The Dramatic Potential of Auxiliary Cadences in Cole Porter Songs with Minor-to-Major Choruses Morgan Markel • Eastman School of Music • [email protected] Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of Music Theory Southeast March 13, 2020
Table 1: Seven sectional verse-chorus and simple chorus songs by Cole Porter containing choruses that begin in minor and conclude in the relative major ! Song ! Form Year Premiered! Musical !
“Get Out Of Town”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AA’) 1938! Leave It To Me!!
“Come On In”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1939! Du Barry Was A Lady!
“The Leader Of A Big-Time Band” Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1943! Something For The Boys!
“Is It The Girl (Or Is It The Gown)?”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AA’) 1944! Seven Lively Arts!
“So In Love”! Simple Chorus (AABA) 1948! Kiss Me, Kate!
“From This Moment On”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1950! Out Of This World!
“It’s All Right With Me”! Simple Chorus (AABA) 1953! Can-Can! !
Figure 1: Foreground and middleground graphs of Cole Porter’s “So In Love” from Kiss Me, Kate (1948)
5 (in F# min) 5 5 4 3 2 3 2 1 (in A maj)
CHORUS 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65
A1 5 (in F# min) A2 5 B 5 4 3 2 A3 3 2 1 (in A maj)
Strange, dear, but true, dear, When I’m close to The stars fill So in love with So in love with I’m yours ’til I die, So in love, So in love, So in love with you, you, dear, the sky, you am I. you am I. my love, am I. Figure 2: Foreground and middleground graphs of Cole Porter’s “Get Out Of Town” from Leave It To Me! (1938)
5 (in G min) 5 4 3 2 5 (in G min) 3 2 1 (in Bb maj)
VERSE 5 10 15 CHORUS 20 25 30 35 40 45
5 (in G min) A 5 4 3 2 A’ 5 (in G min) 3 2 1 (in Bb maj)
Get out of town, Before Get out of town, Be good Why wish Why not retire And be contented The birds off The thrill when we meet That, darling, it’s getting So on your mark, get set, it’s too late, my love. to me, please. me harm? to a farm to charm the trees? Is so bittersweet me down, Get out of town.
Selected Bibliography
Berry, David Carson. 1999. “Dynamic Introductions: The Affective Role of Melodic Ascent and Other Linear Devices in Selected Song Verses of Irving Berlin.” Intégral 13: 1–62.
Buchler, Michael. 2016. “Licentious Harmony and Counterpoint in Porter’s ‘Love for Sale.’” In A Cole Porter Companion, edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss, 207–21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
––––––. 2018. “Musical Structure, Dramatic Form, and Song Pairings in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1: 37–54.
Burstein, L. Poundie. 2005. “Unraveling Schenker’s Concept of the Auxiliary Cadence.” Music Theory Spectrum 27, no. 2: 159–86.
Forte, Allen. 1993. “Secrets of Melody: Line and Design in the Songs of Cole Porter.” The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 4: 607–47.
––––––. 1995. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–50. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gauldin, Robert. 2005. “Tonal Non-Closure in American Popular Ballads: The Minor to Relative-Major Paradigm.” Paper presented at the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis, Dublin, Ireland.
Johns, Donald. 1993. “Funnel Tonality in American Popular Music, ca. 1900–70.” American Music 11, no. 4: 458–72.
Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis, edited by Joseph N. Straus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schenker, Heinrich. [1935] 1979. Free Composition [Der freie Satz]. Trans. and ed. by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman.
Shaftel, Matthew. 1999. “From Inspiration to Archive: Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day.’” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 2: 315–47.
––––––. 2016. “A Consideration of Drama, Lyrics, and Musical Structure in a Porter Film: Broadway Melody of 1940.” In A Cole Porter Companion, edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss, 261–85. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.