Irving Berlin - Music Styles

Music Styles

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." 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.

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." 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."

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.

Among Berlin's contemporaries was Cole Porter, whose music style was often considered more "witty, sophisticated, 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 got Porter the show that launched his career."

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."

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."