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The special musical presentation in the historic lobby of the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner building was presented in partnership with Artistic Soirées and ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Celebrating the European musicians who fled fascism and immigrated to Hollywood during its heyday alongside Reena Esmail, a contemporary, L.A.-raised Indian American composer, the evening was all about connections. Fittingly, the presentation itself only came together after Zócalo met Artistic Soirée director Juan J. Colomer at a reception for a previous Zócalo event. Used to hosting classical concerts in his downtown loft, Colomer helped organize the performance, which featured four L.A. Opera musicians, cellist Evgeny Tonkha, violist Erik Rynearson, and violinists Roberto Cani and Ana Landauer.

Playing to a packed house and overflow room equipped with state-of-the-art sound and video technology, the string quartet’s performance—which employed moving cameras to stream the concert online, and saw two musicians using tablets in lieu of sheet music—showed how early 20th-century musicians continue to merge with the present-day artists in L.A.

As chronicled by author Alexis Landau in an essay for Zócalo, the immigrant European composers who came to L.A. during the 1930s and ’40s, had varying experiences when they arrived. In 1933, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg immigrated to Los Angeles where he would spend the rest of his life writing music and teaching composition at USC and UCLA. In 1940 came Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor Igor Stravinsky, who settled in Hollywood after making the move from France. Erich Wolfgang Korngold arrived in 1935 and had a prodigious career in Hollywood scoring before his death in North Hollywood. Then, in 1942, Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff arrived in Beverly Hills after many years in San Francisco and New York City. These immigrant artists—and others who followed them—fused L.A.’s free-spirited culture with the traditions they brought with them from their homelands, and left their mark on Hollywood, one that resonates today.

Throughout the night, the musicians shared various anecdotes about the composers whose music they brought to life.

Just before the movement of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 began, for instance, Rynearson stood up and told the audience how Schoenberg, “notoriously serious and difficult to get along with,” demanded $50,000 and complete control over both music and dialogue when a movie studio executive phoned him up to score a film. The studio passed.

In between compositions, Tonkha also laid out Stravinsky’s influence over Los Angeles, citing the example of a rich American businessman keen on developing chamber culture in L.A. hiring musicians to perform Stravinsky’s compositions and obligating them to live in a large villa together to practice six days a week for at least two hours a day; a predecessor of sorts to the new “influencer homes” in the Hills.

The music, at times frenetic, felt filmic, like a Hitchcockian pursuit, melding classical sound with a modern Los Angeles aesthetic.

At the post-performance reception, one audience member, who had spent over 30 years in the film business and made a hobby of the violin and drums, commented on the symbiosis of Hollywood and classical music: “For me it’s always the music first, then the motion.”

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Generations ago, in the parenthesis of years between Hitler’s 1933 rise to power and the end of World War II, a deluge of European artists and intellectuals came to the U.S., seeking refuge from the rising tide of fascism. Throughout the 1920s these men and women had enjoyed artistic freedom and prestige in cities such as Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Paris, where they helped define 20th century modernism.

They were writers, directors, actors, visual artists, architects, and musicians, and once they hit American shores, they flocked to three great cities. The writers and visual artists tended to gravitate to New York. The architects generally went to Chicago. And the musicians mainly settled in Los Angeles. Sunny California seems a quixotic, counterintuitive choice for artists who built their careers in epicenters of intellectualism and high culture. But most of them learned to live in this new sort of city, some even thriving here.

Like most wartime refugees, the émigré musicians who escaped Europe went where they knew people and where they could find work. And what better place to find work, especially as a musician, than Hollywood in its heyday of musical comedy—with its splashy sets, bloated budgets, and bottomless need for trained musicians who could work fast? And unlike writers or actors who faced the difficulty of speaking or writing in a foreign tongue, musicians had no language barrier.

These L.A. immigrants were an aggrieved, talented, witty and competitive bunch. The musicians included Erich Korngold, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hans Eisler. They were joined by luminaries such as novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann (the “emperor of exiles”) and his less successful novelist brother Henrich Mann, Austrian screenwriter and stage actress Salka Viertel, playwright Bertolt Brecht, writer Vicki Baum, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and film directors Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. These exiled artists congregated and lived mainly on the westside of Los Angeles: Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills.

Émigrés from all over Europe flocked to gatherings in homes like the Feuchtwangers’ Villa Aurora in the hills of the Pacific Palisades and Salka Viertel’s Santa Monica Canyon Sunday salons. There, over Sachertorte, rounds of ping-pong, and the occasional performance of an in-progress sonata or violin concerto, they compared whose English sounded the best, who had made the most American friends, who had secured a coveted seven-year contract at a movie studio, and who was still struggling to eke out a living.

Meanwhile, a deep current of melancholy ran beneath their sharp banter, a gaping sense of loss hovering all around. The exiles tried to forget their former lives—forgetting was a form of survival—and fit into their new strange identities. But many felt at odds with Los Angeles’s natural beauty and ceaseless sunshine, with its brash Hollywood glamour, and its lack of obvious culture. Even though they knew they were the lucky ones.

Perhaps the deepest manifestation of the musicians’ discomfort with their surroundings was their perception of the tension between “high” and “low” art— between “selling out” to compose for the pictures and the more vaunted, but less financially viable, alternative of composing symphonies or string quartets.

Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived in Los Angeles by way of Paris in 1934, and soon began teaching at USC and then UCLA. He was known for the intensity of his presence, often described as having burning dark eyes that pierced through his more faint-hearted pupils and fellow musicians. He played tennis on George Gershwin’s court, and socialized with Charlie Chaplin. Despite having invented the groundbreaking 12-tone system of composition—with its jarring dissonances and departures from familiar tonal music—by the time Schoenberg was in Los Angeles he had returned to tradition somewhat. He described feeling an “upsurge of desire for tonality” as Alex Ross explains in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. In Los Angeles, Schoenberg wrote “Suite in G for String Orchestra,” “Variations on a Recitative in D Minor” for organ, and “Kol Nidre” for synagogue choir. The aim of these more tonal works, Ross writes, was to “create more marketable hits” whose profits would allow Schoenberg to pursue more advanced musical projects.

Schoenberg harbored a great desire to write for the movies, but could never abandon more high-minded pursuits. In a now infamous meeting with Irving Thalberg, then head of production for MGM, the composer discussed scoring the 1937 film The Good Earth—only to demand complete control over all sound, including the dialogue. This, Schoenberg told a stunned Thalberg, would mean that the actors “would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in,” Ross recounts. Schoenberg also asked for a fee of $50,000. Given such unrealistic demands, nothing ever came of his Hollywood aspirations.

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky fled to Los Angeles after the fall of France in 1940, and like Schoenberg, tried his luck with film composing, with little success. Stravinsky was famous around the world, and the industry was eager to slap his name on their films. But his music appeared in only one Hollywood movie—Disney’s animated Fantasia, which Stravinsky apparently hated. Stravinsky demanded too much time and too much control to really succeed as a movie composer, but he dipped into the commercial realm every now and then, composing “Tango” for Benny Goodman’s band and “Circus Polka” for the Ringling Brothers Circus. The latter was performed by 50 elephants (Stravinsky specified they must be “young elephants”) along with 50 ballerinas, all in pink tutus, and choreographed by George Balanchine.

Unlike Schoenberg and Stravinsky who yearned for silver screen glory but never quite got it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a musical prodigy from Vienna, became wildly successful in shaping the “sonic texture” of Golden Age Hollywood, as Ross calls it. Korngold’s lush, late Romantic opulence was well suited for studio fare. Among Los Angeles émigrés it was a putdown to say that something sounded like “film music,” and Korngold’s critical reputation diminished as a result of his commercial success. Today his work is getting some much-deserved reconsideration and recognition. La Scala put on his first opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) in 2019. That same year, the Bard Music Festival performed his second major opera, Das Wunder der Heliane.

Displaced artists and musicians such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Korngold clung to the Old World while struggling to adapt to a new one. Some despised Los Angeles and found it inhospitable to making art. But others loved Los Angeles and thrived here. Those who flourished artistically learned to carry home within themselves, despite the unimaginable loss of family and loved ones, of careers and identities, of all they had known to be true and beautiful. These refugees witnessed the world fall away from them, the ground shifting beneath their feet faster than they could run over it, all the while figuring out new ways to carry on, to adapt, to keep existing.

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But March 2020 was also a month of reflection. I was finishing up work on a book—and I was thinking about the people I was writing about, and the many echoes between their experiences and what we were collectively living through.

For the past 10 years, I have investigated how French classically trained musicians used their art to cope with the traumas of World War I, a conflict that killed a generation of French men, and millions of women and children. I’ve read thousands of letters and hundreds of diaries, memoirs, and autobiographical novels; I’ve looked at dozens of psychology and physiology texts, compositions, and music method books. This window into people living in wartime and interwar France made me realize that they understood music-making as an embodied therapeutic practice with tremendous potential to console. Their stories have a crucial role to play today, too, as the world reckons with the pain and traumas inflicted by the pandemic.

Like many of us coping with COVID today, people in World War I-era France experienced trauma with a lot of not-knowing and uncertainty. News coverage of the war in French newspapers was extensive, but most in France weren’t getting the whole story. People on the front lines knew what was really happening, but weren’t always permitted to talk about it; for instance, civilians whose loved ones had been killed often waited months to have deaths confirmed.

Combined with the disruption of everyday social interactions, the zone of silence surrounding wartime experiences led to intense isolation. And to make things worse, French culture looked down upon talking about trauma. “Too much” public mourning was deemed disgraceful. The salon hostess and amateur musician Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux wrote in her diary that the composer Maurice Ravel and his brother “were distraught” and “couldn’t remain upright” at the funeral of their mother: “Both were in utter turmoil, incapable of reaction or self-control. A lamentable and distressing spectacle at this time when heroism displays itself as naturally as breathing,” she sniped—and she was their friend.

French doctors, scientists, and members of the military viewed traumatic responses as moral weaknesses. Newspapers recounted contemporary debates about the harsh electrotherapy “treatments” inflicted on soldiers who reported trauma and injury but whose wounds had no visible signs. In this context, there was little room for expressing feelings. As a result, music became a vital way for people to cope with trauma.

How French musicians coped with the traumas they experienced took many forms. Public performance venues in France closed promptly at the conflict’s outset in August 1914, and as a result musicians’ “normal” ways of connecting with one another, through live performance, were brought to a screeching halt. So they found alternative venues for music performance, often in their homes or in other informal settings. When they couldn’t find instruments, they made them out of whatever materials they could find. Musicians didn’t always expressly recognize that they were using music as a coping tool, but they likely had some sense of what music could do for them. While music therapy wasn’t yet an institutionalized discipline during World War I, French psychologists understood mind and body to be intimately connected. Given these musicians’ familiarity with psychological theories of their time, many realized that the embodied nature of making music—that it requires people to move their bodies in the act of creation—gave it the power to soothe.

At the turn of the 20th century, French art music, inspired by post-Romantic composers like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, was largely lush and dissonant with little rhythmic regularity. But during the war French musicians began to compose and perform extremely rhythmically regular “neoclassical” music that, in its predictability and repetitive patterns, soothed their bodies and distracted their minds. For example, after their husbands died in the first months of the war, the pianist Marguerite Long and the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, previously known for performing the lush music of Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, turned to repetitive music filled with ostinati—continuously repeating musical phrases—and regular rhythms that allowed them to move their bodies in a soothing groove. Much of this music was either from the 18th century or written by their friends Maurice Ravel, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, all of whom had either participated in or lost loved ones in the war.  According to the French journalist Raymond Escholier, Long reported that when she sat down to play the Andante movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major, written for and dedicated to her by Ravel, she was “so moved by it” that she had tears in her eyes, particularly in the part of the movement that features a great deal of rhythmic regularity provided by constant 32nd notes.

Musicians’ private writings also suggest that music-making fostered personal relationships that helped them cope with trauma. In a letter to Nadia and Lili Boulanger, the musician-soldier Jacques de la Presle wrote in 1916 that “in a small place of rest we make music—voilà, one of our joys. You can see that for the souls submitted to such a hardship, music is the great and principal consoler.” Many other musicians, especially those serving on the front lines, concurred, including Ernest Mangeret who confided that “a few moments of leisure permitted me to become myself again” when he found a piano in a half-demolished house. “[W]e went down into the basement (you can understand why!),” he wrote, “and when the evening came, we came together, several friends, in order to make a little bit of music.”

Music-making also offered a way to remember what life had been like before the war. The cellist Maurice Maréchal, who enlisted in 1914, wrote in his letters and diary that performing with friends on the front lines and listening to phonograph recordings reminded him of his pre-war life at the Paris Conservatoire—allowing him to step out of his traumatic military life for just a moment. For others still, performing, composing, and organizing concerts brought visceral reminders of friends and family who had died. The composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, for instance, reworked pieces written by her younger sister Lili, who died of intestinal tuberculosis in 1918, and performed them in concerts for the rest of her life.

Musicians’ experiences in 1910s and 1920s France remind us that today, as we struggle with the trauma of COVID-19, we must take into account the inextricability of mind and body. Psychologists like Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Resmaa Menakem, and Peter Levine have recently underlined how trauma becomes, to use van der Kolk’s phrase, “lodged in the body,” and recommended body- and movement-oriented practices—such as yoga, theater, and yes, music-making—to help counter trauma’s negative effects.

Music holds incredible potential for helping people cope—and indeed, we’ve already seen it take on this role during COVID. As musicologist Emily Abrams Ansari has noted, using music as a tool for remembering past times, people, and places became commonplace during the first months of the pandemic. Similar to how French music lovers of the 1910s and 1920s embraced familiar music, many people in lockdown also turned to nostalgic music that reminded them of earlier times, evidenced by a substantial increase in Spotify playlists based on music from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

While we should embrace the benefits that music brings, we must also heed the darker lessons of the World War I-era during this pandemic and going forward. The toxic masculinity that surrounded the expression of grief and trauma back then still resounds today. In the 21st century, we must be thoughtful and ethical in how we engage with one another, as well as with music and sound. We shouldn’t expect people to “get over” trauma quickly. Rather, we need to push for cultural, societal, and policy change that prioritizes mental and emotional health. People in positions of power—government officials, police officers, teachers, school administrators—need training to deal with trauma effectively. Mental health care—including music and sound therapy—needs to be made more accessible to anyone who might benefit from it. Musicians and the music industry must reckon, too, with the ways music has been used as a weapon of control, punishment, exploitation and coercion.

If we can be mindful of how we engage with music, sound, and trauma, though, we can produce new ways of thinking about our ethical engagements with one another.

At its best, music can restore and rejuvenate the body and mind. And there’s some comfort in knowing that people who respond emotionally to music will always find a way to make music, no matter how difficult it may be. Just as World War I-era musicians made music wherever they could, often in houses and churches that had been destroyed by bombs, in the spring of 2020, I was heartened to see musicians of all stripes cultivating Zoom performances to provide themselves and others with comfort, whether through performing classical pieces like Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” or hymns in the Sacred Heart singing tradition. Even the simple act of singing can do wonders. Alone in my bungalow with my two cats, I’d sing to them their favorite songs—“You Are My Sunshine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and find myself suddenly feeling more alive and less alone.

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This achievement is often seen as an example of super-heroic determination, a triumph of the human spirit that tests the boundaries of our species’ ingenuity. But Beethoven the man was not the Beethoven of our imaginations. His story, for all its wonder, is no myth; it offers unfussy but lasting lessons about music, hearing, and disability.

To begin with, accounts of Beethoven’s triumph are often overdone. He did not completely lose his hearing until the last decade of his life, if even then. For most of his adulthood he experienced progressive hearing loss, as many of us do as we age. When he wrote the Fifth Symphony, his most recognizable work, he could hear well enough to correct mistakes in the performance.

And Beethoven wasn’t a “supercrip,” the term for a person who responds to a disability in ways that inspire others but also set unreasonable expectations. He never claimed to be overcoming his hearing loss. Indeed, he accepted it and adapted to it, and this left recognizable marks on his music.

Beethoven’s manuscript of the piano sonata in E Major, Op. 109, shows him creating music on paper, getting carried away with rhythmic, repetitive writing patterns that mirror the emphatic rhythms of much of his music. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Where can those marks be found? The most obvious answers to that question are probably wrong, or at least misleading. Beethoven wrote a lot of loud music, but for someone with hearing loss, loud music is not necessarily better. Indeed, loud music can be painful to failing ears. Listening to a quiet piano sonata in an environment without distractions would likely be more pleasant than hearing a dramatic symphony.

Instead, look for his use of repeating phrases. Repetition is particularly important to someone who is unable to absorb everything on first hearing. Beethoven’s music abounds in repetition, especially repetition of short, highly recognizable units. Musicians call them motives. Beethoven established motives as the building blocks of his longer pieces, a process imitated by many later composers.

This is why the four-note motive at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony is repeated throughout the work. When he wrote this music, Beethoven needed to augment his perception of aural cues, much as a person with progressive hearing loss might augment their understanding of speech by beginning to read lips even if they’re not conscious they’re doing so.

Another sign can be found in his pianos, which changed over Beethoven’s lifetime. The early Viennese pianos he played as a young man had a clear, bell-like sound that was evidently easy for him to hear even as his hearing faded. As he grew older, he became more, not less, attached to his pianos, but what he needed from them was different.

The English Broadwood piano he owned during the last decade of his life was both louder and muddier sounding than the ones with which he grew up—again, the exact opposite of what someone with hearing loss would seem to require.

But Beethoven fell in love with the Broadwood for another reason entirely. It was vibrationally alive. The soundboard, which amplifies the vibrations produced by the strings, was connected directly to the body of the instrument, conveying those vibrations back to the keys and even to the floor beneath the instrument. Thus, though he was increasingly deaf, Beethoven began to feel sound in an entirely new way.

Late in his life, Beethoven commissioned the creation of a specially designed resonator that would be placed over his piano to magnify both sound and vibration. Recently researchers recreated the resonator; the results can be heard on a new recording of his last three sonatas made by fortepianist Tom Beghin. The preparations for Beghin’s recording made it clear just how important touch had become in Beethoven’s experience of music in his last years. The piano music he wrote at this time incorporated powerful repeated chords, new ways of resolving harmonies, and carefully synchronized passages in which the two hands combine to set the frame of the instrument vibrating from top to bottom.

Beethoven also used his eyes to create music. It has been said that both Mozart and Beethoven would compose an entire piece of music in their heads before writing it down. Scholars have known for decades that neither composer ever claimed to have done anything of the sort, but the story persists—perhaps because it provides an idea that is easy to grasp. If this story were true, it would demystify how Beethoven composed in his late years after his ears had failed him.

But Beethoven’s creative process was actually less daunting than the myth would have us believe. When you look at virtually any Beethoven manuscript or sketch, you can see that he was creating music on paper, frequently crossing out and replacing things that didn’t look right, or getting carried away with rhythmic, repetitive writing patterns that mirror the emphatic rhythms of much of his music. He heard what he saw and felt as his pen crossed the paper again and again in arcs and arabesques of musical creativity.

His final string quartets—actual products of his deafness—have a reputation for a kind of profundity that few nonmusicians could describe in words. There is no easy triumph or memorable musical tidbit to be found in them, but they contain a novel sonic universe that seems all the more remarkable when we know that they were written by a man who could not hear. Beethoven created these new textures and sonorities because he was being led by his eyes as much as by his memories of sound. Rather than detracting from his creative process, his deafness added dimensions to these late works that would not have been there otherwise.

Today, Beethoven says less to us about genius and more about how to come to terms with a disability. His experience resonates in an era where forms of human difference have been given unprecedented respect, and words like neurodiversity have entered our vocabulary. Neurodiversity—the idea that all humans occupy a spectrum that includes conditions once considered to be tragic illnesses—has helped bring autism, bipolarity, and depression out of the shadows. In this context it is easier to understand Beethoven’s hearing problems as a normal part of human experience.

Music is a multifaceted medium that inspires people to move, to feel, to watch, to think, and to share experiences with others. If composition were a magical superpower, the music of the great composers would not speak to the rest of us. The story Beethoven tells us is not one of triumphing over adversity, but one of acceptance of what cannot be changed, and of creative adaptation employing the tools at hand. It’s time we welcomed Beethoven on his own terms.

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The songs—sometimes called “standards”—came out of Broadway shows, Hollywood musicals, and small warren-like offices in a few Times Square office buildings, known collectively as Tin Pan Alley. It’s commonly agreed that they represent the pinnacle of American popular music, but it’s a little more difficult to pinpoint their common characteristics. The composer Jule Styne, who came on the scene in the 1940s, once said great popular songs had to be “melodically simple and harmonically attractive.”

These songs meet those requirements, and extend even further. They’re sophisticated (in more than one sense of the word). They’re constructed with superior craftsmanship and, in some cases, remarkable innovation and artistry. The jazz pianist Bill Charlap described a great pop song this way: “It has an innate sense of structure. There are rests, points of emphasis, and overall balance and taste. It’s so pliable, and very American.” The best songs of the era have lyrics that rise to the occasion and are wedded to the melody.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, there was a widespread sense that the once powerful flow of great songs had slowed to a trickle. The great jazz bands that brought the songs to the masses were breaking up, and stepping into the breach were singers—Perry Como, Doris Day, Eddie Fisher, Teresa Brewer, and others—who mostly offered simple ditties and sentimental ballads. Hollywood had pretty much stopped making musicals. Some great tunes were still coming out of Broadway, but there were fewer shows, and they tended to concentrate more on theme and character than on stand-alone songs. And Tin Pan Alley (or so it seemed to older songwriters) was turning out inane novelty numbers and hillbilly hokum.

These trends seemed to reach a head in 1953. The smash hit of the year—number one on the charts for eight consecutive weeks—was a simplistic and infantile jingle whose refrain was, “How much is that doggie in the window?” The song was written by a Tin Pan Alley veteran named Bob Merrill who specialized in novelty songs, many of them vaguely regional or “ethnic.” There was one called “If I Knew You Were Comin’ (I’d’ve Baked a Cake),” another called “Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po),” and another, “Oooh, Bang, Jiggily Jang.” The following year, his geographically puzzling “Mambo Italiano” would become a hit for Rosemary Clooney.

Note that at this point, Elvis Presley had not yet stepped into the Sun Records recording studio in Memphis, and the term “rock and roll” would have drawn a blank look from most Americans. So it wasn’t rock that was doing a number on the Great American Songbook. But what was it? The transition was so obvious, so troubling, and so mystifying to old-line songwriters that in 1953, 34 of them sued the radio networks and the major record companies for $150 million. They alleged a conspiracy to keep their classic songs from being heard.

There was no conspiracy; after wending its way through the courts for 18 years, the suit was dismissed. What was in fact occurring was a sea change in taste, and an opening-up of American pop music. As great as the Great American Songbook was, its preeminence during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s meant that a whole range of other sounds wasn’t getting wide exposure. In particular, records by African- Americans and by white musicians who created what would later be classified as “country music”—then it was called “hillbilly”—barely ever aired on national radio, and thus didn’t sell in substantial numbers. Of course, Great American Songbook composers like George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Cole Porter were greatly influenced by African-American jazz. In the late ’40s, a variety of factors, including the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern and Midwestern cities, and the increased power and prominence of local radio stations and the “deejays” who spun records on them, started to open things up.

It was a time of intriguing hybrids. Consider some of the other number-one records of the era:

• “Good Night Irene,” written by the black singer Lead Belly, and performed by the folk group The Weavers (known for their leftist politics).
• The country song “Slippin’ Around,” a duet by pop singer Margaret Whiting and singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely.
• “Cold, Cold Heart,” composed by Alabama honky-tonker Hank Williams and performed by Tony Bennett, an Italian-American tenor from Queens, New York.
• “Nature Boy,” former jazz pianist Nat “King” Cole’s rendition of a ballad by a New York City-born mystic who called himself eden ahbez.
• “The Tennessee Waltz,” performed by Oklahoman Patti Page and written by a Milwaukee-born polka musician who was born Julius Frank Kuczynski and reinvented himself as country songwriter and bandleader Pee Wee King.

Not to belabor the point, but these tunes were a very different animal than the Great American Songbook, both in their homespun, unsophisticated subject matter and their simple music. “Good Night Irene” has three chords, and “Tennessee Waltz” has four. The tune some people consider to be the greatest in the Songbook, “All the Things You Are” (music by Kern, lyrics by Hammerstein), modulates key four times. In one section (I quote from the website Jazz Standards), “The melody lands on G sharp, the third of the underlying chord of E. Then, by moving one note of the chord—B to C—it becomes a pivotal C [augmented], allowing for an easy return to F minor.”

But that doesn’t mean “Tennessee Waltz” isn’t a great American song. The emotion, immediacy, and, yes, simplicity of this material helped lay the groundwork for rock and roll, which arrived with a bang (literally) in 1956. At first, the older songwriters saw records by Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all the rest as just another variation of the junk that had blanketed the airwaves for nearly a decade. But in time, rock became—and continues to be—the dominant form of American popular music.

Rock turned out to encompass a lot more than just electric guitars, shouted lyrics, and a pounding beat. In particular, it provided a context for a new kind of great American popular song—initiated, ironically, by a quartet from across the Atlantic.

Still, while the Beatles may have led the way, they were accompanied and followed by superb American writers who hailed from New York and Los Angeles, and also everywhere else in between. These included the likes of Carole King, Willie Nelson, Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell.

More often than not (in a departure from the earlier era), these songwriters got up on stage and performed the tunes themselves. The songs came out of folk and blues instead of jazz, and weren’t quite as complex as “All the Things You Are” or some of the other tunes in the Great American Songbook.

But the best of this new wave of American songwriting can hold its own with the earlier era’s best. One test of a standard is its ability to yield varied and satisfying cover versions, and plenty of the newer songs qualify. To take just one example, Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” was originally a hit for Patsy Cline in 1962. Since then, it has been recorded by dozens of artists, including Linda Ronstadt, Dottie West, Leann Rimes, Norah Jones, Dianna Krall, and Neil Young. In short, the last page may have been turned on the Great American Songbooks, but great American songs keep coming.

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