to win the war." Berlin joined the effort and wrote, "For Your Country and My Country," adding "we must speak with the sword not the pen to show our appreciation to America for opening up her heart and welcoming every immigrant group." He then joined with George Meyer and his old colleague Edgar Leslie in a song that demanded an end to ethnicity: "Let's All Be Americans Now."^[5]:197

"Yip Yip Yaphank"

In 1917 Berlin was drafted into the army, and the news of his induction became headline news: "Army Takes Berlin!" one paper read. However, the army only wanted Berlin, now aged 30, to do what he knew best: to write songs of patriotism. Hence, while stationed at Camp Upton in New York, he composed an all-soldier musical revue titled "Yip Yip Yaphank", written to be patriotic tribute to the United States Army. By the following summer the show was taken to Broadway where it also included a number of hits, including "Mandy" and "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which he performed himself.^[1] The shows earned $150,000 for a camp service center. One song he wrote for the show but decided not use, he would introduce twenty years later: "God Bless America."^[12][14]

According to Whitcomb, "at the grand finale, General Bell made a thank-you speech from his box, while Sergeant Berlin, on stage, declined to utter a word. Then, under orders from the War Department, Sergeant Berlin led the entire 300-person cast off the stage, marching them down the theater's aisles, singing 'We're on Our Way to France,' all to tumultuous applause. The cast carried off their little producer like he was victor ludorum." Berlin's mother, having seen her son perform for the first (and last) time in her life, was shocked. The soldier-actors continued out into the downtown street and up the plank to the waiting troop carrier. "Tin Pan Alley had joined hands with real life," writes Whitcomb.^[5]:199Watch

1920 to 1940[link]

Circa 1920

Berlin returned to Tin Pan Alley after the war and in 1921 created a partnership with Sam Harris to build the Music Box Theater. He maintained an interest in the theater throughout his life, and even in his last years was known to call the Shubert Organization, his partner, to check on the receipts. In its early years, the theater was a showcase for revues by Berlin. As theater owner, producer and composer, he looked after every detail of his shows, from the costumes and sets to the casting and musical arrangements.^[15]

According to Berlin biographer David Leopold, the theater, located at 239 West 45th St., was the only Broadway house built to accommodate the works of a songwriter. It was the home of Berlin's "Music Box Revue" from 1921 to 1925 and "As Thousands Cheer" in 1933 and today includes an exhibition devoted to Berlin in the lobby.^[16]

Various hit songs[link]

By 1926, Berlin had written the scores to two editions of the Ziegfeld Follies and four "Music Box Revues." Life magazine called him the "Lullaby Kid," noting that "couples at country-club dances grew misty-eyed when the band went into "Always," because they were positive that Berlin had written it just for them. When they quarreled and parted in the crepuscular bitter-sweetness of the 1920s, it was Berlin who gave eloquence to their heartbreak by way of "What'll I Do" and "Remember" and "All Alone."^[17]

"What'll I Do?" (1924)

This ballad of love and longing was a #1 hit for Paul Whiteman and had five other top-12 renditions in 1924. Twenty-four years later, the song went to #22 for Nat Cole and #23 for Frank Sinatra.^[12]

"Always" (1925)

Written when he fell in love with Ellin Mackay, who later became his wife. The song became #1 twice (for Vincent Lopez and George Olsen) in its first incarnation. There were four more hit versions in 1944–45. In 1959 Sammy Turner took the song to #2 on the R&B chart. It became Patsy Cline's postmortem anthem and hit #18 on the country chart in 1980, 17 years after her death, and a tribute musical called "Patsy Cline ... Always," played a two-year Nashville run that ended in 1995.^[12]

"Blue Skies" (1926)

Written after his first daughter's birth as a song just for her. In it he distilled his feelings about being married and a father for the first time: "Blue days, all of them gone; nothing but blue skies, from now on."^[18] #1 for Ben Selvin with five other hits in 1927 besides being the first song performed by Al Jolson in the first feature sound film, "The Jazz Singer," that same year. In 1946 it returned to the top 10 on the charts with Count Basie and Benny Goodman. In 1978, Willie Nelson made the song a #1 country hit—52 years after it was written.^[12]

"Marie" (1929)

This waltz-time hit went to #2 with Rudy Vallee and in 1937 reached #1 with Tommy Dorsey. It was again on the charts at #13 in 1953 for The Four Tunes and at #15 for the Bachelors in 1965–36 years after its first appearance.^[12]

"Puttin' on the Ritz" (1930)

An instant standard with one of Berlin's most "intricately syncopated choruses," this song is associated with Fred Astaire, who danced to it in the 1946 film "Blue Skies." It was first sung by Harry Richman in 1930 and became a #1 hit, and in 1939 Clark Gable sang it in the movie "Idiot's Delight." It was also featured in the movie Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks and a #4 hit for the techno artist Taco in 1983 (Berlin thus became the oldest songwriter to have a current top Ten hit).

"Say It Isn't So" (1932)

Rudy Vallee performed it on his radio show, and the song was a #1 hit for George Olsen and awarded top-10 positions with versions by Connee Boswell and Ozzie Nelson's band. In 1963 Aretha Franklin produced a single of the song in 1963–31 years later.^[12] Furia notes that when Rudy Vallee first introduced the song on his radio show, the "song not only became an overnight hit, it saved Vallee's marriage: The Vallees had planned to get a divorce, but after Vallee sang Berlin's romantic lyrics on the air, "both he and his wife dissolved in tears" and decided to stay together.^[7]

"I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" (1937)

Performed by Dick Powell in the 1937 film "On the Avenue." Later it had four top-12 versions, including by Billie Holiday and Les Brown, who took it to #1.^[12]

"God Bless America" (1938)[link]

Singing "God Bless America" at the Pentagon memorial dedication, September 11, 2008

Written by Berlin twenty years earlier, he filed it away until 1938, when Kate Smith's manager asked Berlin if he had a patriotic song Smith might sing to mark the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day. It was "a simple plea for divine protection in a dark time—a plangent anthem in just 40 words," writes Corliss. It quickly became the second National Anthem after America entered World War II and over the decades has earned millions for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, to whom Berlin assigned all royalties.^[12][14] The phrase "God Bless America" was taken from Berlin's mother:

While he was growing up on the Lower East Side, she would say "God bless America" often, to indicate that, without America, her family would have had no place to go.^[19] The Economist magazine wrote that by writing "God Bless America", Berlin was "producing a deep-felt paean to the country that had given him what he would have said was everything. It is a melody that still makes his fellow countrymen want to stand up and place their hands over their hearts." ^[20]

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, U.S. senators and congressmen stood on the capitol steps and sang it after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Two nights later, when Broadway turned its lights back on, the casts of numerous shows led theatergoers in renditions of the same song.

Richard Corliss notes that the next day, at an official requiem at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., it was played by the U.S. Army Orchestra. The following Monday, to mark the reopening of the New York Stock Exchange, New York Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani joined traders in singing it. That evening, as major league baseball games resumed around the country it replaced "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as the theme song of the seventh-inning stretch. Over the following weeks, everyone—Celine Dion, Marc Anthony, New York City Police Department officer Daniel Rodriguez, the whole country—sang "God Bless America".^[12]

Describing the mood at the time and the significance of the song, Corliss wrote in Time magazine that December:

In times of crisis, the nation loses its short-term cultural memory—puts aside idiot movie comics, suicidal rock lyrics, must-see reality TV and the pursuit of the moral triviality that is Gary Condit—and, like a senior citizen finding solace in the distant past, rekindles that old feeling. In pop culture, at least for a while, many Americans traded in cool pop culture for warm, sarcasm for sentiment, alienation for community. In the blink of a national tragedy, we went from jaded to nice, just like that.^[12]

The popularity of the song, when it was first introduced in 1938, was also related to its release near the end of the Depression, which had gone on for nine years. As a result, one writer concludes that the song's introduction at that time "enshrines a strain of official patriotism intertwined with a religious faith that runs deep in the American psyche. Patriotic razzle-dazzle, sophisticated melancholy and humble sentiments: Berlin songs span the emotional terrain of America with a thoroughness that others may have equaled but none have surpassed."^[3]

The song has also been adopted by various sports teams over the years. The Philadelphia Flyers hockey team started playing it before crucial contests and won some 80% of those games—including all three when Kate Smith arrived to sing it in person. "Many credited Smith for lifting the crowd and the team to new heights," notes columnist John Bacon. When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team pulled off the "greatest upset in sports history," referred to as the "Miracle on Ice", the players spontaneously broke into a chorus—not of "The Star Spangled Banner," but "God Bless America,"^[21] with ESPN TV noting, "Americans were overcome by patriotism."^[22]

Other songs[link]

Though most of his works for the Broadway stage took the form of revues—collections of songs with no unifying plot—he did write a number of book shows. The Cocoanuts (1929) was a light comedy with a cast featuring, among others, the Marx Brothers. Face the Music (1932) was a political satire with a book by Moss Hart, and Louisiana Purchase (1940) was a satire of a Southern politician obviously based on the exploits of Huey Long. As Thousands Cheer (1933) was a revue, also with book by Moss Hart, with a theme: each number was presented as an item in a newspaper, some of them touching on issues of the day. The show yielded a succession of hit songs, including "Easter Parade" sung by Marilyn Miller and William Gaxton, "Heat Wave" (presented as the weather forecast), "Harlem on My Mind", and "Supper Time", a song about racial bigotry that was sung by Ethel Waters.

1941 to 1962[link]

World War II patriotism—"This is the Army" (1943)[link]

Singing aboard USS Arkansas, 1944

When the U.S. joined World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Berlin immediately began composing a number of patriotic songs. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau requested a song to inspire Americans to buy war bonds, for which he wrote "Any Bonds Today?" He assigned all royalties to the United States Treasury Department. He then wrote songs for various government agencies and likewise assigned all profits to them: "Angels of Mercy" for the American Red Cross; "Arms for the Love of America," for the Army Ordnance Department; and "I Paid My Income Tax Today,"^[23] again to Treasury.^[12]

But his most notable and valuable contribution to the war effort was a stage show he wrote called "This is the Army". It was taken to Broadway and then on to Washington, D.C. (where President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended). It was eventually shown at military bases throughout the world, including London, North Africa, Italy, Middle East, and Pacific countries, sometimes in close proximity to battle zones. Berlin wrote nearly three dozen songs for the show which contained a cast of 300 men. He supervised the production and traveled with it, always singing "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning". The show kept him away from his family for three and a half years, during which time he took neither salary nor expenses, and turned over all profits to the Army Emergency Relief Fund.^[24]:81 The play was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1943, directed by Michael Curtiz, costarring Joan Leslie and Ronald Reagan, who was then an army lieutenant. Kate Smith also sang "God Bless America" in the film with a backdrop showing families anxious over the coming war. The show became a hit movie and a morale-boosting road show that toured the battlefronts of Europe.^[25] The shows and movie combined raised more than $10 million for the Army,^[12] and in recognition of his contributions to troop morale, Berlin was awarded the Medal of Merit by President Harry S. Truman. His daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, who was 15 when she was at the opening-night performance of "This is the Army" on Broadway, remembered that when her father, who normally shunned the spotlight, appeared in the second act in soldier's garb to sing "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," he was greeted with a standing ovation that lasted 10 minutes. She adds that he was in his mid-50's at the time, and later declared those years with the show were the "most thrilling time of his life."^[25]

"Annie Get Your Gun" (1946)[link]

The grueling tours Berlin did performing "This Is The Army" left him exhausted. But his old and close friend Jerome Kern, who was the composer for "Annie Get Your Gun," suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Producers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II persuaded Berlin to take over composing the score.

Loosely based on the life of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the music and lyrics were written by Berlin, with a book by Herbert Fields and his sister Dorothy Fields. At first he refused to take on the job, claiming that he knew nothing about "hillbilly music", but the show ran for 1,147 performances and became his most successful score. It is said that the showstopper song, "There's No Business Like Show Business", was almost left out of the show altogether because Berlin mistakenly thought that Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't like it. However, it became the "ultimate uptempo show tune." One reviewer stating that "Its tough wisecracking lyrics are as tersely all-knowing as its melody, which is nailed down in brassy syncopated lines that have been copied -but never equaled in sheer melodic memorability—by hundreds of theater composers ever since."^[3] McCorkle writes that the score "meant more to me than ever, now that I knew that he wrote it after a grueling world tour and years of separation from his wife and daughters."^[24]:81

Historian and composer Alec Wilder noted the difference between this score and Berlin's much earlier works:

To hear... that "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) was the hit of Vienna and probably every large city of Europe by late 1912, and then to realize that the writer of this song, forty years later, wrote the nearly perfect score of Annie Get Your Gun, comes as a profound shock.^[26]:94

Apparently the "creative spurt" in which Berlin turned out several songs for the score in a single weekend was an anomaly. According to this daughter, he usually "sweated blood" to write his songs.^[25] Annie Get Your Gun is considered to be Berlin's best musical theatre score not only because of the number of hits it contains, but because its songs successfully combine character and plot development. The song "There's No Business Like Show Business" became "Ethel Merman's trademark."^[3]

Final shows[link]

Berlin's next show, Miss Liberty (1949), was disappointing, but Call Me Madam in 1950, starring Ethel Merman as Sally Adams, a Washington, D.C. socialite, loosely based the famous Washington hostess Perle Mesta, fared better, giving him his second greatest success. After a failed attempt at retirement, in 1962, at the age of 74, he returned to Broadway with Mr. President. Although it ran for eight months, (with the premiere attended by President John F. Kennedy), it did not become a successful show. But as Richard Corliss points out, it did at least prove that Berlin was still the "uncomplicated lover of the country that had adopted and enriched him . . . [and] his feelings were most directly expressed" by the lyrics to the song, "This Is a Great Country:"^[12]

Hats off to America,
The home of the free and the brave—
If this is flag waving,
Flag waving,
Do you know of a better flag to wave?

Afterwards, Berlin officially announced his retirement and spent his remaining years in New York.

Movie scores[link]

1920s–1950s[link]

In 1922, Madame Butterfly was his first composing film debut. In 1927, his song "Blue Skies", was featured in the first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. Later, movies like Top Hat (1935) became the first of a series of distinctive film musicals by Berlin starring performers like Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, and Alice Faye. They usually had light romantic plots and a seemingly endless string of his new and old songs. Similar films included On the Avenue (1937), Gold Diggers in Paris (1938), Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946), and Easter Parade (1948), with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.

"White Christmas" (1942)[link]

The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced "White Christmas", one of the most recorded songs in history. First sung in the film by Bing Crosby, it sold over 30 million records and stayed #1 on the pop and R&B charts for 10 weeks. Crosby's single was the best-selling single in any music category for more than fifty years. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia—a pure childlike longing for roots, home and childhood—that goes way beyond the greeting imagery."^[3]

Richard Corliss also notes that the song was even more significant having been released soon after America entered World War II: [it] "connected with... GIs in their first winter away from home. To them it voiced the ache of separation and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth...."^[12] Poet Carl Sandburg said, "Way down under this latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace."^[12]

"White Christmas" won Berlin the Academy Award for Best Music in an Original Song, one of seven Oscar nominations he received during his career. In subsequent years, it was re-recorded and became a top-10 seller for numerous artists: Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Ernest Tubb, The Ravens, and The Drifters. It would also be the last time a Berlin song went to #1 upon its release.

Talking about Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", composer–lyricist Garrison Hintz stated that although songwriting can be a complicated process, its final result should sound simplistic. Considering the fact that "White Christmas" has only eight sentences in the entire song, lyrically Mr. Berlin achieved all that was necessary to eventually sell over 100 million copies and capture the hearts of the American public at the same time.^[27]

Songwriting methods[link]

According to Saul Bornstein, Berlin's publishing company manager, "It was a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song, words and music, every day."^[26]:92 Berlin has said that he "does not believe in inspiration," and feels that although he may be gifted in certain areas, his "most successful compositions were the "result of work." In an interview in 1916, when he was 28, he said:

I do most of my work under pressure. When I have a song to write I go home at night, and after dinner about 8 I begin to work. Sometimes I keep at it till 4 or 5 in the morning. I do most of my writing at night, and although I have lived in the same apartment four years there has never been a complaint from any of my neighbors.... Each day I would attend rehearsals and at night write another song and bring it down the next day.^[28]

Not always certain about his own writing abilities, he once asked a songwriter friend, Mr. Herbert, whether he should study composition. "You have a natural gift for words and music," Mr. Herbert told him. "Learning theory might help you a little, but it could cramp your style." Berlin took his advice. Herbert later became a moving force behind the creation of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In 1914, Berlin joined him as a charter member of the organization that has protected the royalties of composers and writers ever since.^[1]

Years later, he was asked whether he ever studied lyrical writing:

I never have, because if I don't know them I do not have to observe any rules and can do as I like, which is much better for me than if I allowed myself to be governed by the rules of versification. In following my own method I can make my jingles fit my music or vice versa with no qualms as to their correctness. Usually I compose my tunes and then fit words to them, though sometimes it's the other way about.^[28]

In later years he would emphasize his conviction, saying that "it's the lyric that makes a song a hit, although the tune, of course, is what makes it last."^[29]:234

According to music historian Alec Wilder, it was well known that Berlin, unable to write his own music, paid a professional musician to harmonize and write his music, but always did so under his close supervision. He notes that "though Berlin may seldom have played acceptable harmony, he nevertheless, by some mastery of his inner ear, senses it, in fact writes many of his melodies with this natural, intuitive harmonic sense at work in his head, but not in his hands."^[26]:93

As a result, Wilder concludes that many admirers of the music of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter were unlikely to consider Berlin's work in the same category. But he feels that was due primarily to "forgetfulness and confusion," making them inclined to minimize his talent. He writes:

They forget "Soft Lights and Sweet Music,' 'Supper Time,' and 'Cheek to Cheek' because they are confused by his also having written 'What'll I Do?' and 'Always.' The solid, straightforward pop songs of Berlin are minor masterpieces of economy, clarity, and memorability. But they give little hint of the much more sophisticated aspects of his talent as it is revealed in his theater and film music.^[26]

Wilder tries to describe the source of Berlin's gift for songwriting: "In his lyrics as in his melodies, Berlin reveals a constant awareness of the world around him: the pulse of the times, the society in which his is functioning. There is nothing of the hothouse about his work, urban though it may be."^[26]

Music styles[link]

Music critic Stephen Holden writes that composer Jerome Kern recognized that the essence of Irving Berlin's lyrics was his "faith in the American vernacular" and was so profound that his best-known songs "seem indivisible from the country's history and self-image." He adds that where the songs of Kern, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Cole Porter brought together Afro-American, Latin American, rural pop, and European operetta, Berlin's music "did not strive to be lofty in that way." He adds that "The best of it is a simple, exquisitely crafted street song whose diction feels so natural that one scarcely notices the craft.... For all of their innovation, they seem to flow straight out of the rhythms and inflections of everyday speech."^[3] Wilder also explains Berlin's style of writing:

Whatever idealism some of his songs revealed, the core of his work has been eminently practical: his has been truly a body of work... his approach to songwriting is that of a craftsman rather than a composer.... I have been searching assiduously for stylistic characteristics in Berlin, but I can't find any. I find great songs, good songs, average songs, and commercial songs. But I find no clue to a single, or even duple, point of view in the music.^[24]:76

Berlin did state a stylistic goal early in his career: to write a "syncopated operetta." He said, "If I were assigned the task of writing an American opera I should not follow the style of the masters, whose melodies can never be surpassed. Instead I would write a syncopated opera, which, if it failed, would at least possess the merit of novelty. That is what I really want to do eventually—write a syncopated operetta."^[28] Two decades later, composer George Gershwin wrote, "I have learned many things from Irving Berlin, but the most precious lesson has been that ragtime—or jazz, as its more developed state was later called—was the only musical idiom in existence that could aptly express America."^[2]:117

Many musicians and music historians have attempted to define the qualities about Berlin's songs that made them unique. Gershwin once tried:

His music has that vitality—both rhythmic and melodic—which never seems to lose any of its exuberant freshness; it has that rich, colorful melodic flow which is ever the wonder of all those of who, too, compose songs; his ideas are endless.^[2]:117

Among Berlin's contemporaries was Cole Porter, whose music style was often considered more "witty, sophisticated, [and] dirty," according to musicologist Susannah McCorkle. Of the five top songwriters, only Porter and Berlin wrote both their words and music. However, she notes that Porter, unlike Berlin, was a Yale-educated and wealthy Midwesterner whose songs were not successful until he was in his thirties. However, she notes that it was "Berlin [who] got Porter the show that launched his career."^[24]:76

During the early 1940s, Berlin became an enthusiastic reader of works by the 18th century English poet, Alexander Pope. He had a genuine "enthusiasm for Pope's lean, compact heroic couplets." He felt that Pope would have made a "brilliant lyric writer."^[17]

In 2000, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim reflected on the greatest songs in the American Songbook, noting "What distinguishes Berlin is the brilliance of his lyrics. 'You Can't Get a Man With a Gun'—that's as good a comic song as has ever been written by anybody. You look at the jokes and how quickly they're told, and it still has a plot to it. It's sophisticated and very underrated." ^[30]

Personal life[link]

Marriages[link]

In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of the songwriter E. Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever, which she contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, "When I Lost You," was his first ballad.

With wife Ellin, c. 1920s

Years later in the 1920s, he fell in love with a young heiress, Ellin Mackay, the daughter of Clarence Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company. Because Berlin was Jewish and she was Catholic, their life was followed in every possible detail by the press, which found the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and a young heiress a good story.^[1]

They met in 1925, and her father opposed the match from the start. He went so far as to send her off to Europe to find other suitors and forget Mr. Berlin. However, Berlin wooed her over the airwaves with his songs, "Remember" and "Always." His biographer, Philip Furia, writes that "even before Ellin returned from Europe, newspapers rumored they were engaged, and Broadway shows featured skits of the lovelorn songwriter...." During the week after her return, both she and Berlin were "besieged by reporters, sometimes fifty at a time." Variety reported that her father had vowed their marriage "would only happen 'over my dead body.'"^[29] As a result they decided to elope and were married in a simple civil ceremony at the Municipal Building away from media attention.

A front-page story in the New York Times about the wedding stated, "Although Broadway for months had expected the one-time newsboy and Bowery singer of songs to wed the prominent young society girl... the marriage took Clarence H. Mackay, father of the bride, completely by surprise. He was reported to have been stunned when he learned from a third person of the Municipal Building ceremony." However, the bride's mother, who was divorced from Mr. Mackay, was apparently not of the same mind according to the story: "in fact, some quarters pictured her as desirous of seeing her daughter follow the dictates of her own heart. It was reported that the couple motored to the home of Mrs. Blake [her mother], early in the evening and obtained her blessing."^[31]

There were also reports that her father disowned his daughter because of the marriage. Berlin then assigned all rights to a number of popular songs, including "Always," a song still played at weddings, thereby guaranteeing her a steady income regardless of what might happen with their marriage. For some years, Mr. Mackay was not on speaking terms with the Berlins; however, during the Depression five years later, Berlin is said to have bailed out his father-in-law when he suffered because of the stock market crash.^[1]

Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until she died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Irving, who died in infancy; Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmet, who lived in Paris.^[1]

Lifestyle[link]

In 1916, in the earlier phase of Berlin's career, producer and composer George M. Cohan, during a toast to the young Berlin at a Friar's Club dinner in his honor, described Berlin:

The thing I like about Irvie is that although he has moved up-town and made lots of money, it hasn't turned his head. He hasn't forgotten his friends, he doesn't wear funny clothes, and you will find his watch and his handkerchief in his pockets, where they belong.^[28]

It has been noted by Furia that "throughout his life he had a habit of returning to his old haunts in Union Square, Chinatown, and the Bowery, a habit easily indulged in a city where no matter how far up—or down—the ladder of success you had climbed, you could reach your antipodes by walking a few blocks."^[29] Berlin would always remember his childhood years when he "slept under tenement steps, ate scraps, and wore secondhand clothes," describing those years as hard but good. "Every man should have a Lower East Side in his life," he said. He used to visit The Music Box Theater, which he founded and which still stands at 239 West Forty-Fifth St.

George Frazier of Life magazine found Berlin to be "intensely nervous," with a habit of tapping his listener with his index finger to emphasize a point, and continually pressing his hair down in back and "picking up any stray crumbs left on a table after a meal." While listening, "he leans forward tensely, with his hands clasped below his knees like a prizefighter waiting in his corner for the bell.... For a man who has known so much glory," writes Frazier, "Berlin has somehow managed to retain the enthusiasm of a novice."^[17]

Berlin's daughter later wrote in her memoir that "she found her father a loving, if workaholic, family man who was 'basically an upbeat person, with down periods,' until his last decades, when he retreated from public life...."^[24] She adds that her parents liked to celebrate every single holiday with their children. "They seemed to understand the importance, particularly in childhood, of the special day, the same every year, the special stories, foods, and decorations and that special sense of well-being that accompanies a holiday."^[24]:80 Although he did comment to his daughter about her mother's lavish Christmas spending, "I gave up trying to get your mother to economize. It was easier just to make more money."^[32]

Berlin supported the presidential candidacy of General Dwight Eisenhower, and his song "I Like Ike" featured prominently in the Eisenhower campaign. In his later years he also became more conservative in his views on music. According to his daughter, "He was consumed by patriotism." He often said, "I owe all my success to my adopted country" and once rejected his lawyers' advice to invest in tax shelters, insisting, "I want to pay taxes. I love this country."^[24]:80

Berlin was devoted to the Jewish faith and was a staunch advocate of civil rights. Berlin was later honored in 1944 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for "advancing the aims of the conference to eliminate religious and racial conflict."^[33] In 1949, the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) honored him as one the twelve "most outstanding Americans of Jewish faith."^[33] Berlin's Civil Rights Movement support also made him a target of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who endlessly investigated him for years.^[34]

Death[link]

The grave of Irving Berlin in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York City

Berlin died in his sleep on September 22, 1989, in New York City at the age of 101 and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. He was survived by three daughters: Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmet, who lives in Paris. He is also survived by nine grandchildren and six great grandchildren.^[1]

On the evening following the announcement of his death, the marquee lights of Broadway playhouses were dimmed before curtain time in his memory. President George H. W. Bush said Mr. Berlin was "a legendary man whose words and music will help define the history of our nation." Just minutes before the President's statement was released, he joined a crowd of thousands to sing Berlin's "God Bless America" at a luncheon in Boston. Former President Ronald Reagan, who costarred in Berlin's 1943 musical This Is the Army, said, "Nancy and I are deeply saddened by the death of a wonderfully talented man whose musical genius delighted and stirred millions and will live on forever."^[35]

Morton Gould, the composer and conductor who is president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which Mr. Berlin was a founder, said, "What to me is fascinating about this unique genius is that he touched so many people in so many age groups over so many years. He sounded our deepest feelings—happiness, sadness, celebration, loneliness." Ginger Rogers, who danced to Berlin tunes with Fred Astaire, told The Associated Press upon hearing of his death that working with Mr. Berlin had been "like heaven." ^[35]

Legacy and influence[link]

The New York Times, after his death in 1989, wrote, "Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played and sang and danced to for much of the 20th century." An immigrant from Russia, his life became the "classic rags-to-riches story that he never forgot could have happened only in America."^[1] During his career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs^[15] and was a legend by the time he turned 30. He went on to write the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films,^[36] with his songs nominated for Academy Awards on eight occasions. Music historian Susannah McCorkle writes that "in scope, quantity, and quality his work was amazing."^[24] Others, such as Broadway musician Anne Phillips, says simply that "the man is an American institution."^[37] During his six-decade career, from 1907 to 1966, he produced sheet music, Broadway shows, recordings, and scores played on radio, in films and on television, and his tunes continue to evoke powerful emotions for millions around the world. He wrote songs like "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Cheek to Cheek", "There's No Business Like Show Business", "Blue Skies" and "Puttin' On the Ritz." Some of his songs have become holiday anthems, such as "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", and "Happy Holiday". "White Christmas" alone sold over 50 million records, the top-selling single of all time, won an ASCAP and an Academy Award, and is one of the most frequently played songs ever written.^[1] According to McCorkle, of the top five songwriters in America, only Berlin and Cole Porter wrote both their words and music.^[24]

In 1938 "God Bless America" became the unofficial national anthem of the United States, and on September 11, 2001, members of the House of Representatives stood on the steps of the Capitol and solemnly sang "God Bless America" together. The song returned to #1 shortly after 9/11, when Celine Dion recorded it as the title track of a 9/11 benefit album. The following year, the Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp of Berlin. By then, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of New York had received more than $10 million in royalties from "God Bless America" as a result of Berlin's donation of royalties.^[15] According to music historian Gary Giddins, "No other songwriter has written as many anthems.... No one else has written as many pop songs, period... [H]is gift for economy, directness, and slang, presents Berlin as an obsessive, often despairing commentator on the passing scene."^[38]:405

In 1934 Life Magazine put him on its cover and inside hailed "this itinerant son of a Russian cantor" as "an American institution."^[18] And again in 1943 Life described his songs as follows:

They possess a permanence not generally associated with Tin Pan Alley products and it is more than remotely possible that in days to come Berlin will be looked upon as the Stephen Foster of the 20th century.^[17]

At various times his songs were also rallying cries for different causes: He produced musical editorials supporting Al Smith and Dwight Eisenhower as presidential candidates, he wrote songs opposing Prohibition, defending the gold standard, calming the wounds of the Great Depression, and helping the war against Hitler, and in 1950 he wrote an anthem for the state of Israel.^[12] Biographer David Leopold adds that "We all know his songs... they are all part of who we are."

At his 100th-birthday celebration in May 1988, violinist Isaac Stern said, "The career of Irving Berlin and American music were intertwined forever—American music was born at his piano,"^[1] while songwriter Sammy Cahn pointed out: "If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable... [Y]ou couldn't have a holiday without his permission."^[1] Composer Douglas Moore added:

It's a rare gift which sets Irving Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters. It is a gift which qualifies him, along with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, as a great American minstrel. He has caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe.^[1]

ASCAP's records show that 25 of Berlin's songs reached the top of the charts and were re-recorded by dozens of famous singers over the years, such as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald.^[36] In 1924, when Berlin was 36, his biography, The Story of Irving Berlin, was being written by Alexander Woollcott. In a letter to Woollcott, Jerome Kern offered what one writer said "may be the last word" on the significance of Irving Berlin:

Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music. Emotionally, he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time and, in turn, gives these impressions back to the world—simplified, clarified and glorified.^[3]

Composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) also tried to describe the importance of Berlin's compositions:

I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert. But apart from his genuine talent for song-writing, Irving Berlin has had a greater influence upon American music than any other one man. It was Irving Berlin who was the very first to have created a real, inherent American music.... Irving Berlin was the first to free the American song from the nauseating sentimentality which had previously characterized it, and by introducing and perfecting ragtime he had actually given us the first germ of an American musical idiom; he had sowed the first seeds of an American music.^[2]:117

Awards and celebrations[link]

• Received the Army's Medal of Merit on October 2, 1945 from General George C. Marshall, at the direction of President Harry S. Truman, in appreciation for writing the music and lyrics to "This Is the Army."
• Won a Tony Award in 1951 for Best Score for the musical, Call Me Madam.
• Received a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1954 from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for contributing the song, "God Bless America." Berlin had also written three songs for his candidacy, including "I Like Ike."
• Won a Special Tony Award (New York City) in 1963 for his contributions to the American musical.
• Awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1968.
• Was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
• Was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 by President Gerald Ford
• Won a Lawrence Langner Tony Award (New York City) in 1978 for his distinguished life in the American theater.
• Awarded (in absentia,) a Medal of Liberty during centennial celebrations for the Statue of Liberty in 1986.
• His 100th-birthday celebration concert for the benefit of Carnegie Hall and ASCAP on May 11, 1988.
• Awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Musical scores[link]

The following list includes scores mostly produced by Berlin. Although some of the plays using his songs were later adapted to films, the list will not include the film unless he was the primary composer.^[4]

Stage[link]

Film scores[link]

Song lists[link]

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Barrett, Mary Ellin (1994). Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir. ISBN 0-671-72533-5. 
• Berry, David Carson (2001). “Gambling with Chromaticism? Extra-Diatonic Melodic Expression in the Songs of Irving Berlin,” Theory and Practice 26, 21–85.
• Berry, David Carson (1999). “Dynamic Introductions: The Affective Role of Melodic Ascent and Other Linear Devices in Selected Song Verses of Irving Berlin,” Intégral 13, 1–62.
• Hischak, Thomas S. (1991). Word Crazy, Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim. ISBN 0-275-93849-2. 
• Rosen, Jody (2002). White Christmas: The Story of an American Song. ISBN 0-7432-1875-2. 

External links[link]

Find more about Irving Berlin on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

• Papers of Irving Berlin, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
• Irving Berlin at the Internet Broadway Database
• Irving Berlin at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Irving Berlin at the Internet Movie Database
• Irving Berlin Music Company
• PBS page on Irving Berlin, part of their Great Performances series
• If Irving Berlin could not read or write music, how did he compose? (from The Straight Dope)
• Liner notes for The Vintage Irving Berlin, New World Records NW 238
• Irving Berlin collection of non-commercial sound recordings, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
• The Judy Room "Easter Parade" section
• Remarkable Sergeants: Ten Vignettes of Noteworthy NCOs Elder, Daniel K.
• U.S. Army Soldier Show
• Irving Berlin | 5th Avenue Theatre
• Tony Awards
• Songwriters Hall of Fame—Irving Berlin

• Free scores by Irving Berlin at the International Music Score Library Project

Audios[link]

• "Irving Berlin In Hollywood (Film Score Anthology)" Song clips
• "Irving Berlin Always" Song clips
• "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook" Song clips
• "Irving Berlin: A Hundred Years" Song clips
• "The Melody Lingers On: 25 Songs Of Irving Berlin" Song clips
• "Annie Get Your Gun" (film) score samples
• "Annie Get Your Gun (Broadway play) song samples
• "How Deep is the Ocean"—Frank Sinatra
• "What'll I Do?"—Harry Nilsson
• The International Rag at the Library of Congress Jukebox

Videos[link]

• "Ordway Center Spotlight on Irving Berlin" Presentation by James Rocco, V.P. Performing Arts, 8 min.
• Kaye Ballard Tribute 8 min.
• 1982 Oscars Tribute part 2 videos 7 min.
• "God Bless America"—sung by Kate Smith; sung by Celine Dion; with Irving Berlin
• "Always" Frank Sinatra at Irving Berlin's 100th birthday celebration
• "Easter Parade" movie trailer
• "Annie Get Your Gun" "Anything You Can Do"; "Col. Buffalo Bill"
• "Alexander's Ragtime Band" movie trailer
• "Follow the Fleet", Fred Astaire on piano
• "A Cheer for the Navy"; Finale scene from "This is the Army"
• "Let's Face The Music And Dance" with Nat King Cole; version by Diana Krall
• "Blue Skies" Willie Nelson; Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" 1927
• "Top Hat" movie trailer
• "Cheek to Cheek" with Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers
• "There's No Business Like Show Business" movie trailer (1954); Song clip
• "Shakin' the Blues Away" with—Doris Day
• "White Christmas" movie trailer—"White Christmas" Broadway promo
• "Play a Simple Melody" by Greater Boston Intergenerational Chorus
• "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" with Dick Powell & Alice Faye; version with Frank Sinatra
• "A Couple of Swells" with Judy Garland & Fred Astaire
• "Always" with Frank Sinatra slide show
• "Russian Lullaby" (written 1927) with Jacques Gauthe & jazz group
• "Puttin' on the Ritz" with Fred Astaire; played by Cory Hall; piano solo with Jim Hession

Felix Arndt (May 20, 1889 – October 16, 1918) was an American pianist and composer of popular music. His mother was the Countess Fevrier, related to Napoleon III.

Educated in New York, Arndt composed songs for the famous vaudeville team of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes, and recorded over 3000 piano rolls for Duo-Art and QRS Records. He died at age 29 during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

Arndt is best remembered for his 1915 composition, "Nola", written as an engagement gift to his fiancee (and later wife), Nola Locke. It is sometimes considered to be the first example of the novelty piano or "novelty ragtime" genre, published by Sam Fox Publishing Company. It was the signature theme of the Vincent Lopez orchestra, and a top ten hit for Les Paul in 1950. Other Arndt compositions include "Desecration Rag", "An Operatic Nightmare - Desecration No. 2", and "Clover Club".

His piano rolls reveal Arndt to be a fine pianist, and he is known to have been an influence on the young George Gershwin, who would visit him at his studio in the Aeolian Building on 42nd Street in Manhattan.

Felix Arndt died during the world-wide flu epidemic of 1918 in New York city.

External links[link]

• Nola, MIDI version
• A short biography
• Free scores by Felix Arndt at the International Music Score Library Project