27 Ibid., 19. "In fact, I ... had it end on a sort of dissonant chord with kind of violent harmonics — meaning very high, shrill sounds," he says. There’s no look-at-me artifice in Being Alive, his great anthem from Company. The award gave Sondheim the opportunity to study with avant-garde composer "I wanted to learn compositional technique, and that's what I learned from him," Sondheim says. "Then I try to start from the first song, and if I have a lyric line or a phrase, I'll expand a bit. The common complaint about his songs, so integrated into his shows that they’re often hard to lift out to become free-standing hits, is that they’re less than “hummable”. Stephen Sondheim was born in 1930, in New York City, but he moved to Pennsylvania when he was about 10 years old after his parents divorced.
He is not unique in writing the lyrics and music to all his shows in the past 40 years, but no one else comes close as a master of both words and melody. Each word is just right, and in its right place. And then you'll say 'All right, I've got this line that ends with "day" and I want to say "She loves him,' " and then you go through the rhyming dictionary. "During this musical sketching process, Sondheim doesn't record himself — he just makes notations on what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. 24 Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: a life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, 1998), 3-4. "And when he needs to create a rhyme, Sondheim says, it's crucial to know what he wants to say beforehand. I interviewed him at his New York home some 20 years ago, and found him quick to bristle at challenging questions. How smart of the organisers of tomorrow night’s Olivier theatre awards to bestow their 2011 Special Award on Stephen Sondheim, placing him in a (mostly British) coterie that includes Harold Pinter, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith – and Laurence Olivier himself. In 1998, Sondheim said that the often repeated quote about his views on Rodgers's and Hammerstein's respective talents and souls was in response to a reporter's asking, 'Why do you think Rodgers and Hammerstein make a good team? '"-from Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical by Stephen Citron "No, Sondheim is under no illusions. I'd be in another kind of profession.
26 Ibid., 31. I asked if he blamed himself when his shows flopped – like Merrily We Roll Along, which closed after 16 performances on Broadway. So, much of the music for Sweeney Todd has a lowering, operatic quality; A Little Night Music feels like an operetta and is largely in waltz time. I’ve often thought anyone who writes for a living (including humble journalists) could profit from studying Sondheim’s lyrics closely.
In the same way, there’s no recognisable Sondheim “brand”; over the years, he has aimed to write shows that are different from each other, and it shows. So I won’t tell you what to think about Assassins, but I will say this: I think it’s vitally important for Americans to consider what can drive people to such horrifying acts. Jordan Fredericks 2017 7 The reason why his experiences while he was young are important is because it eventually led Sondheim to meet his first musical theatre mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, who taught some of Sondheim’s most important musical theatre lessons. No one would say that of Sondheim. He’s 80 now, and a more benign, jovial figure. So I decided to learn more about these two particular composers and find what made their songs so exciting to work on. "I will improvise or think of various melodic ideas and sometimes chord sequences. His casts and collaborators find Sondheim warm and generous, yet to others he seems distant and forbidding. I’m delighted. "You can improvise and think, 'Wait, that A-flat doesn't sound right,' and you change things as you go along, even though you're just sketching. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Genres: Musical theatre: Occupation(s) Composer; lyricist; Years active: 1954–present: One of the … Yet over the years, some have admired his talents without actually enjoying them. "There are certain rhymes Sondheim says he would never use again — "They're words that have many meanings and many connotations so that's what I mean," Sondheim says.And words, he says, are why he's in theater in the first place. Stephen Sondheim is a deserving winner of the Olivier Special Award. There are no lazy half-rhymes, no sentiments carelessly or incompletely expressed.
But there's so many rhymes for 'day.' One thing is clear, both use text and narrative to guide their … Non-fans have found his lyrics tricky and elitist – though anyone who can devise such an ingenious internal rhyme for a line as “What makes him so reptilian is his brilliantine” is fine by me. "We had four-hour sessions once a week and we would spend the first hour analyzing songs by Though Babbitt influenced Sondheim's compositional techniques, he says it was the film composer Sondheim says he wrote the music to mimic the madness that's taking place in Sweeney's head — and that he originally resisted writing a conclusion that would move an audience to applaud. The Olivier Special Award crowns a time of tributes to him; last year an ecstatic night at the Proms celebrated his career, and a Broadway theatre was renamed after him. ... At the same time, I'm also jotting down any lyric," he says. 25 Ibid., 22. Stephen Joshua Sondheim (/ ˈ s ɒ n d h aɪ m /; born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist known for his work in musical theatre. Sondheim (left) wrote the lyrics for "The process of putting something down on paper is very important in keeping the stuff alive in your head," he says. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns, once groused: “He could make me a lot happier if he’d write more songs for saloon singers like me.” Well, tough, Frank, because he doesn’t.
Once I sang Moments in the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and The Audition Sequence by Jason Robert Brown, I realized the amount of extra detail there was in their work in comparison with other songs I previously sang.
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