!Song ! Form Year Premiered! Musical !

“Get Out Of Town”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AA’) 1938! Leave It To Me!!

“Come On In”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1939! Du Barry Was A Lady!

“The Leader Of A Big-Time Band” Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1943! Something For The Boys!

“Is It The Girl (Or Is It The Gown)?”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AA’) 1944! Seven Lively Arts!

“So In Love”! Simple Chorus (AABA) 1948! Kiss Me, Kate!

“From This Moment On”! Sectional Verse-Chorus (AABA) 1950! Out Of This World!

“It’s All Right With Me”! Simple Chorus (AABA) 1953! Can-Can!

!

The Dramatic Potential of Auxiliary Cadences in Cole Porter Songs with Minor-to-Major ChorusesMorgan Markel • Eastman School of Music • mmarkel@u.rochester.edu

Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of Music Theory SoutheastMarch 13, 2020

Figure 1: Foreground and middleground graphs of Cole Porter’s “So In Love” from Kiss Me, Kate (1948)

Table 1: Seven sectional verse-chorus and simple chorus songs by Cole Porter containing choruses that begin in minor and conclude in the relative major

5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65

When I’m close toyou, dear,

The stars fill the sky,

So in love with you am I.

5 (in F# min) 5 5 34 3 2 2 1 (in A maj)

5 (in F# min) 5 5 4 3 2 3 2 1 (in A maj)

Strange, dear, but true, dear, So in love with you am I.

I’m yours ’til I die, So in love, So in love, So in love with you, my love, am I.

CHORUS

A1 A2 B A3

Figure 2: Foreground and middleground graphs of Cole Porter’s “Get Out Of Town” from Leave It To Me! (1938)

Selected Bibliography

Berry, David Carson. 1999. “Dynamic Introductions: The Affective Role of Melodic Ascent and Other Linear Devices in Selected Song Verses of Irving Berlin.” Intégral 13: 1–62.

Buchler, Michael. 2016. “Licentious Harmony and Counterpoint in Porter’s ‘Love for Sale.’” In A Cole Porter Companion, edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss, 207–21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

––––––. 2018. “Musical Structure, Dramatic Form, and Song Pairings in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1: 37–54.

Burstein, L. Poundie. 2005. “Unraveling Schenker’s Concept of the Auxiliary Cadence.” Music Theory Spectrum 27, no. 2: 159–86.

Forte, Allen. 1993. “Secrets of Melody: Line and Design in the Songs of Cole Porter.” The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 4: 607–47.

––––––. 1995. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–50. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gauldin, Robert. 2005. “Tonal Non-Closure in American Popular Ballads: The Minor to Relative-Major Paradigm.” Paper presented at the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis, Dublin, Ireland.

Johns, Donald. 1993. “Funnel Tonality in American Popular Music, ca. 1900–70.” American Music 11, no. 4: 458–72.

Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis, edited by Joseph N. Straus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schenker, Heinrich. [1935] 1979. Free Composition [Der freie Satz]. Trans. and ed. by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman.

Shaftel, Matthew. 1999. “From Inspiration to Archive: Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day.’” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 2: 315–47.

––––––. 2016. “A Consideration of Drama, Lyrics, and Musical Structure in a Porter Film: Broadway Melody of 1940.” In A Cole Porter Companion, edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss, 261–85. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Get out of town, Before it’s too late, my love.

Get out of town, Be goodto me, please.

Why wish me harm?

Why not retire to a farm

And be contented to charm

The birds off the trees?

The thrill when we meet Is so bittersweet

That, darling, it’s getting me down,

5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

So on your mark, get set, Get out of town.

VERSE CHORUS

A A’5 (in G min)

5 (in G min)

4 3 2

4 3 25

5

3 2 1 (in Bb maj)

3 2 1 (in Bb maj)5 (in G min)

5 (in G min)