![]() The next day, Will calls and asks Charlotte to make a hat for his date to an upcoming benefit dinner. Will admires the hats she made for the occasion and is surprised to learn that Charlotte is the daughter of one of his old girlfriends, Katy, who died in a car accident. Will notices her immediately and her grandmother, an old friend of his, introduces them. Charlotte Fielding (Winona Ryder) is a free-spirited, 22-year-old woman brought to Will's upscale restaurant by her grandmother and friends to celebrate her birthday. Will Keane (Richard Gere) is a successful 48-year-old restaurateur and womanizer who is the subject of a recent New York Magazine cover story. The following video featuring Dawn Upshaw includes the verse.Īmerica’s songs: The stories behind the songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley / Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (New York: Routledge, 2008)Īutumn in New York (1934) / Jazz Standards.Plot SPOILER WARNING: The following contains important plot details of the entire film. Most of them, at least include only the chorus. ![]() Wikipedia lists dozens of recordings, including two as recent as 2011. Louanne Hogan and Charlie Parker both recorded “Autumn in New York” in 1946 and began a virtual flood of recordings. Ten years later, though, both the Harry James and Charlie Spivak big bands played it on the radio. No one took much notice of “Autumn in New York.” Neglected song becomes a standard Duke later characterized the show as “a decent, average revue received decent, average notices.” It ran for five months. He exactly described the song Duke had already written.Įven though Duke warned him that its frequent modulations from key to key made it difficult to sing, Anderson decided to use is as the finale. When Duke played the song for friends in Westport, he reported that he noticed them “retreating to the bar in the middle of the verse.”īack in New York, Murray Anderson was producing a revue he called “Thumbs Up.” He told Duke he still needed one song, and what he had in mind was something that would evoke nostalgia with an image of red leaves in Central Park. The chorus, less difficult and experimental, nonetheless is not easy listening or easy singing. He called the song “a genuine emotional outburst.”Īlec Wilder, another musician with one foot in classical music and the other in popular song, suggested that Duke, the popular song composer, began the verse and Dukelsky, the classical composer, finished it. He later acknowledged that it contained “not a particle” of what his publisher considered popular appeal. The music consists of a single verse and a chorus, a fairly ordinary structure for a Tin Pan Alley song.īut Duke apparently wasn’t thinking of something he could publish as a hit. The text shows Duke’s thorough familiarity with the language of popular song lyrics. So he wrote a poem in his second language and set it to music. In 1934, when he was in Westport, Connecticut, Duke suddenly became homesick for Manhattan. From that time on, Dukelsky wrote music for orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensembles under his birth name and popular songs as Vernon Duke. ![]() Gershwin persuaded him to try his hand at popular songs as well as “classical” music and suggested Vernon Duke as a suitable pen name. Dukelsky had studied composition in Kiev with Reinhold Gliere and wanted to pursue a musical career. In a way, the story of Autumn in New York begins when a young Russian immigrant musician named Vladimir Dukelsky arrived in New York in 1921 and met Jacob Gershowitz, the son of Russian immigrants.īut by that time, Gershowitz had changed his name to George Gershwin and had begun to make a name for himself as a composer of popular songs. ![]() That it became a standard, recorded by dozens of the giants of American popular music was not inevitable. Inevitably, someone wrote a song called Autumn in New York. New York has inspired more songs than any other American city. The season of autumn has inspired some of America’s best popular songs. One of a flood of early recordings that established “Autumn in New York” as a standard.
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