Paul Whiteman and Modern Metropolitan Music, 1927–40

This chapter traces the roots and dissemination across musical media and genres of a Modern American Music middlebrow aesthetic that Whiteman and his arrangers played a major role in defining. The chapter tracks this style across the 1920s to the 1940s as it flourished on the radio, on Broadway stages, and in Hollywood soundtracks. This aesthetic aimed to glamorize popular music, particularly in its Modern Metropolitan Music format, which signaled sophisticated urbanity, commonly (but not exclusively) coded as white, most clearly in representations of New York City. The author analyzes adaptations of Louis Alter’s 1928 Manhattan Serenade, including Whiteman’s 1940 recording. The chapter includes discussion of the Modern American Music piano-solo publication series of Robbins Music, a firm that Whiteman was closely associated with.