List of film/theatre scores
- Puttin' on the Ritz (1930)
- Top Hat (1935)
- Follow the Fleet (1936)
- Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)
- Carefree (1938)
- Holiday Inn (1942)
- Easter Parade (1948)
- Annie Get Your Gun (theatre: 1946; film: 1950)
- White Christmas (1954)
This composer is an example of the following tropes:
- An Immigrant's Tale: He was born in Russia and came to the U.S. as a child.
- Blue Is Calm: "Blue Skies" extols blue skies and bluebirds indicators of inner peace and that things are looking up.
- Break Up Song: While he wrote plenty of straightforward love songs, quite a few of his standards are about relationships that have broken up or are about to, including "All Alone," "All By Myself," "What'll I Do?," "How About Me?," "[You Forgot To] Remember," and "Say It Isn't So."
- Christmas Songs: "White Christmas" is the most popular American Christmas song.
- Counterpoint Duet: He had one of the first hits in this format with 1914's "Play a Simple Melody" and returned to it throughout his career, including his last big hit, "You're Just In Love" from Call Me Madam, and his last new song in a musical, "An Old-Fashioned Wedding" from a 1966 revival of Annie Get Your Gun.
- Dreaming of a White Christmas: Trope Namer, though the not-very-commonly-performed verse establishes that the narrator is experiencing a sunny and warm Christmas Eve in "Beverly Hills, L.A." and is reminiscing about the snowy Christmases of his youth.
- Never Learned to Read: Not only could he not read or write music, he could only play in one key! Specifically, F sharp, so he could mostly stay in the black keys. He had a special piano built with what was essentially a giant lever-operated capo if ever he needed to transpose something. He got around his musical illiteracy by using a "musical secretary" to transcribe his songs. He once asked his songwriting friend Victor Herbert whether he should study composition, to which Herbert replied that it "might help you a little, but it could cramp your style".
- Protest Song:
- "I'll See You In C-U-B-A" about Prohibition.
- "Stay Down Here Where You Belong" from 1914 was a general protest against war but was pretty obviously inspired by the outbreak of World War I in Europe. It became an Old Shame for him after the US entered the war and he became known for patriotic songs.To please their kings they've all gone out to war,And not a one of them knows what he's fighting for.
- Qurac: "Araby", one of his early hits, and also an example of "Arabian Nights" Days, which gave him his surname (due to a typo on the sheet music, "Baline" came out as "Berlin".
- The Roaring '20s: Wrote songs which appeared in revues during this period, though he continued to work and remained plenty popular throughout The Great Depression all the way up to The '40s and The '50s.
