Harold Arlen and His Songs
by Walter Frisch

Harold Arlen and His Songs is the first comprehensive book about the music of one of the great song composers of the twentieth century. Arlen wrote many standards of the American Songbook, including "Get Happy," "Over the Rainbow, "Stormy Weather," "Come Rain or Come Shine," and "The Man That Got Away" - that today rank among the best known and loved. Author Walter Frisch places these and other songs in the context of a long career that took Arlen from Buffalo, New York; to Harlem's Cotton Club; to Broadway stages; and to the film studios of Hollywood. Even with their complex melodies, harmonies, and formal structures, Arlen's tunes remain accessible and memorable. As Frisch shows, he blended influences from his father's Jewish cantorial tradition, his experience as a jazz arranger and performer, and peers like Gershwin, Kern, and Berlin. Arlen always emphasized the collaborative nature of songwriting, and he worked with the top lyricists of his day, including Ted Koehler, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin.

Harold Arlen and His Songs is structured around these and Arlen's other partnerships, analyzing individual songs as well as the shows or films in which they appear. The book also treats Arlen's performances of his own music as a vocalist and pianist through numerous recordings and appearances on radio and television. A final chapter explores the interpretations of his songs by great singers, including many who worked with him, among them Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

About the Author

Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, Germany, and China. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in American popular song. His books include German Modernism: Music and the Arts (2005), Music in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and Arlen and Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” (2017). He is currently working on a book about the classic French film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Frisch has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

About the Speakers

Eric Comstock is an acknowledged master of the American Songbook. Comstock shares his passion for the music, the songwriters, and the stories in a singular way, and his audiences feel they’ve been entertained and enlightened at the same time. A Resident Artist at Birdland Jazz Club, he and Barbara Fasano will release their CD Painting the Town featuring tenor saxophone legend Houston Person in early 2025. He sings a duet with Fasano on her award-winning Harold Arlen CD Written in the Stars. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center's American Songbook, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has received numerous awards and has been a performer or commentator on PBS, CNN, CBS’s Early Show, Sirius/XM, BBC, Radio France, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, JazzSet, and Broadway to Main Street.

Kevin Fellezs is Associate Professor of Music/Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He is interested in the relationship between the social and the aesthetic as articulated in music and sound. He has written on a wide range of music from fusion (jazz-rock-funk) to Hawaiian music, heavy metal, and enka. His current project is focused on the sounds of anthropogenic activity in the ocean and its impact on the more-than-human. His first book, titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funkand the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press, 2011), is a study of fusion music of the 1970s framed by insights drawn from cultural studies, popular music studies, jazz studies, and ethnic studies. His second book, Listen But Don’t Ask Question: HawaiianSlack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific (Duke University Press, 2019), is a transPacific ethnographic study into the ways in which Kanaka Maoli and non-Hawaiian guitarists articulate Hawaiian values and notions of belonging.

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982, serving six years as department chair (1999-2005) and was President of the American Musicological Society. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart's music, and Brahms's slow movements. Her most recent publications, after the monograph-length article on “variations” in New Grove 2, concern biography (Haydn and his multiple audiences), chronology (Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets), history (marriage in Don Giovanni), Enlightenment aesthetics (Haydn’s Creation), and the opus concept (“Six of One”), and she is completing studies of Haydn’s Metastasio opera L’isola disabitata and of music and melancholy. Her most recent work concerns Haydn's "poetics of solar time."

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