Irving Berlin: His Music, His Life Essay

America has become a home to diverse kinds of music. It epitomizes the diversity of people and culture that live in it. One great American composer that we consider to have a gargantuan contribution to its development as what it is now is Irving Berlin. Although he was born in Russia, he managed to share his melodies and lyrics to people in an era fraught by war, cultural alienation and economic instability. The son of an impoverished Jewish cantor, he was taken to America at the age of five. His father died when he was 13, and a year later he ran away from home, rather than be a burden to his mother. He sang for pennies outside cabarets, became a chorus boy, a stooge in vaudeville, a song plugger and a singing waiter. Berlin had no formal musical training, but taught himself to play the piano, if only in one key, F . He began churning out songs, usually serving as his own lyricist, and finally caught America’s ear with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ in 1911 (Bordmann, 2001). According to New Grove Dictionary, Berlin’s first complete stage work, â€Å"Watch Your Step† (1914), purported to be the first musical written entirely in ragtime. However, his supporters would argue that that was not strictly so, but cannot dispute that Berlin played a major role in making ragtime popular, just as the real genre was fading away. The show’s hit was ‘Simple melody’. Between â€Å"Watch Your Step† and â€Å"Mr President† (1962) Berlin wrote all or most of the songs for 19 other Broadway shows. As a Jewish, Berlin maintained his ties to his own community. Berlin was very much a part of New York City’s radically multicultural milieu, which encompassed, in addition to his own group, Jews who had been in the United States for several generations; other recent immigrants to the New World from such places as Italy, Sicily, Portugal, and Turkey; Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians who had come over a generation or two ago; Americans of British heritage who had a much longer history in the United States and who had largely shaped the nation’s political, educational, and cultural life; and some blacks, who were still very much on the fringes of American society. Like David Quixando in Zangwill’s play, Berlin had personal and professional association with many people outside his own ethnic group: Chuck Connors, a friend and protector during his early days in Chinatown; his first collaborator, Mike Nicholson; Edgar Leslie, born in Stamford, Connecticut, and a graduate of the Cooper Union; the Irish-American George M. Cohan and the Dublin-born Victor Herbert, who became mentors and friends. He associated as freely as was possible at the time with such black musicians as Eubie Blake (Hamm, 1997, p.ix). Hamm (1997) cited that some of Berlin’s biographers have singled out â€Å"When I Lost You† as his first mature, fully successful ballad. They have related the content of the lyric to the fact that in early 1912 Berlin married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of his friend and collaborator E. Ray Goetz, and that the bride died five months after their wedding of typhoid or pneumonia probably contracted during the couple’s honeymoon in Havana. â€Å"When I Lost You†, published several months after her death, has a lyric lamenting the loss of a loved one. I lost the sunshine and roses, I lost the heavens of blue, I lost the beautiful rainbow, I lost the morning dew; I lost the angel who gave me Summer, the whole winter through, I lost the gladness that turned into sadness, When I lost you. It’s not true that the song is â€Å"unlike any song Berlin had previously written† in being â€Å"an exceedingly simple and stately waltz employing a bittersweet† (p. 162). In 1925, Berlin met and fell in love, for the second time, with Ellin Mackay, the daughter and heiress of Clarence H. Mackay, head of Postal Telegraph. As a devout Irish-American Catholic and a member of an elite New York society, Clarence Mackay recruited his immense power and resources in an attempt to prevent their marriage and, when all other strategy failed, he sent his daughter off to Europe for several months. During her absence, Berlin wrote several of his most poignant love ballads, including â€Å"Always† and â€Å"Remember†. When she returned to New York they were married secretly at City Hall on January 4, 1926, embarking immediately afterwards on a European honeymoon. When news of the marriage leaked out to the press, the newspapers gave much publicity to the romance which had so dramatically broken down social and religious barriers. The event even found its way into music in â€Å"When a Kid Who Came from the East Side Found a Sweet Society Rose† (lyrics by Al Dubin and music by Jimmy McHugh). Although Clarence H. Mackay disinherited his daughter and refused to communicate with her, even after the Berlins’ first child was born, he later allowed a reconciliation to take place, and he remained sympathetic to his son-in-law (Ewen & Ewen, 1962, p. 24-25). Irving and Ellin had three daughters—Mary Ellin, Linda, and Elizabeth, all of whom were raised Protestant—and a son, Irving Berlin, Jr. , who died before his first birthday, on Christmas Day in 1928. As a father, Berlin was absent too much to be a doting father. During World War II, he traveled with his show, This Is the Army. When he wasn’t on the road he worked at night, going to bed at 4 or 5 AM and sleeping until noon. There were three faiths in the house – Ellin was Catholic, Irving was Jewish and the three girls were raised Protestant, largely because Ellin was in favor of religious tolerance (People Weekly, 9 October 1989). Popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century had been touted with the domination of Jewish Americans. More important, their cultural and musical heritage colored their products, giving them a flavor quite different from that of earlier popular songs and bringing yet another ethnic strain to the already diverse style of American song. If a single songwriter were to be chosen to epitomize the era, it would certainly be Irving Berlin. He wrote songs from the very beginning of the period through to the end (and even into the next era); his songs represent all of the various types that characterized these years; and dozens of his songs were among the most popular products of the Tin Pan Alley years. Furthermore, his career and his music point up the strong links between the first and second generations of Tin Pan Alley, and the emergence of a somewhat different song style in the 1920s and ’30s (Hamm, 1979, p. 329). To gain a better perspective on this issue, one must understand the Tin Pan Alley aesthetic. New songs were judged by audience acceptance or rejection, not by abstract analysis of their musical and lyrical components. As Wilder put it, for Berlin and his peers â€Å"a good song and a hit song [were] synonymous (p. 92). † To ensure that their songs would be immediately accessible to their audiences, composers drew on already familiar musical styles, including the most popular songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely disseminated pieces of the classical repertory, and social dances of the present and immediate past. Berlin himself wrote in the Green Book Magazine for April 1916, â€Å"There’s no such thing as a new melody. Our work is to connect the old phrases in a new way, so that they will sound like a new tune. † During World War I, Berlin served first as a private, then as a sergeant at Camp Upton, a temporary station for troops embarking for Europe. Convinced of the need for entertainment for these troops–and encouraged by the commanding general of the camp, who needed $35,000 for a new service center–Berlin prepared an all-soldier show, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, for which he wrote book, lyrics, and music. This musical, which opened at the Century Theatre in New York City on July 26, 1918, presented various aspects of a rookie’s life at camp in song, comedy, sentiment, dance, and production numbers. Berlin’s best songs were â€Å"Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning† and â€Å"Mandy. † Yip, Yip, Yaphank eventually netted over $150,000 for the Camp Upton Service Center. However, it is indubitable that â€Å"Annie Get Your Gun† (1946) Berlin’s most successful musical. Based very freely on the life of Annie Oakley, the show was originally to have had music by Kern; he died while working on it, and Berlin replaced him. At the first performance, Ethel Merman sang the title role and Ray Middleton played Frank. Annie has entered the repertory of opera companies in the USA, and the Vienna Volksoper. Upon his return to civilian life, Berlin began to expand his activities beyond songwriting. He formed his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. –an occasion that inspired an â€Å"Irving Berlin Week,† celebrated throughout the country with performances of his songs in theatres and night clubs. He also embarked on a career as a vaudeville headliner, appearing in performances of his song hits in leading theatres. In 1927, Berlin wrote a ballad, â€Å"The Song Is Ended,† almost as if he had a prophetic glimpse of what awaited him: the uncreative years between 1929 and 1932. During this time he wrote little and seemed incapable of producing anything that either satisfied him or could win public approval. This period of sterility was made even more difficult by the depletion of his fortune during the economic crisis. The hit of his last success, Call Me Madam (1950), was â€Å"You’re Just in Love†. Berlin also created the music for many films. Berlin’s music was always catchy as it kept abreast of the latest in musical fashions and constantly composed memorable, musically inventive songs in the idiom of the moment (Bordman, 2001). Berlin’s rise from poverty to fame is quite inspiring. Starting with nothing on the Lower East Side, sleeping in flophouses on the Bowery, he earned a vast fortune by the time he was thirty and married Ellin McKay, the daughter of one of the richest men in America. Although he never lost his East Side accent, he assumed the privileges of wealth as one to the manner born; his daughter describes a life of quiet, tasteful luxury marred only by her father’s long bouts of depression, during which he would become even more invisible than usual, shutting himself off even from his family (Schiff, 1996). Through his great life we learn that music has great role in our lives and it is difficult to fathom why. Flutes have been found in France dating â€Å"as far back as 30,000 years† (Jensen, 2001, p. 15). This and other evidence implies that music has been used throughout human history. Music has been used by every culture to inspire, tell stories, pass on history, glorify achievements, amuse, relax, and educate. Music is used to express love, anger, despair, and hope. Some admit that music is indeed a universal language. In the United States, we have become culturally diverse in our musical tastes and embrace every genre and style from folk to classical, jazz, blues, rock and roll to rap. Berlin was a prominent figure in a time where jazz tunes reigned supreme. Thus, to share the wondrous life of a musician like Irving Berlin, people could celebrate the unique music of cultures and ethnic groups and we could show younger generations that diversity is something to be respected and treasured Works Cited Bordman, G. â€Å"Berlin, Irving†, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001). Ewen, David H. , and David H. Ewen, eds. Popular American Composers from Revolutionary Times to the Present: A Biographical and Critical Guide. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1962. Hamm, Charles. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Jensen, E. Arts with the Brain in Mind. (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001) People Weekly. Irving Berlin: Music and Myth, 32. 15 (9 October 1989):3. Schiff, David. â€Å"For Everyman, by Everyman: In Creating Himself According to the Nation’s Enthusiasm for His Songs, Irving Berlin Helped Create a National Identity. † The Atlantic Monthly Mar. 1996: 108+. Wilder, Alex. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

PEST analysis for banks Essay

The sustainability of DCB Bank agenda has expanded rapidly. It reflects the company’s increasing focus on the wider nature of business and made the stakeholders growing interests in competitive world of business. There is now a great awareness about the global challenges such as climate changes, poverty, scarcity of resources, and demographic shifting. The responses came from the government and from different businesses, as well as the non-profit organization helped DCB Bank made it possible for the sustainability. Economic Analysis The approach to the sustainability program is useful and encourages DCB to be open and transparent to the issues such as the initiatives in further research and development, dialogue with the government and various organizations, and their priorities. DCB Bank enable to broaden their focus on corporate responsibility to prove that they play an essential role in establishing an economic advantage in the country where they operate. Social Analysis The sustainability strategy focuses in their objective to improve the value of the business and their stakeholders. They give importance on the customers and clients such as maintaining the understanding of their needs and promoting the company by measuring satisfaction. It can be only possible by focusing of their global performance by their assurance to develop an innovative solution and enhancing performance. On the other hand, the people working with DCB Bank make a great advantage in the performance of the business. In addition, they attract employees to collect the talent, develop them according to the competent world, and retaining them as much as possible. Technological Analysis DCB uses the means of technology for their business especially in the areas of Agri and Inclusive banking. Their aim to help the people in fight against poverty is possible through their financial system. The technology makes it possible to empower the system and establish a competitive advantage. Pioneering the new ideas, adding the skills and operational excellence are part of the guiding principle of the organization.

Micro Operation at Airlines

_____________________________________________________________________ B200B TMA Spring 2013 _____________________________________________________________________ Question: ‘The airline industry has firms which can be great examples of operations management. There are processes and resources to manage very carefully in order to have satisfactory outputs and results’.Analyze the above statement using examples from B200B material and an airline company, and discuss in particular the following issues: managing micro-operations for an airliner, handling emergencies and delays, serving passengers, reservations handling, baggage handling, meals, maintenance, training of crew†¦ (100 Marks) NOTES TO STUDENTS Cut-off date: Submit this assignment no later than 27 April, 2013.Word count: 1500 words (plus or minus 10%). Referencing: You must acknowledge all your sources of information using full Harvard Style Referencing (in-text referencing plus list of references at the end). Use E-library: to get journal articles on the topic (using Emerald or EBSCO). Use at least 2 or 3 articles. Plagiarism: It is very important to use your own words. Plagiarism will lead to a significant loss of marks. Extensive plagiarism could mean that you failed your TMA.Plagiarism means copying from internet, from unreferenced sources, from other students’ TMAs or any other source. Penalties for plagiarism ranges from failure in the TMA to expulsion from the university. Answering: Your response to the question should take the form of a full essay format divided into a number of paragraphs with introduction and conclusion without subheadings and bullet points. Use B200 ‘reader three’ chapters (Processes), especially chapters 1, 2, 4. Also search information on a specific airline company and use E-library. This TMA is 20% of B200B Grade.

It205 Week 4 Checkpoint

How does email benefit an organization? I believe that email is a great benefit to most companies because it allows ideas and or attachments to be shared instantly. Why might an organization limit how an employee uses email during work hours? By limiting email usage during work hours it decreases the chance of clients being overcharged for work hours and also decreases the chance of loss of profit due to an employee’s attention being somewhere other than work. What is an emails path once it leaves an organization? Depending on the company it could go directly to the person it is addressed to or it could go through the IT department then to the person it is addressed to. What is the effect of instant messaging on organizational networks? Instant messaging can be a very useful tool as long and it isn’t taken advantage of, it could be used to send mass messages to all employees and or messages to individuals who may not be in the same building when working on projects. What are benefits and drawbacks of using instant messaging in an organization? A benefit would be that it is instant unlike email that may take a while, and has to be checked. A drawback can be used with that same example it is instant so files and or information that is not supposed to be viewed by outside individuals can be transmitted instantly. What are the drawbacks and benefits of webpage and search engine use in an organization? A benefit would be information for research being very accessible via websites and search engines A drawback would be these tools being abused and people using them for reasons outside of work. Should managers monitor employee email and internet usage? Why or why not? I think that management should monitor email and internet usage during work hours because of loss of revenue due to employees being on the web instead of being productive. Also to protect the organization from potential liability of what may or may not be transmitted or received on the organization’s server/ IP.

Power that Information Technology opens up in Information Essay

Power that Information Technology opens up in Information Technology-led organizational - Essay Example The rise of the discipline of statistics was an outcome of the will of the state to get knowledge of the population and its tendencies such as mortality, health, work or life styles and to control it better. To discuss how information technology has opened up the power and knowledge to information technology companies, the cases on the learning process and Business process reengineering and Enterprise Resource Process will be evaluated (Hammer and Champy (2001, p.39). Hammer and Champy (2001, p.89) state that learning process is a process of knowledge conversion, and it involves four modes. The assumption that knowledge is created through the relations between inferred and clear knowledge enables us to categorize the four modes: from tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge known as socialization, from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge called externalization, from explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge known as combination and lastly from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge also re ferred to as internalization. Socialization acts as a connection with the theories of group processes and culture of the organization. Combination entails processing of information while internalization is related to learning in organizations. Externalization is, however, neglected and has not closely been considered in many cases. Socialization is a process of experience sharing thus, creation of inferred knowledge such as mental modes, which are shared, and technical skills. Someone can acquire inferred knowledge from others directly without involvement of language. An outstanding example being that of apprentices who normally work beside their masters and learn craftsmanship, not by any mode of conversation but rather through observation, imitation, and practice. All that somebody requires to acquire is knowledge and experience (Hammer and Champy, 2001, p.103). According to Hammer and Champy (2001, p.103), experiences helps one by, projecting him into another individual’s thinking process and gain something. For example, Matsushita Electric industrial Company in Japan, a major problem in developing an automatic bread making machine in the late 1980s at the Osaka based Company concentrated on mechanizing the process of dough-kneading, which is essentially inferred knowledge processed by master bakers. Socialization also occurs between product developers and customers. Interactions of customers with product developers and after market introductions are, in, fact, a never ending process of sharing inferred knowledge and idea creation for improvement. Hammer and Champy (2001, p.100) argues that externalization such as from tacit to tacit to explicit is a process of articulating tacit knowledge into clear concepts. It is a typical knowledge creation process in that inferred knowledge becomes clear, taking the figures of metaphors, analogies, concepts, hypotheses, or models. By conceptualizing a figure, we express its essence mostly in language writing in an act of converting inferred knowledge into achievable knowledge. Words are often inadequate, insufficient and inconsistent. Such variations and breaks between figures and expressions, nevertheless, assist in promoting expression and interaction between individuals. Knowledge conversion of externalization mode is typically seen in the action of creation of concepts and is triggered by dialogue (Hammer and Cham

Drunk Drivers should be imprisoned on the first offence Research Paper

Drunk Drivers should be imprisoned on the first offence - Research Paper Example Many people’s lives are put to risk by this annoying habit. Drunk driving began long before the invention of automobiles. As soon as a man climbed onto the back of a transport animal and began riding, there were drunken donkey, camel, elephant and horse riding. In almost all cultures backdating to thousands of years ago, there has been awareness that drunkenness is undesirable. Moderation has always been advised since wiping out alcohol is impossible. The fact that alcohol is continually referenced through history as a bad thing proves that there have always been abusers of alcohol. These abusers have either caused harm to themselves or society at large. Almost all of us have had an experience with a drunk driver weaving in between lanes or driving on the opposite side of the road. Worse still, we have witnessed fatal accidents caused by these drunk drivers (Klein A10). No form of irresponsibility by anyone justifies such loss of lives. This ill vice has to come to an end! The government has tried to curb the menace by introducing road sobriety tests and other measures but the habit is still not dying down. Certain ages are prone to drink more than others men are responsible for 81% of drinking and driving incidences. Young men between 21 to 34 years of age contribute 11% of the incidences and 85% by people drinking above the required amounts. This is according to Centre for Disease Control and prevention (CDC). The problem is so grave that it has attracted anti-drunk driving activism. Opposition to drunk driving is as old as the automobile. One of the activists, Doris Aiken who got involved in anti-drunk driving activism in 1978 says the tragedy that inspired her involved two teenagers who she barely knew. This led her to establish an organisation called Remove Intoxicated Drivers (Baron 1, 4). An unfortunate incident is of a young girl who got an accident after a 17-year-old male

The Telephone Technology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

The Telephone Technology - Essay Example Subscribers who wanted to communicate with more than one point had to obtain and set up as many pairs of telephones as the number of communicating points. Telephone technology was restricted to domestic lines. It was Western Union which first used telephone exchanges to interconnect individual subscribers in 1878. Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Telephone Company was quick to incorporate the concept of telephone exchanges. Though the Bell Telephone Company was supposed to have monopolized the telephone business for more than 15 years since its invention, there were nevertheless as many as 1,730 telephone companies operating during the period. In the initial days, the most serious contender tot Bell’s monopoly was Western Union which had bought patents from others who had designed variations of Bell’s original principle of telephone, and had created the American Telephone Company as early as in December 1877. Had Bell not own the patent infringement case against Western Union in the Supreme Court of America in 1879, Western Union, with its large telegraph network already in place, was poised to overtake the Bell Telephone Company within a very short period of time. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was set up in 1885 to provide long-distance service to American Bell Company subscribers. The Bell Telephone Company had been expanded and rechristened the American Bell Company in the meantime. The first automatic commercial exchange began operating in 1892. By the turn of the century, independent telephone companies were fast overtaking the American Bell Company. In 1889 the first public coin telephone had been set up in Hartford, Connecticut. These were attended payphones with the payment collected by someone standing at hand. The invention of the electron tube in 1906 by Lee De Forest made amplification possible and led the way to national phone service. The subsequent development