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Night and Day

music and words by Cole Porter

AS SUNG BY FRED ASTAIRE, who introduced the song in the 1932 Broadway musical Gay Divorce, ‘Night and Day’ starts on a B flat: ‘Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom / When the jungle shadows fall / Like the tick tick tock of a stately clock / As it stands against the wall’. Four lines and thirty-three B flats later, he’s still on that same note. This is minimalist, you might say literal word-painting: tom-toms and clocks don’t change pitch.

In the verse’s second stanza, he moves up a step to B natural on ‘drip’: ‘Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops’. Then up another step to C on ‘summer’: ‘When the summer shower is through’. Then he drops back via B natural to B flat again on ‘voice’: ‘So a voice within me keeps repeating / You, you, you’. And with those repetitions of ‘You’, slow and insistent, one to a bar, the rhythm steadies and the chorus finally arrives, along with the song’s title.

‘Night and Day …’ Almost unbelievably, he continues to sing the B flat! It’s only with the following line that the melody begins to unfold.

Porter’s lyric describes an obsession. Guy Holden, Astaire’s character in Gay Divorce, is besotted with Mimi Glossop and thinks about her ‘night and day’. The ‘longing’ is with him not only in ‘the roaring traffic’s boom’ but also ‘the silence of [his] lonely room’. Porter wrote a number of songs about obsessive desire, including ‘So in Love’ and ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, and ‘Night and Day’ gives the imagery of the latter a trial run: ‘Night and Day / Under the hide of me, / There’s an oh such a hungry / Yearning burning inside of me.’

Just as the verse’s persistent B flat mirrored the sound of the drum and the clock, now it plays a vital role in the chorus. ‘Night and Day’ is in the key of E flat, so B flat is the fifth note of the scale, the dominant. It certainly dominates the melody of ‘Night and Day’. The singer can’t leave it alone. As the tune drops away chromatically from the B flat, we may think we’re going somewhere new, but the words tell us the truth: ‘Whether near to me or far, / It’s no matter, darling, where you are: / I think of you / Night and day.’ Down the melodic line goes, step by step, all the way to the B flat an octave below (‘I think of you’), only to bounce back up to the original B flat on ‘Night and Day’.

The manner in which the melody of ‘Night and Day’ creeps around is typical Porter, whose songs are full of scalic lines. These contribute to a general perception of his music. Porter wrote major-key songs, but it’s surprising how many of them seem to be in minor keys. The ‘tragic major’ is something Porter had in common with Schubert in his later music.

‘Night and Day’ is a good example. At the opening of the chorus, the third of those repeated B flats – the one on ‘day’ – sits on top of a chord of C flat major, the melodic B flat turning the chord into a seventh. It’s a wonderfully strange and chromatic chord, the G flat hinting that the song is in E flat minor. None of this would matter very much, but it is harmonic ambiguities such as this that make Porter’s songs so recognisable.

Structurally, the song is an oddity. Instead of the thirty-two bars that were fairly common among popular songs in the 1930s, ‘Night and Day’ has forty-eight, a structure we might label ABABCB – that’s sixteen bars (AB), repeated with different words (the next AB), then varied (CB). In the C section, that G flat is reinforced because the music jumps, suddenly and memorably, to a chord of G flat major (this is at ‘Night and day / Under the hide of me’).

The final eight bars provide a further twist and the song’s melodic climax. The lyrical payoff is Guy’s declaration that his ‘torment’ will only be ended by Mimi’s allowing him to make love to her for the rest of his life, an alarming prospect that was only slightly less alarming in 1932 when ‘making love’ meant sending flowers and holding hands. On the words ‘this torment won’t be through’, Astaire begins the chromatic descent we’ve already heard twice in the earlier B sections, but this time he doesn’t make it all the way down to the low B flat.

The line ‘Till you let me spend my life making love to you’ gets as far as E flat, but on the word ‘making’ arrests its descent, mid-phrase, to jump back up the octave and place ‘love’ on the high D. Then the line completes its journey down to B flat (on ‘Day and night’), but it’s the original B flat, which is now a springboard to E flat (‘Night and day’), the song’s highest note, its last and its tonic.

Gay Divorce was Astaire’s final appearance in a Broadway musical, but two years later he starred in the RKO film The Gay Divorcee with Ginger Rogers. The Hays office, Hollywood’s self-imposed moral enforcer, took the view that divorce should never be ‘gay’, and so insisted on the name change. Perhaps they heard in the new title an echo of The Merry Widow. It wasn’t the only change the movie made to the stage show. All of Porter’s songs were now gone, with the exception of ‘Night and Day’, because, by then, Astaire’s recording with Leo Reisman’s Orchestra was one of the decade’s greatest hits.