Description |
xvi, 453 pages : illustration ; 25 cm. |
Series |
The Michigan American music series
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Michigan American music series.
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Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 411-419) and indexes. |
Contents |
Ch. 1. Sondheim's Career and Output -- The Hammerstein connection ; College activities ; A student in New York ; Journeyman work ; Sondheim as lyricist: West Side story ; A decade of uncertainty ; A career in full flight ; Into the 1990s -- -- Ch. 2. The compositional process -- General considerations ; Lyric sketches ; Prosody ; Music sketches ; The score ; Orchestration ; Literary sources -- -- Ch. 3. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum -- Farce as Genre ; Plautus, new comedy, and "trick" songs ; The score and its profile ; The Broadway matrix and Hispanic features ; Refrain and motif songs: structural ambiguities ; The meaning of song construction ; The whole song -- -- Ch. 4. Anyone Can Whistle -- The motivic score ; Act 1 ; Act 2 ; Act 3 ; The generic scheme ; Divertissement songs ; Symphonic songs ; A score in search of a show? -- -- Ch. 5. Company -- The concept musical ; The modernist lyric ; Urban music ; The score as a whole ; The need for deconstruction ; The question of the ending ; The four last songs -- -- Ch. 6. Follies -- The image in the mirror ; The list song ; Song as folly ; Diegetic song ; Character groupings in Follies ; The pastiches ; The ghost music ; The original music ; In praise of folly -- -- Ch. 7. A little night music ; Sondheim's middle period ; Folly once more, and its motifs ; Period tone: the Nineteenth Century ; The waltz and its symbolism ; The metric fount: hemiola ; Character dances and further rhythmic resources ; The lyrics and hemiola ; Lyrics and the Luftpause ; The ending -- -- Ch. 8. Pacific overtures -- The orientalist tradition ; Pacific overtures as historical pageant ; The reflexive dimension ; Aspects of the lyrics ; Multiple perspectives in the music ; The phrygian matrix and stylistic unity ; The kabuki element ; Ritual form and the mimetic interlude -- -- Ch. 9. Sweeney Todd -- A piece that sings ; Is Sweeney Todd opera? ; Diegetic musical motifs ; The Dies irae ; Structural processes in the score ; The range of the score ; The universal ballad -- -- Ch. 10. Merrily we roll along -- The problem of the show musical ; The historical metaphor ; Concordances of the reverse narrative ; Musical planes: Frank and Gussie ; Modular furniture: the popular song analyzed ; Stylistic unity and the return to Broadway ; The show song and its meanings -- -- Ch. 11. Sunday in the park with George -- The joyous synthesis ; Wagner, musical impressionism, and the synaesthetic circle ; Chromatic theory ; Chromaticism, diatonicism, and pointillism in the score ; Promenades ; Theme and variation ; Toward a fundamental aesthetic ; Sondheim moves on -- -- Ch. 12. Into the woods -- A fairy tale musical ; Morals and choices ; Musical and lyric simplicity ; Beans and spells ; Pentatonic innocence and children's games ; The music of a community ; The achievement. |
Subject |
Sondheim, Stephen. Musicals.
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Musicals -- New York (State) -- New York -- History and criticism.
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Musicals. |
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New York (State) -- New York. |
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Musicals. |
Other Form: |
Online version: Banfield, Stephen, 1951- Sondheim's Broadway musicals. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1993 (OCoLC)622100691 |
ISBN |
0472102230 alkaline paper |
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9780472102235 alkaline paper |
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0472080830 paperback |
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9780472080830 paperback |
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