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.1 Rather, “tapeworm” was a term used by Arlen to describe his songs that extend beyond the standard thirty-two-bar span, including “That Old Black Magic” (75 bars), “The Man That Got Away” (61), “Blues in the Night” (58), and “One for My Baby” (60). When his biographer Edward Jablonski asked Arlen whether he was trying to be “different” from other songwriters with such frequent departures from convention, Arlen replied, “I don't think I'm trying to be different. Sometimes I get into trouble; in order to get out of trouble I break the form: I start twisting and turning, get into another key or go sixteen extra bars in order to resolve the song. And often as not I'm happier with the extension than I would have been trying to keep the song in regular form.”2