Book overview
The history of early 20th Century Dance Bands has generally focused on the personalities of the Band Leaders, famous soloists, or the recordings they made, but the arrangers have been neglected. This book will attempt to show what made popular dance music in the 20th Century so different from dance music in the 19th Century and also show how these pioneer arrangers melded the many disparate elements together into a coherent art form. Dance styles come and go but their significance I think doesn't lie in the dances themselves but with what composers achieved through working with those styles. Few want to actually dance the Courante or Minuet today but who would want to lose these works by Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven? Similarly, the achievements of arrangers such as Arthur Lange, George Evans, and Lew Stone need to be evaluated and studied, to better understand how we have arrived at the situation we are in today, especially because modern score writing programmes and digital audio have completely changed how we can approach composition and arranging. Critics have often disparaged dance band arrangements as commercial and lacking in artistic merit, but in fact, these early arrangers were innovative and creative.
