RECORDINGS IN REVIEW ALEC WILDER & FRAN LANDESMAN

1 8 8 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G In planning concert seasons, a handy trope to follow is the anniversary . As with museums and the lecture circuit, nothing fits on a poster like a nice proud one followed by two zeroes. A centennial gives free rein to pay homage to, reconsider the status of, or formally enshrine a composer. Even semi-centennials (50) or dodranscentennials (75) bring out the admirers. This year and next we’ll mark Margaret Bonds’s and Benjamin Britten’s 100th birthdays, Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th, and C. P. E. Bach’s 300th. But what about composers of American popular songs? They might get a tribute in a cabaret here and there after their deaths, but the long wait until an easily divisible year may see them fade from memory. So let us raise a toast to the upcoming birthdays of two of the finest and quirkiest of the twentieth-century’s songwriters who mark lopsided numbers this year. Alec Wilder would have turned 106 in February and Fran Landesman would have become a sprightly 86 in October of this year. Anyone familiar with their work will raise the objection that they need no introduction, each having solid, nearly cultlike followings. But the wider listening public, for whom a few songs by these two great writers may be familiar, will probably know nothing about their biographies – and each of these song- 1 8 9 R smiths led a life filled with grand gestures as clever as any of the songs they wrote. Alec Wilder has been well served in musical scholarship. Since his death in 1980, two biographies have been published that explore his immense talent, and an annotated reissue of Letters I Never Mailed, his 1975 epistolary autobiography, was released in 2006. His life is well chronicled from his upbringing as the scion of a well-to-do Rochester, New York, family, through his early emancipation from them, and his nontraditional musical training at the Eastman School of Music to his extremely productive decades-long career. He began composing classical pieces early on but soon ventured into popular song form, a genre that he would explore with regularity for the rest of his life. Along the way, he composed fourteen musicals and operas, scored motion pictures, and composed octets, quintets, duets, many solos, and other chamber pieces. This stunning variety of output, though impressive by anyone’s account, causes him often to be deemed uncatagorizeable by music historians . Add in his songs for jazz singers and pop vocalists, and his art songs for sopranos such as Eileen Farrell, and you have a truly polymorphous genius. If you put on virtual blinders and a good pair of earphones, you’ll recognize Wilder as a very disciplined student of the American popular songbook. (Indeed, he was a scholar and a canonizer, with his American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, published by Oxford University Press in 1972 – a volume that is required reading to understand the heavyweights of the twentieth century.) He wrote a few hundred songs at best estimate and made a strong impression on singers, including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Mabel Mercer, who all collaborated with him closely. Wilder had his first rush of success with songwriting in the early 1940s, when Mildred Bailey released her recordings of ‘‘Give Me Time,’’ ‘‘It’s So Peaceful in the Country,’’ and ‘‘I’ll Be Around.’’ As was standard practice of the day, songs were usually recorded by an array of singers, competing with one another for supremacy on radios and jukeboxes. The version of ‘‘I’ll Be Around’’ by the Mills Brothers, which lacked the depth of sadness in Bailey’s original , became a bona-fide hit, putting Wilder in solid business as a songwriter. Subsequent compositions, including ‘‘While We’re Young’’ and ‘‘Trouble Is a Man,’’ proved good sellers, but none ever 1 9 0 Y O U N G Y reached the heights of ‘‘I’ll Be Around’’ – perhaps because the general tenor of many of Wilder...