Irving Berlin, 1938 (Rogers and Hammerstein Organization)
Here are more of those wonderful songs we love, and the stories behind their long and unexpected lives. Each program takes up the work of one songwriter and a few of his familiar, forever songs, where daydreams, blue skies, and love lost and found still live.
Combing a lively lecture with a wide variety of film clips, filmmaker and cultural historian Sara Lukinson traces how these favorite songs from the Great American Songbook came to be and how different artists, unexpected arrangements, and changing times transformed them into something new but still the same.
Lukinson, who has won three Emmys and seven Writer’s Guild Awards, now teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
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Blue Skies: Songs by Irving Berlin
Berlin’s songs are deceptively simple: His magical fusions of melody and lyrics seem more born than written. His joyful songs are contagious, while his love songs are tender and eternally true, such as Blue Skies, What’ll I Do, Cheek to Cheek, and Putting on the Ritz
Additional Sessions of this American Songbook Series
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