Arlen's Tapeworms: The Tunes That Got Away

The title of this essay does not refer to any intestinal condition suffered by the composer Harold Arlen (1905-1986), whose physical health was decent if fragile for much of his working life until Parkinson's set in during the 1970s. Indeed, tapeworm is probably a misnomer for songs like those named above; it implies continual growth or expansion of the kind music analysts mean when describing as "through-composed" classical songs with little or no internal structural repetition.