THE MUSIC OF AN UNHAPPY COUNTRY.

A few weeks ago, we closed out the work week with a meditation on the cheerful ballads of the early American High.

It's possible that Serious Thinkers will lump the optimistic ballads of the late Forties and early Fifties, along with the tract houses and the family formation, as a collective suppression of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it took the Kingston Trio and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to call attention, in varying ways, to the fractures that were always there.

Dear reader, you deconstruct traditions at your peril.  "Is anybody surprised, when the aspirational Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best give way to reality TV and the tabloid culture, and bad behavior in some circles is transgressiveness or authenticity to be celebrated in other circles, that bad choices become the default?"

There once was an American High, only it occurred before the living memory of most of our fellow citizens and co-residents.  That it lives on only in radio archives stands in judgement of our culture choosing which monuments to destroy.

Perhaps it was too cloyingly conformist, or so Robert "Bastiat's Window" Graboyes argues.

Whether in politics or entertainment or fashion or science or beauty, beware of being at the top of the mountain, for from there, the plummet is longest and most lethal.  A metaphor for this notion lies in a song that has caused eyes to roll and skin to crawl for over half a century, despite its all-star cast of creators, a brief period of phenomenal popularity, and enormous influence over the music that followed.

Back in 2022, a fellow musician friend mentioned the song, “Theme from A Summer Place,” written for A Summer Place (1959)—a teen romance, set on the coast of Maine, featuring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue.  My friend referred to the song as “one of the sillier/cheesier tunes ever recorded.” I responded that for me the song, is something of a riddle and perhaps indicative of a larger phenomenon of our time—our habit of heaping scorn on that which we showered with praise just a short time ago.

To modern ears (mine included), “Theme from A Summer Place” is, indeed, dreadful.  The song is the ultimate exemplar of “elevator music.” As such it has been used in countless films and television programs—usually to ironic effect. In Animal House (1978), it accompanies a drunken teenager fumbling with his even drunker date’s clothing. In Legend (2015), its syrupy sweetness precedes a brutal murder.

The song is as cheesy as can be, but I'm not sure whether it was intrinsically cheesy from the outset (as 1970s clothing was), or whether is was the victim of time, overuse, and endless imitation. The most famous version—the one used in the film—was performed by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Listen to its treacly, string-heavy sound, and in 2024 you may wonder how any studio ever thought it was worth releasing—or how Percy Faith became a name.

Once upon a time, that "treacly, string-heavy sound" was common, in addition to Percy Faith we had Andre Kostelanetz, The Living Strings, Mantovani, and the sentimental ballads of the era often had string accompaniment other than the guitars and drums that became the rage in the 1960s.  Maestro Faith, moreover, had serious compositional support for that tune.

[T]he song’s provenance was imposing.  It was composed by Max Steiner—one of the greatest film composers of all time. He didn’t have a lot of misses in his career, which featured, among others, his classic scores for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Casablanca; Arsenic and Old Lace; Now, Voyager; Little Women; King Kong; The Searchers; and Gone with the Wind. Furthermore “Theme from A Summer Place” was not some late-career failure by an over-the-hill-composer. With this composition, Steiner knocked the ball out of the park—a #1 hit that became a national obsession.

Alas, that "national obsession" turned, almost immediately, to national satiety.  That it came out about the same time as the Montgomery bus boycotts and the eldest Baby Boomers hitting adolescence only accelerated the change of attitude.  "Boomers’ weary distaste for the song—and, more generally, for the Percy Faith sound—has been subtly passed along to later generations."  And other composers and arrangers borrowing the orchestration and the tempo didn't help, particularly when all those imitations were loaded onto tape and piped into ... elevators.

The song had the bad luck of emerging at the precise moment when Americans collectively grew sick to death of “elevator music.”  “Theme from A Summer Place” bore some resemblance to the audible schmaltz that once permeated shopping malls, office lobbies, voicemail systems, and—of course—elevators. Today, one might wonder why businesses surrounded customers with irritating sounds. The surprising answer is that elevator music, much of it produced by the Muzak Corporation, was relatively well-liked by the public until just around the time that A Summer Place hit the theaters in 1959. But by around 1960, Muzak’s omnipresence had begun to grate on the public. The 1969 film, Goodbye, Columbus (based on Philip Roth’s 1959 eponymous novella), features a running joke on elevator music; Ron Patimkin, a dull ex-college athlete, repeatedly describes the pride he holds for his collection of records by Mantovani and Kostelanetz—two famous purveyors of elevator-style music.

It's possible that customers of shopping malls grew weary of the Muzak because ... the tapes kept looping.  I worked a summer in a mall restaurant and could predict which tune would come up next.

His tale, though, includes more than a little musicology.

The song evokes 1950s/1960s childhood memories that transitioned from fond to annoying.

I’m a bit of a musical sleuth, and I strongly suspect that Max Steiner based the melody on two tunes that subliminally reminded viewers of every white, middle-class family or neighborhood get-together of the period.  Allow me to stereotype a wee bit. At each such event, pre-teens and teens would self-isolate in a basement. At some point, a musically talentless boy would open the dusty piano and perform “Chopsticks.” Then, two giddy and equally talentless girls would sit together on the bench and bang out a duet of “Heart and Soul.” Afterward, an awkward boy with even less musical capacity would nervously round out the repertoire with “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” and “The Knuckle Song.” Then, other kids would repeat that four-song Playlist-from-Hell over and over. (I have no idea whether any of these songs are still played.)

After writing the earlier version of this essay, it occurred to me that “Theme from A Summer Place” combines the 6/4 rhythm of “Chopsticks” with the C-Am-F-G chord pattern of “Heart and Soul.”  In 1959, both songs were emblematic of youthful 1950s innocence, and A Summer Place was a drama on the loss of that innocence. I’m guessing that the resemblance to those ditties was no accident—that the master composer Steiner knew exactly how to pluck the desired emotions and memories from the listener’s subconscious.

Assuming my theory is correct, Steiner was quickly copied.  “Chopsticks.” reconfigured for 4/4 time, lurks beneath the opening of the theme song to television’s My Three Sons, which premiered the year after A Summer Place. While I have involuntarily hummed that TV song as an earworm for half a century, I never noticed till 2022 that its dominant saxophone melody is a countermelody to “Chopsticks.” “My Three Sons” composer Frank de Vol clearly used the song to evoke teenage innocence—as I suspect Steiner did.

The essay includes video clips of the various tunes, and he concludes with an elegy to the monuments we've destroyed.

We live in an era that is quick to vilify the aesthetics of the past, be it the writings of Mark Twain; the humor of Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld; or the statuary of Theodore Roosevelt. Though you won’t find me listening to “Theme from A Summer Place” (except when writing this piece), I’m willing to bear a measure of respect for something that, though alien to modern sensibilities, was clearly at home in its own time.

Pray that he is correct when he notes, "future generations will gag at whatever appeals to us today."  What has replaced the sentimental ballads and Christmas songs of the 1950s has not been better.

"What came later" could have been an opportunity to expand the bounty and the good cheer.  That was the simple logic of civil rights  -- neither law nor custom ought deprive anyone of the opportunity to buy a nice house, to get coffee at the lunch counter, to enroll in a good school.  But in the hands of the right kind of angry people, to simply be is to be unenlightened.  Thus has the common culture been distorted, by the right kind of angry people, into a situation in which to simply be is to be oppressive.

Maybe playing some Percy Faith and Andre Kostelanetz and Paolo Montovani is today's act of rebellion.

I'll close you out for the weekend with a little Henry Mancini.

I'd say find yourself a circus and go to it, but as it's Oktoberfest season, find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.