Get Happy and Let Yourself Go: The Music of Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen

About the Event

Get Happy and Let Yourself Go: The Music of Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen – Songs from the Great American Songbook with Tyler Driskill and Friends

This concert appears as part of KCH’s new The Great American Songbook Lecture/Concert Series with Brent Wagner & Tyler Driskill

Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, both born to Jewish cantor fathers around the turn of the century, became known as two of the greatest songwriters of the Great American Songbook era, contributing such classics as “Putting on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “White Christmas” (Berlin) and “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “Over the Rainbow” (Arlen). Their careers spanned the Jazz Age, the golden age of Hollywood, and into the dawning of the modern American musical, and their impact on American culture is impossible to quantify. Join Tyler Driskill and special guests from the U-M Musical Theatre Dept. in a program celebrating both familiar and seldom-heard works by these two giants of American popular song.

About the series…

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter — these marvelous writers created so many lasting standards in the early 20th century that their contribution to that era has been termed ‘The Great American Songbook.’ These songs have been recorded hundreds of times by pop singers, jazz artists, dance bands, and even opera singers, and new generations of performers are constantly discovering and rediscovering the depth and artistry of these mini-masterpieces.

But why have these songs lasted so long? What exactly makes them ‘great’? Professor Wagner will explore the repertoire, detailing and demonstrating some of the characteristics that make these songs part of an enduring and rewarding legacy.  

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