Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki
Villa Terrace Art Museum
The Villa Terrace Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The first hit song by a Milwaukeean was written by Charles K. Harris. His melancholic, romantic “After the Ball” sold five million copies—not records but sheet music. The success encouraged Harris to leave the Midwest in the 1890s and set himself up as a music publisher in New York’s “Tin Pan Alley,” a district named for the tinny sound of made-for-order tunes pounded out by aspiring writers on cheap pianos.
The success of “After the Ball” was an inspiration point for the Villa Terrace exhibition “The Beat Goes On! The Art and History of Sheet Music, 1897-1957.” “I started the exhibit with ‘After the Ball’ in mind because of its Milwaukee connection. We tried to draw on local sources when possible,” says Annemarie Sawkins, co-curator with Martha Chaiklin, The exhibit includes artifacts from songs commissioned for Milwaukee’s centennial celebration and concludes with sheet music, and an autographed electric guitar, from the “Wizard of Waukesha,” Les Paul.
The exhibit’s 60-year span, with some 60 examples of sheet music cover pages, encompasses the format’s golden years. By the 1890s, middle-class parlors were furnished with upright pianos stocked with classics as well as the pop tunes of the day. “Mass-produced pianos became affordable—there was no television or radio,” Sawkins says of fin de siècle America. “If you didn’t have a piano, maybe your neighbor did. It became a way for people to gather. And learning to play piano was a standard part of a young person’s education—it was a social expectation that you’d have some knowledge of piano.”
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Home Entertainment
Even before the advent of television, the rise of radio and recorded music marked a shift in home entertainment. Even so, sheet music continues to be produced as new generations learn to play instruments. One of the principal sponsors for “The Beat Goes On!” is the world’s largest sheet music publisher, Hal Leonard, headquartered in Milwaukee.
Period recorded music will fill Villa Terrace’s galleries, but the show’s emphasis is on sheet music’s front pieces, the covers, as visual art and historical documents. Like LP covers in the late 20th century, “sheet music covers helped to sell the music,” Sawkins says. “Sheet music is American historical ephemera. What excites me are the colors, the fonts, the graphics. Song publishers reached out to illustrators and fine artists for their covers.”
Those covers reflected the visual trends of their time, from Victorian sentimentalism through art nouveau and art deco until photography of the pop stars associated with the songs pushed illustrations to the margins. As a center for printing and lithography, Milwaukee had a role to play in the proliferation of sheet music, even when the songwriters had no ties to the Cream City.
“The Beat Goes On!” is arranged under such broad themes as “Transportation” (trains, planes, automobiles), “Women” (love and romance), “Orientalism” (exotic images of the East) and more. A few of the images are shockingly racist, reflecting the stereotypes of their period. The collection includes sheet music by esteemed composers such as Duke Ellington and Cole Porter as well as a raft of forgotten tunesmiths. “The chat labels talk about the artists or the illustrators, their personalities and careers—or about the music,” Sawkins says.
Sawkins, co-author of the definitive book A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art, first worked with Chaiklin while co-curating a 2015 exhibit at the Charles Allis Museum, “More on Less: The History of Burlesque.” Chaiklin is now with the Smithsonian Institution.
“This is a very fun project, an art exhibition for everybody—art people, music people, anyone interested in graphic design and American history,” Sawkins concludes. “There are so many angles, cultural and ethnic, the history of entertainment. ‘The Beat Goes On!’ also shows that you don’t have to have million dollars paintings to say something interesting about art. Sheet music was mass produced. The value is in what they teach us about America and about how things have changed.”
“The Beat Goes On! The Art and History of Sheet Music, 1897-1957” opens Thursday, July 31 with a 5-8 p.m. reception at Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens, 2220 N. Terrace Ave. Several concerts are planned during the run of the exhibition, including Milwaukee acts such as Old Sam and the Teardrops, the Troubadours of Rhythm and Natalie Ford (soprano) and Mary Rebers (piano). “The Beat Goes On!” continues through January 18.
