COLE PORTER
How Cole Porter transformed popular music
Which 20th century composers will still be delighting audiences in 300 years' time, as Handel, Mozart and Beethoven do today? Though the earlier composers, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, were pushing the boundaries of classical music, their compositions were still recognisably related to the work of their predecessors. And, more importantly, music lovers wanted to listen to their work. But as composer Howard Goodall points out, classical music soon 'began a perilous journey into an arid form of modernism that the mainstream audience couldn't, or didn't want to, follow'.
By the 1920s, popular music entered the process, and songs that were catchy and entertaining, though often banal in their simplicity, began to rival classical compositions in their complexity and sophistication. This transformation, says Howard Goodall, was kick-started by Cole Porter, a musician who was part of a generation of gifted composers that created and developed the musical – one of the seminal American art forms of the 20th century.
A new era
Drawing on jazz, the music of the time, the rhythms of Porter’s music fused European with African-American traditions. It's no coincidence, then, that the finest interpretations of Porter's songs were by the some of the greatest African-American jazz, blues and swing artists. Even now, singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday are known for their definitive versions of Porter’s songs.
The composer’s construction of harmonies also drew on more than one tradition, shifting from major to minor and back again. But Porter also drew on classical forms of music, using a technique called sequencing, basing his music on the same scales that are the foundation of classical music.
Songs for all
Porter had a thorough grounding in classical music, plus an ear for the sounds of the time. This, combined with his own unique brilliance, says Goodall, meant that for the first time since the Middle Ages, the composer had 're-established the link between the kind of music ordinary folk liked and that enjoyed by the sophisticated, educated classes’. Porter, says Goodall, ‘made them one and the same'.
BIOGRAPHY
Biography
Cole Porter
Cole Porter was born in the US – in Peru, Indiana – in 1891. The son of wealthy parents, he started playing piano and violin when he was six years old. By the age of 10, he had started composing music. He went to the universities of Yale and then Harvard, where he started as a law student but soon opted to study music. After the First World War he moved to Paris, where he studied music and began to mix with the writers, artists and intellectuals of the Left Bank. While there, Porter met and married Linda Lee Thomas, despite the fact that she was aware that he was gay. Their palatial home in Paris became the backdrop for many spectacular and lavish parties, attended by the leading socialites of the day.
In 1923, in what he described as 'my one effort to be respectable', Porter wrote the music for a modern ballet called Within the Quota, which was full of jazz rhythms and harmonies. But classical music was not to be his future. Bringing together complex classical techniques with the rhythms and harmonies of popular music and adding brilliant lyrics, Porter's sophisticated popular music would fill the vacuum left by modernist classical composers who had lost touch with their audiences.
Towards the end of the 1920s Cole Porter started to make his name on Broadway, enjoying a reputation for his witty, suave and often provocative style. Despite the economic slump, by the 1930s Porter boasted a string of hit shows. Throughout the decade, seven Cole Porter musicals were staged on Broadway, while he also composed scores for several Hollywood musicals.
In 1937 Porter was involved in a horrific horse-riding accident, in which he fractured both legs. Though the pain from those injuries remained with him for the rest of his life, he continued to compose. Night and Day, the fictionalised film version of Porter's life was released in 1946 and, in 1948, he enjoyed great success with Kiss Me, Kate, his musical based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
After having a leg amputated in 1958, Porter became a recluse. Two years later, Yale honoured him with an honorary doctorate. He died in Hollywood 1964.
