Thank you, Elmore for your help today. I don't know yet know how it will help, but it made me listen to the "Within the Quota" differently on my ride home tonight.
DR John G, you have to take "Within the Quota," along with "The snake in the Grass," as two of Porter's attempts to push his talents as a "serious" composer. not as the writer of popular songs like"Let's do It" or "You've Got That Thing." Both he and Rodgers aspired to Gershwin's success on the concert stage, but they're really miniaturists. It's as masters of the popular song form and its extensions where they excelled. I think as melodists Porter and Gershwin stand behind Rodgers, and I think they all stand behind Kern.
Sousa's band had a big success in European tours with ragtime and African-American rhythms at the turn of the century, although Paris always liked exotic musicians - Louis Moreau Gottschalk was very popular in Paris with his Cuban-influenced creole romanticism of the 1850s. If you don't know "Bamboula" or "The Banjo" and other piano pieces by Gottschalk, you're in for a treat. Imagine Chopin as a cakewalk.
A lot of black American performers ended up in Paris in the 1920s - Bricktop, josephine Baker, for example - and you had black jazz bands influencing Stravinsky (two "ragtime" pieces which show he still didn't understand it), Krenek (Johnny spielt auf), Kurt Weill (Threepenny Opera), Debussy (Golliwog's Cakewalk), Ravel (Piano concerto in G), Milhaud (Le creation du monde and Le boeuf sur le toit). The black bands in Europe did two things: improvised as jazz musicians and played popular songs with a "jazz" infusion. I think all the classically trained European composers would have been horrified to lose control of what they wrote with improvisation but I think they loved the new chords and the blue notes. Then, there were all the orchestra colors - harmon, hat, and cup mutes, trombone glissandi, brass growls, and other "rude" sounds - that the bands revelled in and these were things the composers could steal and take to "serious" music.
