If you have heard songs by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, or George Gershwin, you are already familiar with the 20th-century American popular songbook. Yet few have heard of the Rochester native who helped define and expand this tradition to such an extent that the industry never quite knew where to place him: Alec Wilder.
Alexander Lafayette Chew Wilder was born in Rochester in 1907, and it was here he emerged with a foundation in compositional technique. At the Eastman School of Music, Wilder studied counterpoint and composition as an informal student under Herbert Inch and Edward Royce.
Eastman offered him an immersion into modern soundscapes and classical tradition, though his ear was never confined to them. While Gershwin had translated the jazz idiom to the symphonic stage with Rhapsody in Blue, Wilder pushed further by dissolving the boundaries of jazz, classical, and American popular music.
Wilder was a master of melody and harmony. His Song Cycle Sketchbook bears countless erasures and rescoring, a testament to his obsession over counterpoint and melodic line. His compositional philosophy respected the regimented form while adding a tasteful harmonic palette.
Wilder’s early classical compositions, notably his Octets, showcase the brilliance and richness of this approach. Yet these were never far from the popular idiom, whose demands of adapted orchestration techniques held their own attraction to him. No genre stood in isolation for Wilder; the versatile composer moved across genres and earned the profound admiration of some of the most influential figures of the 20th-century music industry.
Frank Sinatra was perhaps the most devoted among them. Wilder’s excellence in the romantic ballad no doubt appealed to Sinatra, and the patronage that followed was rare in its constancy. Sinatra recorded the poignant “I’ll Be Around” on In the Wee Small Hours and the haunting “Where is the One?” on Where are you? He also championed the intimate chamber soundscapes of Wilder, conducting a full album of compositions on Columbia Records in 1945, and two tone poems on Capitol Records a decade later.
Wilder was also a poet. His verse resists easy categorization as much as his music. Some titles even invoke musical vocabulary: for instance, one poem entitled “Plagal Cadence.” Wilder obscures the obvious harmonic connotation by dwelling on existential themes through etymology: the Greek plagios (sideways) and the Latin cadere (to fall). Wilder survives in more than his compositions; he documented the very style in which he thrived.
Wilder wrote American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 in his late career, and hosted the Peabody Award-winning NPR show American Popular Song with Alec Wilder and Friends.
From these titles alone, it seems contradictory that a composer obsessed with blending genres would narrow his focus so intensely on the standards of the American Songbook. Yet Wilder’s analysis of the American musical identity is less a retreat than an acknowledgment of the sophistication it required. Composers in this style were bound to a restrictive form and thus privileged the very techniques Wilder had mastered, making the topic a natural subject for his late-career pursuits.
Wilder preferred to let his work speak for itself. Before he died in 1980, he asked that there be no public notice or funeral service. But a composer who moved so freely across style and devoted his life to the legacy of the craft in such seriousness has a way of outlasting his own modesty.
Rochester, the city that shaped Wilder, will have the chance to rediscover him. Mark Daniels, Jessica Ann Best, and Rob Goodling celebrate his music at Hatch Recital Hall on June 21, at 5:45 and 7:45p.m., as a part of the Rochester International Jazz Festival.
Alex Anderson is a jazz pianist, pipe organ builder, and musicologist from Rochester, studying architecture at Princeton University. He's interning with WXXI Classical this summer.