Reader Responses to Storytelling through Song

The single course that has stuck with me up to this, my 90th year, was Arlan Coolidge’s 20th Century Music because in that course we learned about composers who broke with the 18th and 19th century established harmonic practice, and it was their music I came to love as I never loved their predecessors except J.S. Bach. 

I began to play trumpet in 1952 and listened to jazz musicians and to Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky and the like. I write this after making contact with Lyle Bourne ’53 who began 1st grade with me in Rumford, R.I. and we then went all the way together graduating in 1953. He was a musician who began early and I wanted to learn music and play trumpet. Lyle played drums and vibraphone and he told me he was going to take an Introduction to Harmony course. I took the course with Lyle. 

I have played trumpet in an orchestra in Sweden during most of my years in Linköping and have always had Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song close by, a book in which he does what “Storytelling through Song” seems to do—carefully examine the melodies of about 200 standards and explain how the composers do special things with the expected harmonic changes to support the stories told by the lyrics. Seems to me that the storytelling course is what I would have liked to have taken during retirement. It would be great if the teachers of that course could give us a couple of examples online.

In response to “Storytelling Through Song,” (Courses of Study, Apr.-May ’22), my son is a composer, conductor, and teacher in vocal jazz. He has written a text for students to explain the classic rules. His mentor, Alice Parker, notes words matter before you write or sing them. Fascinating how tunes from the past are reused.