Sometimes the word popular is used as the antithesis of the word classical. The pedantic view is that classical music is the stuff written in Vienna between the Baroque and the Romantic by Mozart and Haydn. More commonly it's used to mean any music composed with the intention of being performed exactly as written-- symphonies, sonatas, and opera. A practical definition is that classical music is the kind that gets subsidies from governments and foundations, whereas people like popular music enough to pay for it themselves by buying tickets and records and sheet music.

What has come to be called, in capital letters, The American Popular Song, is the body of music written by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and their younger contemporaries-- Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers among them-- between the First World War and Korea-- a period of about forty years. Another use of the word classical is an exemplary work of lasting value. By this standard, there is a case that the American Popular Song as defined here, is also classical music. The implication of Rise and Fall in the title is deliberate. These songs are an art form that passed through development, florescence, and decline, but one that may survive in repertory like grand opera and baroque concerti.

Popular music is a universal constant. American colonists and immigrants brought their national musics with them, and they imported African music along with slavery. Until this century, people performed for one another-- the music we now call folk music. We also imported the European custom of sheet music to be played on the living room piano or organ. Popular music included political songs and so-called parlor songs, mostly using song forms from the British Isles. I heard an unfamiliar piece on the radio the other day, and my first thought was that it was from The Beggar's Opera of 1728 England. I learned that it was our own Stephen Foster, a century and a half newer. Some of his songs have more of an American sound, and these tend to have melodies borrowed from African Americans.

Ragtime appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. The creation of African-American composers, it combined African harmonies and syncopation with French quadrilles and march music. It was a classical music in two senses-- it was composed rather than improvised, and performance required technical virtuosity. This first great American contribution to western music captured popular audiences as well as formal composers like Stravinsky and Milhaud. African American blues was settling into a regular form at about the same time.

Russian born Irving Berlin was a New York singing waiter who began writing and publishing his own songs. His first big hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911), brought the rhythms and energy of ragtime into popular music. Ever since, American popular music has been a distinctly American amalgam of African and European forms. This applies to everything from Nashville to fusion and grunge rock.

By 1920, the influence of ragtime on the music of the popular song had been supplemented by two more African-American contributions. New Orleans jazz had become international from 1917 on, and had become the dominant American dance music. The blues donated flatted thirds and sevenths. All three helped the popular song swing. Melody lines had internal rhythms-- the mechanical assignment of one syllable to each quarter note disappeared and phrasing became independent of bar lines. The 'twenties compositions of George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and others clearly show the new direction in popular song-- distinctively twentieth century American.

In addition to the rare combination of melody, harmony, and rhythm that charges the music receptors in our brains, a song needs a lyric. All of the qualities of good written poetry apply to a song lyric, but there's much more. Each line must correspond to the form of the music and each syllable has to fit a note in the melody. Stressed words and syllables have to match corresponding notes. The mood of the message must match the harmony of the music. In show tunes, the song has to fit the character and is often a substitute for dialog in advancing the plot. And, of course, the lyric is meant to be sung, not read. It must flow naturally for the singer and be instantly intelligible to the audience. In a good song, finally, all of the hard work in meeting all of these constraints disappears in the performance and the result is direct, natural, and satisfying. The great lyric writers took poetry seriously. Gilbert & Sullivan operettas were one influence, and another was P.G. Wodehouse. The author of hundreds of great stories and novels about silly Englishmen-- like Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves-- lived mostly in America from 1910 on. With Jerome Kern's music, he wrote the books and lyrics for a series of musicals in the teens and twenties unlike anything that had come before. They were about ordinary people, not counts and princes. Lyrics used common speech and clichés, but with attention to poetic values. They were far from the high-falutin quality of operetta and parlor songs.

We had a new approach to music, a fresh lyric style, and a third major contribution to the form was a new way of performing. Even in popular music, bel canto had been the norm. One reason was that public performances had to reach the back rows without amplifiers. The familiar style of Al Jolson is a typical instance. The introduction of the microphone in recordings and radio provided the opportunity for more intimate delivery. Louis Armstrong, the genius who converted jazz from dance music into an art form, also introduced a new way of singing, one picked up by Bing Crosby and followed by recording artists ever since.

The musical and lyrical forms were available in the twenties, and the cultural upheavals presented by the so-called Jazz Age created an opportunity for novelty. After World War One, women started wearing their hair and skirts short, and most single women expected to have jobs (although working mothers were still rare). Among upper middle class young people there was an openness about sexuality, including homosexuality. Alcohol was illegal and available-- like coke and grass now-- which added an allure to smoking and drinking. Jazz rhythms were the standard dance music. Songs like The Old Folks at Home and That Irish Mother of Mine suddenly became hopelessly old-fashioned. Most of the great songwriters were born within a few years of one another in the late 1890s. It may have been something in the drinking water, but it was probably that they reached their twenties when our century did. They were influenced by new musical forms-- Stravinsky and Ravel as well as jazz. They shared the post-war optimism that the new generation could bury the nineteenth century. And Jazz Age audiences were ready for something new. Another necessary condition was present-- a commercial opportunity to earn a living writing new music.

At the turn of the century, printed sheet music was the source of songwriters' income. What began as a sideline of local printing companies became a small industry concentrated on West 28th Street in New York. In the days before radio, television, and movies, popular entertainment was vaudeville, revues with comedy and music presented by traveling performers in theaters in every city and town in the country. After World War One, traveling dance bands playing in local ballrooms supplied another venue for music. When in New York, these performers would visit the song publishers to get new material. Each publisher's offices included small rooms with upright pianos, where hired demonstrators would try to place the songs with the artists. Performances around the country, of course, would help sell the sheet music. The noise from all the piano playing got the street its nickname-- Tin Pan Alley. Except for the few who rose above the pack, like Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin, songwriting was a chancy business. First the publisher had to be sold, then the demonstrators would have to place the song with the vaudeville singers and band leaders, and then members of the public would have to like it enough from one or two hearings to buy a copy to play at home. The trick was to write songs that were just like all the other songs, but would satisfy the performer's wish for something "new". Then, in the 1920s, an upscale competitor to Tin Pan Alley appeared farther uptown, centered on Broadway and 42nd Street.

American musical theater before the war had gone beyond minstrel shows and imported operettas. There were variety shows like the elaborate Ziegfeld Follies and there were home-grown operettas by Victor Herbert. But after the war, there was an explosion. There was plenty of money in New York, and incredibly by today's standards, fifty new musicals per year opened on Broadway during the twenties. Ziegfeld shows and their imitators needed large numbers of songs, and producers and theater owners wanted new shows to fill their houses. The Broadway audiences, moreover, were more sophisticated and adventurous than those for the vaudeville circuit. Just as bright young people today are drawn to law and investment banking, the Broadway job market attracted bright well-trained young composers like George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, and serious writers of light verse like Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. Most of the composers and lyricists were New York born, and they were, or soon became, friends of one another. Perhaps implicit competition added to their fundamental integrity as an incentive for innovation and for quality.

The depression of the 1930s hit Broadway hard-- the annual number of new shows dropped from fifty a year into the low teens. Fortunately for the songwriters, the movies now had sound and lots of money. The young people who had made reputations writing for Broadway got offers they couldn't refuse, and most of the important New Yorkers went to Hollywood. Often their songs were only used as incidental snippets in dramatic films, but there were the lavish Warner Brothers musicals with songs by Harry Warren and the Fred Astaire films with scores by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwin brothers, and there were original musicals like The Wizard of Oz, with a score by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. With Broadway and the movies, direct payment and royalties replaced sheet music sales as the dominant source of songwriters' income. By the forties, royalties covered not only public performances, but radio and records as well.

The number of people exposed to the new music on Broadway had been local and small, but radio and the movies brought the songs to national audiences. Until it was overtaken by television, prime time network radio brought the good songs (and a lot of mediocre ones) to every home in the country. Many of the programs were musical, and even the situation comedy programs like Bob Hope and Jack Benny included singers in the company who would have one or two songs each week. The record business had almost disappeared in the depression, but in the late thirties, the big swing bands were as popular as Elvis and the Beatles. Their raw material included original instrumentals and jazz standards, but more than half of the big band records used popular songs. Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman in particular favored the great Broadway composers. Until about 1940, radio music was live. When the new profession of disk jockeys-- who played records-- appeared on radio, popular songs became omnipresent. In the early forties, band singers like Frank Sinatra found they didn't need the big bands-- they could sell records and star on radio with just the songs.

It's significant that this occurred before the media became segmented. Children, teens, adults, and the aged of all races and social classes all saw the same movies, listened to the same radio programs, and heard the same songs. In the early days of network television, it followed radio in featuring performances of popular songs. Ed Sullivan was the host of one of the most popular of the early television programs. Almost single-handedly, he nationalized the market for Broadway shows by featuring scenes from most new shows on his high-rated program.

There was one sign that all was not well with the form. The number of new Broadway shows each year never recovered from the Depression, and the number of good songs introduced also fell. The quality of the material issued by the insatiable record companies dropped, although the customers didn't seem to notice. A fine songwriter who appeared after World War Two is Sheldon Harnick. When he first came to New York, a publisher told him, "Your songs are too good. Listen to the crap that's on the radio-- that's what we want."

The American Popular Song in twenty years or so had risen from its Broadway origins to become the dominant music from coast to coast. Then the bottom abruptly fell out. By 1950, records accounted for much of music sales and radio performances. The typical record featured a pair of songs, and if, say, Frank Sinatra had a hit song on Columbia, Perry Como would record the same song for Victor and Bing Crosby would cut it for Decca, and the songwriters got royalties from everybody. Then an oboe player named Mitch Miller produced a record with Frankie Laine, a Chicago jazz singer. The song was Mule Train, and the arrangement was dominated by driving rhythm punctuated by simulated whip cracks. It was a phenomenal success. Other record companies misunderstood, and as usual they all issued their own versions-- but it was the Frankie Laine record people bought. Miller followed Mule Train with a Rosemary Clooney record, Come-on-a My House. The song was a silly novelty item, but Miller had Clooney accompanied by a piano with thumbtacks in the hammers to provide a loud tinny sound and as with Mule Train, the rhythm dominated the disc and produced another hit. Then Milt Gabler, best known as a producer of jazz records, recorded Bill Haley and the Comets. Rock Around the Clock confirmed the displacement of words and music by the beat. The success of these records as records introduced the present era in popular music. The record itself-- as produced-- was the hit and the money maker, not the song. People would buy Elvis's record of Heartbreak Hotel and The Rolling Stones record of Sympathy for the Devil. These weren't songs written for a show or for sheet music that happened to be recorded. They were purely records.

At the same time the market lost its universality. Movie musicals were about to disappear along with network radio. By 1960, there would be little music on television. Sheet music sales went the way of the parlor piano, and Broadway shows were soon to be more tourist attractions than venues for good scores. Young people bought most of the records, and they were attracted to the strong rhythmic content of the innovations, especially welcome given the bland mediocrity of a lot of what was then passing for popular music. Radio became local and segmented and favored independent development of several pop markets, each with its own station and audience-- country, soul, bubble-gum rock, heavy metal, new age, and grunge. Artists would appear and disappear in a year or two as the record companies looked for the next band to go platinum. During the first twenty-five years of radio people of all ages had hundreds of songs in common. That's no longer true. When Bart and Lisa Simpson were asked to perform at a family gathering, the common musical currency was the Armour Hot Dog commercial.

For the last thirty years, the big players in popular music have been the record producers who engineer the product and the record company promotion departments who make the stars. And usually the stars sing their own material. Several who entered the field through rock or neo-folk music have written well for their genres-- Stevie Wonder, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan, Paul and Carly Simon, the Beatles-- but these owe little if any debt to the classic popular song. As Tom Lehrer has observed about folk music-- "It doesn't matter how many syllables you put into a line/ and it don't got to rhyne."

There are still gifted composers and lyricists writing good American Popular Songs, but for the relatively narrow markets of a much smaller Broadway and for cabaret. Stephen Sondheim is as fine a composer and as fine a lyricist as any of those of the 'twenties and 'thirties, but his chances of making the top forty are nil. In 1959, he was writing lyrics for the show Gypsy with composer Jule Styne. Styne was an old timer who had written dozens of hit songs. When Sondheim wrote a line, "Funny, I'm a woman with children," Styne complained-- "A man can't sing it." He was still thinking of the dead days when hit songs were recorded by several singers of both sexes. For the last thirty-five years, Sondheim has been writing words only for his own music, and most of the songs in his shows are not especially portable outside their specific contexts in the scores. Away from the theater, there are even fewer contemporary practitioners. There is almost no market for stand-alone songs and no way to earn a living writing them.

Most of the popular songs from the 'twenties to the 'fifties were mediocre and many were awful. Sales data from the period suggest that what made the Hit Parade or sold gold records was determined by a coin toss. But there were a couple of dozen superior composers like George Gershwin and superior lyric writers like Dorothy Fields who wrote hundreds of superior songs. It's said that people's lifetime taste in music will be what they liked when they were growing up. Perhaps when my generation is dead, this music will be forgotten. There are signs, though, that it's entering classical status, along with Mozart and mainstream jazz-- music that will continue to be performed and appreciated, if only by relatively small audiences. One good sign has been the appearance of several series of compact discs surveying the field-- the Smithsonian Institution has several fine collections, and the Metropolitan Opera Guild has covered the entire history of the Broadway musical. Classical divisions of the major labels have reissued most of the important original cast albums on CD. And it may be my age, but I still think songs by the likes of Kern and Sondheim are-- to borrow from Sheldon Harnick's song publisher-- better than the crap they play on MTV.

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