The Irving Berlin Reader

"What a wonderful glance into the musical past! Benjamin Sears has assembled, organized and notated a fan's paradise of writing on and by Irving Berlin. And what a spectrum: from the master giving hints on how a song should be written, to a famous critic completely mis-judging Berlin's greatest theater score. This takes you back to another time and place, and brings Irving Berlin alive again. All in all, a great read." --Ted Chapin, President, Rodgers & Hammerstein "The Irving Berlin Reader is an engrossing documentary biography that will delight both the casual music lover and the hardcore Berlinophile. Item after item brings up fascinating details about not only Berlin's life and work but also the workings of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood at the height of the studio system--and Berlin was at the forefront of each of those institutions when it reached its artistic peak. To understand Irving Berlin is to understand almost everything important about a wide swath of America's popular music history." --Larry Hamberlin, author, Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era "A valuable collection of commentary by and about a great American songwriter, compiled by a unique performer-scholar with a long and special affinity for his subject." --Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater "Gives us several shades of Irving, and a sense of who he was behind the self-imposed public mask, at least in the early years." --Playbill.com "Thanks to Magee and Sears as well as to other scholars, Irving Berlin's ever-trenchant Jewish inspiration continues to be revealed as a major aspect of his mighty achievement." --The Forward "Give[s] lively accounts--more detailed than conventional biographies have managed--of two fascinating moments when Berlin rose above the ranks of his peers: The 1910s, when he was the new pop phenom, and World War II, when he became an actor on the stage of world history in a way that no other American songwriter has." --Los Angeles Times "Sears collects articles, anecdotes, analyses and reminiscences that build a compelling, if necessarily incomplete, portrait of Berlin." --Times Literary Supplement "The Irving Berlin Reader is an excellent resource. It offers detailed yet accessible discussions of Berlin's music alongside insightful passages about his personality. his relationships, and his place in American popular culture. As such, it will be useful to scholars, students, and casual readers alike." --Notes "Sears's short but elegant introductions guide the reader through his life and work, and the volume promises to be a standard reference work for musical theatre students and scholars." -- New Theatre Quarterly "Not only has his archival research helped significantly to enrich our knowledge of all these pieces, but Magee's insights into the contexts in which they were presented - such as the impact of the establishment of Manhattan's Times Square area on early musical theatre - also have implications for our understanding of the genre more broadly." -- lNew Theatre Quarterly