Tin Pan Alley
[10] However, while an article on Tin Pan Alley can be found in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from May of that year,[11] this is unattributed and no piece by Rosenfeld that employs the phrase has been discovered.
Von Tilzer had modified his expensive Kindler & Collins piano by placing strips of paper down the strings to give the instrument a more percussive sound.
[8] The term then spread to the United Kingdom, where "Tin Pan Alley" was also used to describe Denmark Street in London's West End.
With stronger copyright protection laws late in the century, songwriters, composers, lyricists, and publishers started working together for their mutual financial benefit.
The American music publishing industry before Tin Pan Alley was largely based on European “art” songs in an effort to get around copyright royalty fees.
[21] He was one of the few musicians or composers to publish his own sheet music, capitalizing on the boom in that medium as America emerged out of the Civil War, and urban middle classes grew.
Piano ownership was widespread in middle-class families, and if one wanted to hear a popular new song or melody, one would buy the sheet music and then perform the piece at home.
[22] The music houses in lower Manhattan were lively places, with a steady stream of songwriters, vaudeville and Broadway performers, musicians, and "song pluggers" coming and going.
[23] Among the songwriters who frequented Tin Pan Alley were Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Dorothy Fields, Scott Joplin, and Fats Waller.
"[13] When vaudeville performers played New York City, they would often visit various Tin Pan Alley firms to find new songs for their acts.
Initially Tin Pan Alley specialized in melodramatic ballads and comic novelty songs, but it embraced the newly popular styles of the cakewalk and ragtime music.
Later, jazz and blues were incorporated, although less completely, as Tin Pan Alley was oriented towards producing songs that amateur singers or small town bands could perform from printed music.
In the 1910s and 1920s Tin Pan Alley published pop songs and dance numbers created in newly popular jazz and blues styles.
This can be seen in the use of certain influences such as, "a vernacular African-American impact coming from ragtime, 'coon' songs, the blues and jazz", as well as "input from high and middlebrow white culture".
[25] Many of these new styles were used to help fuel the economy of Tin Pan Alley, allowing composers to be more creative, as well as have a continuous influx of innovative music.
Referring to the dominant conventions of music publishers of the early 20th century, "Tin Pan Alley is gone", Dylan proclaimed in 1985, "I put an end to it.
[27] Due to the large fan base of Tin Pan Alley, the government believed that this sector of the music business would be far-reaching in spreading patriotic sentiments.
[27] In the United States Congress, congressmen quarreled over a proposal to exempt musicians and other entertainers from the draft in order to remain in the country to boost morale.
