Between 1880 and 1900 a new breed of music publisher entered
the field. T. B. Harms, Willis Woodward, M. Witmark,
Charles K. Harris, Howley, Haviland
and Dresser, Stern and Marks, Jerome H. Remick, Leo Feist, and other young firms chose to concentrate on
popular music of broad
mass appeal. Aggressively competitive, they invented formulas for the
composition of successful songs based on analysis of current hits, tried out
their wares in variety theatres, music halls, saloons, and on city streets,
then attempted by persuasion, influence, favors, or outright bribery to place
them with popular vaudeville performers, minstrel companies, and in musical
comedies , extravaganzas, and burlesque venues. They were tireless promoters,
sending singing stooges to shows and sporting events, dispatching demonstration
pianists to sheet music counters of department and retail stores across the
country, organizing song-slide sing-a-longs and song sessions, planting printed
copies in papers and periodicals. Give the public what it wants, putting it
across so as to lodge it in their consciousness – this was the philosophy and
sales strategy of the Tin Pan Alley man. By 1905 these companies dominated the music
industry in
As vaudeville matured variety houses began installing small
orchestras. Vaudevillians, proud and loath to credit their success to anything
but their own charisma, talent, personality, and hard work, nevertheless soon
found it prudent to approach a pit pianist, violinist, or theatre conductor for
a simple instrumental setting to accompany their act. By the mid 1880s a small
number of free lance musicians in
Tin Pan Alley was not slow to realize how valuable a good
song arrangement could be in “putting it across”. A proper setting could add
solidity, depth, color, and humor, as well as ear-catching and attention-getting
melodic hooks, rhythmic breaks, and other musical effects. Around 1890 some
companies began hiring arrangers specifically to prepare these settings for
small theatre orchestra, offering them free of charge to performers who agreed to
feature the songs on regular theatrical circuits. Their format was basic – an
introduction, vamp (to mark time until the artist was ready to start singing) ,
verse, song chorus, and a more full second chorus that could be utilized for
dancing, patter, funny business, or
additional singing. Star stage attractions often merited custom settings for
the same courtesy. When a song became successful the arrangers were directed to
write a purely instrumental account for distribution to key theatre and music
hall orchestras that might further promote it during intermissions or between
acts and shows. So popular did these instrumental editions become that
surprised publishers began making them available for general sale. Pit bands
could now purchase a ready-made score of a current hit tune to vary their featured
repertoire of overtures, marches, dance pieces, and light intermezzi. Dance
groups found them useful as well, and they made novel additions to the programs
of salon ensembles and amateur combinations. In this manner the publisher’s
printed popular song orchestration, later commonly termed the “stock arrangement” made its bow.
European music houses offered popular or potentially popular
orchestral music in versions for ensembles of different sizes. For instance, a
work might be issued in an eight-part, a twelve-part, and a sixteen-part
arrangement ( referring to the number of instrumental
parts ) . American firms, selling to a smaller, more restricted, and less
varied market, developed a more ingenious and democratic, if less aesthetically
sensitive, tradition
: a “one-size-fits-all” method of arrangement whereby a single orchestration
could be effectively rendered by any number of musicians from a piano-violin
duo to a substantial orchestra. Thus the important melodic lines, accompaniment
figures, bass and harmony notes would be assigned first to instruments most
likely to be encountered in the average ensemble – a violin, a cornet, a cello,
a second violin, a flute or clarinet, a piano. Instruments less likely to be
present – a viola, a trombone, a French horn, an oboe and bassoon, and
additional violins, cellos, cornets, clarinets, etc. – would be given complementary, color, less important , or
optional lines and harmony notes, or would “double” those already existing.
Such an approach to scoring was not new, nor was it unique. The early brass
band journals and wind band publications utilized basically the same approach,
as did the above-mentioned vaudeville orchestrators in
preparing an artist for a tour of engagements in theatres whose instrumental
forces might range from a single piano player to fifteen musicians. It has
become prevalent in the writing of educational band and orchestra music, and is
likely to be found in all printed ensemble pieces designed for amateur
performance. Yet so closely did it become associated with published
instrumental popular song arrangements that it became known as “stock voicing”.
The earliest stocks do not often credit their writers, and many
of them are now obscure figures known only from music and show business
memoirs. A good number were immigrants with formal European training. Almost
all were theatre musicians. Ned Straight, Paul Ritter, Carlo Vitozzi, Siegfried Stenhammer,
Herman Hermanson, and Hilding
Anderson were among the first, as were David Braham ( musical director and
composer of the popular Harrigan and Hart shows ) , John
Stromberg ( musical director of the Weber and Fields extravaganzas ) , William
T. Francis ( ditto for Weber and Fields and later for producer Charles K. Frohman ) , George Rosey (
Rosenberg ) ( pioneer vaudeville orchestrator ) , Gustave Luders ( composer of Viennese
– style operettas ) , his associate William Schaeffer, Max Hoffman ( known
especially for his treatment of coon songs and ragtime ) , and Max Dreyfus (
who in the early 1900s would come to own the T.B. Harms firm ) . Bob Recker, Tommy Hindley, and later
Jules Lensberg, George May, Julius Vogler, and Paul Schindler led vaudeville house orchestras
in
Of similar backgrounds and following soon after were Karl Hoschna, Harry Carroll, Albert Von Tilzer,
Abe Holzman, William Christopher O’Hare, J. Bodewalt Lampe,
Frank Meacham, Harry Alford, and Frank Saddler , all successful
hard-working mainstream musicians. Later
on J. Zamecnik, Carleton Colby, W.C. Polla, Ray Henderson, Olly Ades, George Trinkhaus, and
Arthur Lange contributed, and after 1920
Ferde Grofe, Milton Ager , Frank Berry, Walter Paul ( Dauzet
) , Art Mckay, Brewster – Raff, C.E. Wheeler, Louis Katzman, and David
Kaplan were very active.
Associated primarily with concert or “classical” music
publishing houses but influential in stock and popular orchestration as well
were Otto Langey, Paul Steindorff,
and Harold Sanford, who made available for mass consumption the works of Victor
Herbert, among others, the brothers Hugo and Otto Frey, and former opera
conductor and future captain of radio arrangers Adolf
Schmid.
When the dance band supplanted the theatre orchestra as the characteristic American popular music ensemble stock arrangements reflected the succession as yet another generation of imaginative writers brought new life and freshness to the medium. From the mid 1920s the work of Frank Skinner, Ted Eastwood, Mel Stitzel, Elmer Schoebel, Charles Cook, Tiny Parham, Joseph Nussbaum, and Arcie Bleyer appealed especially to younger musicians and was employed in recording studios and even acquired and utilized by “name “ dance outfits. Skinner’s “charts” became so celebrated that forthcoming publications were heralded in trade newspapers. In their wake came Jimmy Dale, Spud Murphy, Jack Mason, Ken Macomber, Jimmy Mundy and later Johnny Warrington, Will Hudson, Larry Wagner, and Teddy Black, to name only a few of the more prominent.
Many
musicians tried their hand at “stocks”, among them cornet virtuoso Herbert
Clarke, songsmith Harold Arlen, future motion picture composer and conductor Max
Steiner, theatre orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett,
arranger Gordon Jenkins, and radio conductor Andre Kostelanetz.
Famous bandleaders and their arrangers sometimes wrote, or supervised the
writing of, stocks of their hit recordings and most popular numbers.
The proliferation of professional, semi-professional, and
amateur dance orchestras at this time and over the next thirty years led to the
sale and purchase of great quantities of these arrangements. Consisting of an
introduction, verse ( later omitted or non-existent ) , two choruses of melody
that duplicated but alternated interplay between brass and saxophone sections followed by a modulation leading to
a climactic half-chorus of greater drive, swing, and complexity in a new key
written to give the performers a chance to “pull our all the stops” and really
“show their stuff”, stocks could be altered, adapted, and tailored as needed to
feature a vocalist or particular soloist, to fit a certain length of time, or
to be strung together with other tunes to create a medley. Some were written
and published as medleys. Many dance band stocks also offered optional or
doubling parts for a string section, and a number of symphonic orchestras
during this period included them in “pops” concerts.
After the early 1950s the business declined but the field
continued to attract talent such as Glenn Osser,
Jerry Sears, Ernie Houghton, Robert Lowden, Lenny Niehaus,
Dave Wolpe, Sammy Nestico,
Dennis Howard, and John Pace who carried the tradition well through the rock
age.
Many have questioned, with reason, the absolute artistic value of these arrangements. While some of the writing was very good, much of it was dull, hackneyed, and mechanical. What might sound vibrant and flexible when played by a smaller number of instruments often came across as thick and plodding with a full ensemble. For many years stock orchestrations rapidly incorporated the latest styles, trends, idioms, and novelties of popular music, codified them in light of current practices, and published them, placing the professional popular arrangement within the reach of all and enabling musicians far and wide to closely reproduce the sounds of favorite bands, orchestras, and hit recordings. As such they went far towards spreading, homogenizing, and standardizing popular culture, at the same time educating, encouraging, and even inspiring several generations of arrangers and performers. From 1915 to 1955 their influence was pervasive, and their importance in the history of American music must be recognized.