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The first comprehensive collection of the letters of one of the most successful American songwriters of the twentieth century From Anything Goes to Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter left a lasting legacy of iconic songs including \"You're the Top,\" \"Love For Sale,\" and \"Night and Day.\" Yet, alongside his professional success, Porter led an eclectic personal life which featured exuberant parties, scandalous affairs, and chronic health problems. This extensive collection of letters (most of which are published here for the first time) dates from the first decade of the twentieth century to the early 1960s and features correspondence with stars such as Irving Berlin, Ethel Merman, and Orson Welles, as well as his friends and lovers. Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh complement these letters with lively commentaries that draw together the loose threads of Porter's life and highlight the distinctions between Porter's public and private existence. This book reveals surprising insights into his attitudes toward Hollywood and Broadway, and toward money, love, and dazzling success.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

Earlier, in 1906, the Peru Republican reported that Porter's father, S.F. Porter, Set out at once for Portland to bring his son home after he broke his leg, falling through a hay mow to the bam floor on a school-organized vacation camping trip. [...]the star-studded life unfolds: childhood riches in Peru, Indiana; prep school in Worcester, Mass.; failing first Greek and then algebra on the Yale entrance exams, but Yale nonetheless, where he wrote songs and shows; Harvard Faw School, shifting to the study of music; his first New York flop, then World War I and France. A relationship \"bordering on infatuation\" is reported with Alice Garrett, art and theatre-collecting ambassador's wife, whose EvergreenHouse is now a Johns Hopkins University museum. The only years with no new film or play were 1931, 1945, 1949, 1951, 1952. Since many years saw two or three openings, Porter averaged better than one a year.

Through a broad analysis of musical, textual, and dramatic similarities between the framing and framed shows in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate and a more specific analysis of “So in Love” and “Were Thine That Special Face,” this article identifies an overall musical/dramatic structure with three formal rotations, cutting across the show's two acts. In tying the sometimes-masked song resemblances to the show's overall dramatic arch, Kiss Me, Kate's narrative structure is ultimately portrayed as united rather than bifurcated. As a springboard, this article scrutinizes Knapp's (2006) reading of “doubles” in the show.

Though published vocal scores of Broadway musicals imply sole musical authorship the archives reveal a more complex picture. Five case studies illustrate different approaches to the compositional process in the 1940s and 1950s: Richard Rodgers, who produced fair copies in piano-vocal score for each of his songs; Cole Porter, who regularly used an amanuensis but sometimes produced fair copies; Frank Loesser, who initially used an amanuensis but later in his career produced detailed fragments of music for his arrangers to turn into performance scores; Frederick Loewe, who worked closely with an arranger to produce fair copies; and Robert Wright and George Forrest, who went through a complicated process of selecting and adapting the work of composers of art music such as Borodin and Rachmaninov. Detailed study of the available manuscripts makes clear that score production was nearly always a collaborative activity on Broadway, whether it involved amanuenses, copyists, arrangers, or orchestrators. Although in each of these cases the named composer retains an authorial role, in practical terms the archives reveal them to be “collaborators” rather than “authors,” working as a member of a team to create each performance score. As such, their aims were to facilitate performance events rather than to produce fixed works.

Critics of Pablo Neruda's ‘Caballero solo’, from the first volume of Residencia en la tierra (1933), generally concur that the most significant literary influence on the poem is T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. While acknowledging that source, this article argues that it is primarily Neruda's sustained reading of and aesthetic engagement with D. H. Lawrence during his time in Ceylon (1929–30) that gave rise to the poem and account for a number of its specific allusions and turns of phrase. It also raises the possibility that another, more popular source of inspiration might underlie the poem: the music of Cole Porter.

20's and 30's New York produced, says Nicky, 'the best songs ever written'. In this film, he journeys to Manhattan to explore his lifelong musical passion for the golden age of songwriting when the music of packed Broadway theatres fused with the sounds of Harlem’s raunchy jazz clubs. Nicky sings, plays the piano and strums his ukulele as he unpacks six timeless love songs that he believes 'map every contour of the human heart in just three minutes'. And in celebrating the dazzling lyrics, unforgettable tunes and thrilling rhythms, he also discovers the troubled geniuses who wrote them: from George Gershwin, the gifted prodigy son of Jewish immigrants, to Fats Waller, Harlem’s larger-than-life lothario, and Cole Porter, sparkling socialite with a secret double life. Along the way Nicky meets a colourful cast of characters: singer/songwriter Annie Lennox, who shares Nicky’s passion for this music; hip hop artist Baba Brinkman, who raps Lorenz Hart's 1926 lyrics to Ira Gershwin; jazz singer, Harlem resident and Fats Waller enthusiast Michael Mwenso; David Lahm, son of the first successful female lyricist Dorothy Fields; and 81 year-old cabaret singer Marti Stevens, close friend of the late great Cole Porter.

[...]early drafts of the Kiss Me, Kate book, located in the Samuel and Bella Spewack papers at the Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York City, show that Bella attempted to change the narrative of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the basis and frame for Kiss Me, Kate, to create a more progressive Katharine. According to Bella, in an unpublished remembrance she wrote about Porter, Sam's work consisted mostly of revising a few sections, notably the scenes with the loveable gangsters who \"persuade\" Lilli to continue performing in the show, even after she has tried to walk out due to her huband's abusive behavior. [...]by 1948 Bella and Sam were having marital problems, and Bella initially took on the Kiss Me, Kate job independent of her husband, and even recruited Cole Porter to write the score-the Spewacks had collaborated with Porter in 1938 oAh,n Leave It to Me. Though Sam eventually worked on the book for Kate, he told Bella he didn't want credit for it, until, in the summer of 1948, Porter prevailed on him via telegram, writing that it would make the public much happier to read \"book by Sam and Bella Spewack.\" The exchange continues: FRED: Because I've let you pick everything's [sic] so far - that we've done together.