Burton Lane

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Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox musical artist

Burton Lane (born Levy; February 2, 1912 – January 5, 1997) was an American composer primarily known for his theatre and film scores. His most popular and successful works include the musicals Finian's Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).

Biography

Early life

Burton Lane was born Burton Levy, in Manhattan, New York City, on February 2, 1912, to Lazarus and Frances Fink Levy.<ref>Vallance, Tom. Obituary: Burton Lane" The Independent, January 8, 1997</ref><ref name="times-obituary">Severo, Richard. "Burton Lane, Composer for 'Finian's Rainbow' and 'Clear Day,' Is Dead at 84" The New York Times, January 7, 1997</ref><ref>Template:Harvnb. This source gives the most exact location of Lane's birth.</ref>Template:Refn When a teenager, Burton changed his surname to Lane at the suggestion of someone with whom he was auditioning, and his brother and cousins followed suit.Template:Sfn

Lane's parents loved music, and his mother played piano, but she died when Burton was two years old.Template:Sfn He studied piano, viola and cello as a child, and composed two marches for his school band which were published. At age 14 the theatrical producers the Shuberts commissioned him to write songs for a revue, The Greenwich Village Follies. That show was canceled, but Lane remained committed to music.Template:Sfn He played piano so well that, when his father pushed him to play in public in a boarding house in Atlantic City during the winter holidays, George Gershwin's mother introduced herself to the Lanes, and Burton subsequently met George, his lyricist brother Ira, and Ira's best friend Yip Harburg, Burton's future collaborator.Template:Sfn

A friend of Lane's knew the lyricist Joe Young, who was working for the music publisher J.H. Remick. Young asked Lane to compose a tune for one of his lyrics, which Lane did on the spot. Young was impressed, recommended Lane to Remick's,<ref name="wolinsky">Template:Cite web</ref> and Lane dropped out of high school to compose for them.Template:Sfn

At the age of 18, Lane began his Broadway career when he composed "My Real Ideal" and "Two Perfect Lovers" for the 1930 edition of the revue Artists and Models,Template:Sfn and two songs used in the revue Three's a Crowd: "Forget All Your Books" and "Out in the Open Air."Template:Sfn In the post-Depression Broadway slump Lane was only able to contribute to a few more shows. Lane and Harold Adamson wrote the songs for The Earl Carroll Vanities of 1931,Template:Sfn and Lane placed songs written with Adamson or Harburg in several other shows.Template:Sfn He continued writing and publishing single songs; two that had some success were "Look Who's Here" and "Tony's Wife", both with lyrics by Adamson.Template:Sfn

Lane's early days on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway ended when his employer, Irving Berlin Inc., sent him and Adamson to Hollywood for six weeks, and Lane remained there for 21 years.Template:Sfn

Career and notable works

Lane wrote the majority of his music for films, more than 60 of them.Template:Refn He and Adamson wrote songs together freelance for several different studios from 1933 to 1936.Template:Sfn In 1933 their song "Everything I Have Is Yours" was introduced in Dancing Lady and became a hit.Template:Sfn

In 1935, according to Lane, he discovered the 13-year-old Judy Garland.Template:Refn He caught her sisters' act at the Paramount theater in downtown Los Angeles, which featured a live stage show along with the movie. The older sisters, Suzy and Jimmy, brought on their younger sister Judy. Lane immediately called the head of the music department at MGM and told him he'd just heard a great new talent. The head told Lane to have her brought in for an audition. Lane went backstage and arranged an audition with the girls' father. The head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, was so impressed by Garland's audition that he ordered every producer, director and writer to hear her, with the result that the audition, which began at 9:30 am, finished at 7:30 pm, and MGM signed her. Lane left MGM soon after and worked with other studios and projects for some years. When he finally worked together with Garland, on Babes on Broadway in 1941, she remembered him and thanked him.Template:Sfn Other people also claimed to have arranged that audition, and their and Garland's accounts differ from Lane's.Template:Sfn

File:Paramountpicturesmelrosegate.jpg
Paramount Studios, where Lane wrote songs from 1936 to 1941

Lane worked for Paramount Pictures from 1936 to 1941, at first primarily with lyricist Ralph Freed. Their biggest success together was the hit "How About You?", in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's characters got to know each other in Babes on Broadway; it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.Template:Sfn In 1938, Lane's agent introduced him to two other clients, Frank Loesser and Manning Sherwin, and Lane heard a couple of their songs. Lane was especially impressed by Loesser's lyrics. Lane introduced the two to a producer at Paramount, Lew Gensler, and they were signed to a ten-week contract.Template:Sfn<ref name="attie">Template:Cite web Audio interview with Lane on diverse topics. Includes sung and played performance of "On a Clear Day".</ref> Loesser soon began writing songs with Lane. They had many successes at Paramount, including the standards "The Lady's in Love with You"Template:Sfn and "I Hear Music".Template:Sfn Lane also recommended to Paramount the then-unknown Mary Martin, whom he had heard in a cabaret show, though they didn't sign her until after her successful Broadway debut.Template:Sfn

Lane worked for a number of studios in the 1940s and 1950s.Template:Sfn His most notable film in that period was Royal Wedding (1951), with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner,Template:Sfn from which "Too Late Now" was nominated for a Best Song Academy Award.<ref name="24th-oscars">Template:Cite web</ref> Lane said that it was the only time in Hollywood that he'd been allowed, by producer Arthur Freed, to work with the star, Fred Astaire, to plan the musical numbers, and to write the kind of songs he wanted to write.<ref name="wolinsky"/>

File:Rodgers Theater - Hamilton (48193460677).jpg
Broadway's 46th Street Theatre, where Finian's Rainbow premiered in 1947

Despite his prolific output in Hollywood, Lane was most celebrated for two of his Broadway musicals. He composed the first, Finian's Rainbow, in 1947. Harburg co-wrote the libretto and wrote the lyrics.Template:Sfn It has been revived four times on Broadway and twice off-Broadway.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Songs from it including "Old Devil Moon",Template:Sfn "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"Template:Sfn and "If This Isn't Love"Template:Sfn have been recorded many times. It was made into a film in 1968.Template:Sfn

Lane's second acclaimed musical was On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, in 1965. Lerner wrote the libretto and lyrics.Template:Sfn Though Lerner's libretto was not well received,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and the show only ran for a middling 280 performances,Template:Sfn it was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Original Score,<ref name="clear-day-ibdb">Template:Cite web</ref> and Lane and Lerner shared a Grammy Award for Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album for its cast album.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Its title songTemplate:Sfn and "Come Back to Me"Template:Sfn<ref name="come-back-to-me-allmusic">Template:Cite web</ref> have been widely recorded. The show was adapted to film in 1970, with some new and revised songs by Lane and Lerner.Template:Sfn

Lane also wrote the music for the less remembered Broadway shows Hold On to Your Hats (1940, also with Harburg),Template:Sfn Laffing Room Only (1944), for which he himself also wrote almost all of the lyrics,Template:Refn and Carmelina (1979, also with Lerner).Template:Sfn Carmelina's libretto was also criticized, and it closed quickly,Template:Sfn but it was also nominated for a Tony Award for Best Original Score.<ref name="ibdb-carmelina">Template:Cite web</ref>

Lane's output was notably sparse after his film work declined in the 1950s.Template:Sfn He said that it was difficult to find a libretto that inspired a show's worth of varied songs.Template:Sfn He was hired to compose Arms and the Girl (1950), for which Dorothy and Herbert Fields had written a libretto. Immediately after reading it he left the project, telling them that he honestly felt the script was inadequate.Template:Sfn A few years later he was signed to score the Fieldses' By the Beautiful Sea (1954), but again quickly bowed out.Template:Sfn He chose not to work with Harburg on Flahooley (1951) because he felt Harburg had packed too much politics into the libretto for there to be any human interest, and "good songs come out of people". Lane passed up properties for other reasons as well: He and Harburg turned down Hello, Dolly! (1964) because it didn't have enough social significance to interest Harburg.Template:Sfn

Lane did finally collaborate with Dorothy Fields on the made-for-television musical Junior Miss, which aired on CBS on December 20, 1957.Template:Sfn His last major work, on which he collaborated for the first time with noted lyricist Sammy Cahn, was the animated musical Heidi's Song (1982).Template:Sfn

Personal and professional life

Lane married Marian Seaman in 1935. They had a daughter around 1943, who was mentally disabled. Though long, their marriage was not happy; in 1961 they finally divorced and he married Lynn Baroff Kaye.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

File:Representatives Oren Harris (left) and Steven B. Derounian quiz show scandals.jpg
November 4, 1959. Reps. Oren Harris (left) and Steven B. Derounian, to whose committee Lane sent charges of payola.

In 1957 Lane was drafted to be president of the American Guild of Authors and Composers. He served for ten terms, during which period he inaugurated a system of auditing music publishers' books to ensure that songwriters were paid their fair share of royalties.Template:Sfn He also served three terms on the board of directors of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). In 1959 he wrote on behalf of the Guild to the House subcommittee investigating payola in the music business, accusing publishers of bribing disk jockeys to play the publishers' songs. The cases he cited implied that payola promoted rock and roll, usually published by members of ASCAP's rival BMI, at the expense of other genres more often represented by ASCAP.Template:Sfn In 1966 the Guild honored his work with its first Sigmund Romberg Award. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972, elected its director in 1973,Template:Sfn and awarded its highest honor, the Johnny Mercer Award, in 1992.<ref name="songwriters-hall-of-fame">Template:Cite web</ref>

He died at his home in Manhattan on January 5, 1997.<ref name="times-obituary"/> He was survived by his second wife and their daughters.<ref name="songwriters-hall-of-fame"/>

Lane was raised in a largely Jewish environment, had to defend himself against anti-semitism as a boy, and received training for his bar mitzvah.Template:Sfn He considered himself Jewish throughout his life.Template:Sfn But, near the end of his life, he had no formal association with any Jewish organization.Template:Sfn In a 2009 interview, his widow stated that "I don’t think there was anything, of any real consequence, that Burton and Yip [Harburg, an avowed atheist] disagreed about."<ref>Template:Cite web "The Unchristmas Show" features an interview with Burton Lane's widow.</ref>

Musical style

Lane normally composed music to which a lyricist would then add words. But he would do so knowing what sort of song a scene called for, and sometimes the librettist or lyricist would have chosen a title which needed to fit rhythmically into the music. Sometimes Lane would suggest a place in a show that would benefit from a song. So he was "as responsible really as the lyricist ... or the librettist" for a show's choice and style of songs.Template:Sfn

"I don't know what my style is", Lane claimed in an interview,<ref name="attie"/> and he insisted that his personal life never showed in his work.Template:Sfn The noted critic Alec Wilder said that Lane had "no specific stylistic devices".Template:Sfn But Lane said repeatedly that, though he never actually worked or studied with him,<ref name="wolinsky"/> George Gershwin was his biggest influence, in particular in how he used surprise in his music.Template:Sfn<ref name="attie"/> "George was always interesting. Everything he did was always filled with delicious surprises, wonderful surprises."<ref name="wolinsky"/> Yip Harburg said that Lane was the composer who came closest to Gershwin's "effervescence".<ref name="attie"/> Wilder cites many examples of musical surprises in Lane's compositions.Template:Sfn Gershwin also inspired Lane to not pander to current commercial tastes, but to write quality songs.<ref name="wolinsky"/>

Lane noticed that the Gershwins did better work when they had better librettos to work from,<ref name="wolinsky"/> and was very particular about the librettos he chose to work from. He said, "I've always looked for properties that had either a background that was interesting or marvelous characters that could be caught musically, because I think, when you have that, it helps give a personality to the score that otherwise you might not have ... This is the pain of my life, trying to find good stories that lend themselves to musicals."<ref name="attie"/>

Works

Stage shows

Selected films

Lane wrote several original songs for each of these films.

He contributed original songs to many other films.Template:Refn

Notable songs

Template:Main

See also Songs with music by Burton Lane.

Discography

Stage shows and films

Songs

Notes

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References

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Sources

Template:Archival records

Interviews

Databases

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