Oregon Festival of American Music 2010: I Could Write A Book--The Jazz Age Writers

Location: Jaqua Concert Hall

Presented by The Shedd
Note: I Could Write a Book has moved to the Jaqua Concert Hall at the Shedd Institute, High St. & Broadway
Our Grand Finale concert will focus on three American writers -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), John O'Hara (1905-70), and Damon Runyon (1880-1945). In the case of Fitzgerald, we'll explore three of his classic novels-Tender Is The Night (1941), The Last Tycoon (1941) and The Great Gatsby (1925)-to show how he referenced song titles and lyrics in a way that they became almost a literary version of a film score, and used these songs, and their associations, to augment and further his characters and plots. There are over seventy instances of popular songs mentioned in his books, not counting his own "made-up" titles and lyrics.
With O'Hara and Runyon, we'll turn the tables and show the influence their writing had on popular composers, with excerpts from Rodgers & Hart's 1940 Pal Joey, which was based a series of O'Hara short stories published by The New Yorker in the late 1930s, and Frank Loesser's 1950 masterpiece Guys And Dolls, which was based on several Damon Runyon short stories: "The Idyll of Sarah Brown," "Blood Pressure" and "Pick The Winner" all from his 1932 collection, Guys And Dolls.

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