Author: Alec Wilder
Title: American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950
Year: 1972
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Book (edited and with an introduction by James T. Maher)
Wilder — himself a composer who worked in both classical and popular forms — applies formal musical analysis to the work of popular songwriters from Jerome Kern through the end of the Tin Pan Alley era. The argument is implicit in its method: train the tools musicologists reserve for art music on the harmonic language, melodic construction, and structural invention of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, and their contemporaries, and the verdict follows on its own: this is serious composition. Wilder never pleads pop’s case on cultural significance or emotional impact. He stays on the page: Porter’s chromatic voice leading, Arlen’s blues-derived melodic intervals, and Kern’s modulations are compositional achievements that reward close analysis.
Wilder’s narrowness is also his discipline: he is interested in the songs as written compositions, not as recordings or performances. He analyzes sheet music, not records. This means he misses everything that recording, arrangement, and vocal interpretation contribute to popular music’s power — the dimensions that would become central to the Brill Building and Motown eras. But his core move, taking popular songwriting seriously as craft by demonstrating its technical sophistication, laid the intellectual groundwork for every subsequent defense of pop. Before American Popular Song, the academic world had no framework for treating a Cole Porter song as a compositional achievement comparable to (though different from) a Schubert lied. After it, the question was open.
Run Wilder’s method forward fifteen years and it lands on Burt Bacharach, whose “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (1963) slips out of 4/4 into a bar of 5/4 and back through a 7/8 turnaround, the chromatic voice leading Wilder prized in Porter now wrapped around a meter that will not sit still. The craft Wilder taught us to hear did not end at Tin Pan Alley; it walked the few blocks to the Brill Building and got harder. But the song also marks where his page-only discipline runs out. Bacharach scored his own records, and the extra beats land exactly where Dionne Warwick pauses for breath, so the difficulty lives in the performance as much as the chart. Analyze the sheet music alone and you miss the thing that makes it work: a hit single nobody could hear was in 5/4.
Key contributions
- The foundational text for treating popular songwriting as serious composition, applying formal analysis (harmony, melody, structure) rather than cultural or sociological arguments
- Detailed analytical readings of individual songs that demonstrate the harmonic and melodic sophistication of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, making the craft visible to readers who might otherwise hear these songs as “simple”
- The implicit argument that what separates “art music” from “popular music” is institutional context and audience, not quality or complexity
- A method that later writers extended into the rock and pop eras: if Porter and Gershwin deserve formal analysis, so do Bacharach, Lennon-McCartney, and Brian Wilson
See also
- Pop as craft — Wilder provides the intellectual foundation for the craft argument: the first systematic demonstration that popular songwriting is compositionally sophisticated, not just commercially successful
- Tin Pan Alley — The tradition Wilder analyzes in detail, treating its best practitioners as serious composers rather than entertainment industry workers
- Brill Building — The next generation of the craft tradition Wilder documents. Bacharach’s harmonic language descends directly from the Porter-Arlen-Kern lineage Wilder analyzes, extended through jazz harmony into pop.
- Burt Bacharach — The Brill Building songwriter whose harmonic sophistication most directly continues the Wilder lineage
