Volume 54, Number 13 · August 16, 2007
Wake Up and Dream
By Robert Gottlieb
The House That George Built
by Wilfrid Sheed
Random House, 335 pp., $29.95
At different times and in different places there occur seemingly inexplicable explosions of new art forms: Greek drama; Elizabethan drama; the theater of Racine, Corneille, and Molière; the Victorian novel; the painting of the Italian Renaissance. But these phenomena can also take place on less exalted levels. The first half of the twentieth century, for instance, saw in our country the apparently spontaneous eruption of three popular art forms that went on to conquer the world. Jazz is one, Hollywood movies are another, and they're both umbilically connected to the third: the large body of songs we now refer to as 'standards.'
Review, 4087 words
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