Irving Berlin
- ISBN-10
- 0812816595
- ISBN-13
- 9780812816594
- Series
- Irving Berlin
- Pages
- 224
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1974
- Publisher
- Stein and Day
- Author
- Michael Freedland
Description
He created over three thousand songs, yet never learned to play the piano properly. A composer who calls himself a songwriter, whose songs are to him no more than "tunes," he can't read music. When asked once what effect music education might have on his music, he replied, "Ruin it." "Irving Berlin," says Jerome Kern, "has no place in American music - he is American music." And some of America's legendary performers--Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman--would probably concur. Some of the songs, like "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and "Easter Parade," and "White Christmas," have become classics. Thirty Broadway shows and seventeen Hollywood musicals attest to his prodigious talent. This book is the story of this remarkable man's rise to his place as perhaps the greatest weaver of musical spells in American popular music.
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