Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. By Derek B. Scott.

Abstract

In its modern form, Western popular music is a product of bigness: big business, huge markets, vast cities. This fact, so obvious as to be easily overlooked, is the starting point for Derek B. Scott's book. He singles out four cities as especially important, and here I cannot improve on his own words: dance music in Vienna provided infectious rhythms, novel orchestral timbres, and a new coloristic use of harmony (chords that took on a ‘free-floating’ major sixth or major seventh); it also employed new melodic devices (the wienerische Note). It was in Vienna that what became known as ‘light music’ was created, and the old types of contredanses were gradually ousted by dances for couples (the waltz and polka). Blackface minstrelsy in New York provided popular music with a percussive character, a new type of syncopation, and a three-chord model—features inherited by a range of twentieth-century styles from blues to punk. Music hall in London supplied songs with a hook or catchy chorus coupled to a less memorable narrative-driven verse section—features inherited by Tin Pan Alley, dance bands, and stage musicals. Cabaret in Paris presented songs with hard-hitting and socially concerned texts, precursors of later protest songs (for example, those of Bob Dylan) and various later forms of ‘realist’ song (for instance, Jacques Brel's ‘Amsterdam’, Radiohead's ‘Creep’) (pp. 6–7).