![]() Voigt and McKenna: these are concerts that, when placed together, stretch our notions about what songs in the American vernacular can be. And on the next night, Lori McKenna performs, bringing songs of her own composing - songs that are full of intimate, kitchen-table epiphanies, the best moments of which resemble snatches of Raymond Carver or Jayne Anne Phillips short stories. In week one, for example, Deborah Voigt, one of the world's leading sopranos, moves confidently out of her comfort range to tackle an evening of songs from Broadway. What gives this year's season, which runs from January 23 through March 1, its depth and resonance are its musical pairings. It's a month of shows that, as Harold Arlen might put it, has the world on a string. ![]() This year is, in fact, its 10th anniversary, and the series has its own idea about how to celebrate - namely, by presenting its best and most diverse series of concerts to date, shows that put forward everything from cabaret and show tunes to country, R&B, folk, bluegrass and stripped down and plugged-in rock and roll. The American Songbook series at Lincoln Center has, for a decade, worked both the center and the margins of American popular song with intelligence and élan. At the front, it can mean the alternately pointed and soaring songs of performers ranging from Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Tom Waits to Sufjan Stevens, Nellie McKay and Rufus Wainwright. At the historical back end, this means the work of Stephen Foster and other early American songwriters. These composers and lyricists remind us that in music, like everything else in life, standards do matter.įor many listeners, however, the Great American Songbook can often seem most interesting at its fraying edges - those places where it bleeds into the music that both preceded and immediately followed it. This music has become part of our cultural DNA, and we know it on aural contact: the ringing and often soigné songs of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen and Rodgers and Hart, among many others. Historians and critics have boiled the term down to mean, more or less, the warm, witty, sophisticated songs that were written and composed from the 1920s through the beginning of the rock and roll era in the 1960s - the well groomed, pulse-quickening music of Broadway, Hollywood musicals and Tin Pan Alley. ![]() What do we talk about when we talk about the Great American Songbook?
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