How Cole Porter transformed popular music
Which 20th century composers will still be delighting audiences in 300 years' time, as Handel, Mozart and Beethoven do today? Though the earlier composers, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, were pushing the boundaries of classical music, their compositions were still recognisably related to the work of their predecessors. And, more importantly, music lovers wanted to listen to their work. But as composer Howard Goodall points out, classical music soon 'began a perilous journey into an arid form of modernism that the mainstream audience couldn't, or didn't want to, follow'.
By the 1920s, popular music entered the process, and songs that were catchy and entertaining, though often banal in their simplicity, began to rival classical compositions in their complexity and sophistication. This transformation, says Howard Goodall, was kick-started by Cole Porter, a musician who was part of a generation of gifted composers that created and developed the musical – one of the seminal American art forms of the 20th century.
A new era
Drawing on jazz, the music of the time, the rhythms of Porter’s music fused European with African-American traditions. It's no coincidence, then, that the finest interpretations of Porter's songs were by the some of the greatest African-American jazz, blues and swing artists. Even now, singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday are known for their definitive versions of Porter’s songs.
The composer’s construction of harmonies also drew on more than one tradition, shifting from major to minor and back again. But Porter also drew on classical forms of music, using a technique called sequencing, basing his music on the same scales that are the foundation of classical music.
Songs for all
Porter had a thorough grounding in classical music, plus an ear for the sounds of the time. This, combined with his own unique brilliance, says Goodall, meant that for the first time since the Middle Ages, the composer had 're-established the link between the kind of music ordinary folk liked and that enjoyed by the sophisticated, educated classes’. Porter, says Goodall, ‘made them one and the same'.
