Berlin is one of the internet’s favorite people – his songs are still popular and some are even out of copyright. While looking at the top search results, though, I noticed that the internet pages cannot agree on some basic facts, like the year that his first wife died.
And, however accurate, Philip Furia’s book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley claims that Berlin was originally a lyricist, not writing the melodies until 1909.
I don’t doubt that he wrote 900+ (or 3000+, depending on the source) songs. But how did he avoid repeating himself, for example re-composing a song that he had composed and forgotten about 50 years ago? I await your response, at least until Marie from Sunny Italy visits me too.
In Cecil’s column he relates how Berlin played the piano using only the black keys because it was “easier for untrained fingers to play the black keys (which are elevated and widely spaced) without hitting wrong notes.”
Certainly true, but the black keys form a Major Pentatonic Scale - if you stick to these notes, or at least use them as a starting point, it’s hard to compose a tune that doesn’t sound decent.
Now, I know, and I think Cecil knows, that Berlin’s songs use more than those 5 notes. In fact, some songs are quite complex and use chromatics and key changes. But Berlin was a musical genius and the songs probably came from many sources. It is said that he was a real craftsman - he would sit at the piano for hours shaping melodies, trying every possible note in a simple phrase.
I haven’t personally listened to every song Irving Berlin ever wrote, nor compared them for duplication, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: sometimes he did duplicate certain themes or passages, to a degree.
I was going to give you a quick overview of music theory, but let me truncate it into the quick-quick overview: while there are twelve tones in a chromatic scale (A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb, E, etc) and four different kinds of basic triads (major, minor, diminished, and augmented), the number of potential combination of chords in a musical passage, say, twelve chords long would be 116,191,483,108,948,578,241 (assuming you don’t repeat a chord).
However, that’s like saying there’s millions of moves in chess when you and I both know that you’re gonna have to start by moving either a pawn or a knight. Some combinations of chords just don’t sound good.
There’s bound to be some repeating in there somewhere.
Cecil does know. In the sentence just before the one you quoted: “He played almost entirely in the key of F-sharp, allowing him to stay on the black keys as much as possible.”
And further down the page: "Thus while still playing on the (mostly) black keys of F-sharp major, Berlin could hear the music in a variety of other keys. "
I personally wouldn’t make much hay of the fact that he played in the key of six sharps all the time. The chord structure and musical modulations don’t change their basic nature just because he’s got an instrument arbitrarily tuned to A = 440 hz.
It’s not suddenly a different song if the piano is out of tune, after all. The key just defines your relative home pitch. The structure itself defines what the song is — I mean, you can’t re-write “God Bless America” in D Major and claim it’s your own brand-new composition.
I’d explain about degrees of a scale, and chord theory, but do you really want to hear any of that? Didn’t think so.
A far more sophisticated musician than Berlin, Noël Coward, employed a secretary, and was a “black-key” pianist, although he could handle Gb, Db, and occasionally Ab.
More recently, Mel Brooks, even less musically literate than Berlin, had to hum the tunes for The Producers to a secretary.