the history of musicals
Jul. 7th, 2010 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLooking for something to occupy my ears during a long drive recently, I happened upon the local library's shelves of white boxes of "Great Courses" lectures on multiple CDs. Music is a subject dear to me and also one particularly suited to providing examples for recorded lectures, so I looked those over. Unfortunately, every one of the many classical courses was by Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory. I say "unfortunately" because I have heard Prof. Greenberg in person many times and have little desire to do so again. His approach is too superficial for my tastes and often tendentious, and he has a highly mannered style that it's extremely easy to get terminally ill with.
Besides, these courses would be unlikely to say much I didn't already know. So how about a course on Broadway musicals? There's something I like but could certainly benefit from learning more about. It was given by Bill Messenger, a jazz pianist who lectures at the Peabody Institute.
Most surveys of Broadway I've seen run hastily through the early 20th century in order to wallow in the blockbusters of the 1940s on. Not Messenger. He takes the approach that Isaac Asimov took to the history of science: go way back to the beginning and trace the whole history, tucking the familiar recent stuff tightly into the end. As Messenger says in the course, you've heard the blockbusters of the 1940s on, but you may not know their predecessors. So he spends half of his 16 lectures on the period from the 19th century up to WW1, limiting himself to the American vernacular stage tradition (no operettas, for instance) but interpreting that widely. So there are whole lectures on minstrel shows - which he defends as artistically interesting and generative, regardless of their racial offensiveness - ragtime, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, before he even gets around to going back to the genesis of Broadway-style musical theatre (which he dates to The Black Crook in 1866).
Of all these, ragtime is my favorite - I'd have been rather sad if I'd had to live through its going out of fashion in the late 1910s - particularly as Messenger classes that 1902 earworm "Under the Bamboo Tree" as a ragtime song. (If you don't know this song, here's Judy Garland singing it in Meet Me in St. Louis, but be warned - it's dangerously catchy.)
Amid all his well-told anecdotes - he's fond of telling stories about flops and revealing at the end the title, showing that it became a famous hit you've still heard of today - Messenger has some cogent thoughts on musical structure and even on melodic practice. (He considers flatted sevenths absolutely the bee's knees.) Still-famous songs he often doesn't even play at all, but there are a number of original recordings of early 20C songs and reconstructed versions of 19C ones, interpolated into the lectures. Sometimes Messenger just plays the songs himself, but here lies a problem. First, he can't sing. He talks through the lyrics is a manner more akin to a campfire singalong leader than to Rex Harrison. And second, he can't stop playing like a sub-Tatum jazz pianist, the kind whose playing of the actual tune is only detectable in the blizzard of decoration if you already know how it goes.
It's not until lecture 13 that he finally gets to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and that's where I am now. As he said he wasn't covering operetta, it's not surprising that not until now does he get around to even mentioning Gilbert and Sullivan, and that only in the context of pointing out that Hammerstein was not influenced by Gilbert (whereas Larry Hart, for one, was). Messenger says that where Gilbert will write "[We'll] indulge in the felicity / of unbounded domesticity," Hammerstein will write, "Let's get married," leaving no doubt that he prefers Hammerstein.
Well, I don't. I do actually like Rodgers and Hammerstein better than Rodgers and Hart, but only because I think Rodgers wrote better melodies with Hammerstein than he did with Hart. (Messenger discusses the change in Rodgers' style and Rodgers' denial that there was one.) Pawing through a Broadway survey CD set that we have, in the wake of listening to Messenger, I find something weirdly fascinating about the melody of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," for instance, and even more its orchestration, despite the fact that the lyrics are the most appalling thing I've ever heard. So it's been, all the way back to "Under the Bamboo Tree" (rather dicey lyrics itself, which may be why it's less remembered than its contemporaries like "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game") and the minstrel shows. Clever lyrics can enhance the appreciation of a good melody, and vice versa; but enjoyment of a tune does not imply endorsement of its lyrics.
Besides, these courses would be unlikely to say much I didn't already know. So how about a course on Broadway musicals? There's something I like but could certainly benefit from learning more about. It was given by Bill Messenger, a jazz pianist who lectures at the Peabody Institute.
Most surveys of Broadway I've seen run hastily through the early 20th century in order to wallow in the blockbusters of the 1940s on. Not Messenger. He takes the approach that Isaac Asimov took to the history of science: go way back to the beginning and trace the whole history, tucking the familiar recent stuff tightly into the end. As Messenger says in the course, you've heard the blockbusters of the 1940s on, but you may not know their predecessors. So he spends half of his 16 lectures on the period from the 19th century up to WW1, limiting himself to the American vernacular stage tradition (no operettas, for instance) but interpreting that widely. So there are whole lectures on minstrel shows - which he defends as artistically interesting and generative, regardless of their racial offensiveness - ragtime, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, before he even gets around to going back to the genesis of Broadway-style musical theatre (which he dates to The Black Crook in 1866).
Of all these, ragtime is my favorite - I'd have been rather sad if I'd had to live through its going out of fashion in the late 1910s - particularly as Messenger classes that 1902 earworm "Under the Bamboo Tree" as a ragtime song. (If you don't know this song, here's Judy Garland singing it in Meet Me in St. Louis, but be warned - it's dangerously catchy.)
Amid all his well-told anecdotes - he's fond of telling stories about flops and revealing at the end the title, showing that it became a famous hit you've still heard of today - Messenger has some cogent thoughts on musical structure and even on melodic practice. (He considers flatted sevenths absolutely the bee's knees.) Still-famous songs he often doesn't even play at all, but there are a number of original recordings of early 20C songs and reconstructed versions of 19C ones, interpolated into the lectures. Sometimes Messenger just plays the songs himself, but here lies a problem. First, he can't sing. He talks through the lyrics is a manner more akin to a campfire singalong leader than to Rex Harrison. And second, he can't stop playing like a sub-Tatum jazz pianist, the kind whose playing of the actual tune is only detectable in the blizzard of decoration if you already know how it goes.
It's not until lecture 13 that he finally gets to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and that's where I am now. As he said he wasn't covering operetta, it's not surprising that not until now does he get around to even mentioning Gilbert and Sullivan, and that only in the context of pointing out that Hammerstein was not influenced by Gilbert (whereas Larry Hart, for one, was). Messenger says that where Gilbert will write "[We'll] indulge in the felicity / of unbounded domesticity," Hammerstein will write, "Let's get married," leaving no doubt that he prefers Hammerstein.
Well, I don't. I do actually like Rodgers and Hammerstein better than Rodgers and Hart, but only because I think Rodgers wrote better melodies with Hammerstein than he did with Hart. (Messenger discusses the change in Rodgers' style and Rodgers' denial that there was one.) Pawing through a Broadway survey CD set that we have, in the wake of listening to Messenger, I find something weirdly fascinating about the melody of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," for instance, and even more its orchestration, despite the fact that the lyrics are the most appalling thing I've ever heard. So it's been, all the way back to "Under the Bamboo Tree" (rather dicey lyrics itself, which may be why it's less remembered than its contemporaries like "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game") and the minstrel shows. Clever lyrics can enhance the appreciation of a good melody, and vice versa; but enjoyment of a tune does not imply endorsement of its lyrics.
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Date: 2010-07-08 10:27 pm (UTC)