Word: hammersteins
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Undeterred by the fact that Boston had the misfortune to have its Icicle Ball cancelled, I ventured to the somewhat hallowed halls of New York city’s Hammerstein Ballroom, which was not so unlucky. Artist Direct’s Snocore mini-festivals have two different tours that run concurrently. The rock tour, which this year featured Alien Ant Farm and The Apex Theory, caters for the harder-headed listeners, while the romantically named Icicle Ball presents an eclectic mix of artists tending towards the more adventurous. This year’s Ball even featured poet Saul Williams...
...Hammerstein Ballroom...
...sentiment and a brash, welcoming wit made him the favorite composer of the people - but maybe not of other top composers. I wonder if he was ever considered a member of their club, of whether he considered himself one. Oh, they were all chummy. Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were his producers on "Annie Get Your Gun"; he took over from Kern, who had died suddenly. (Twenty years earlier, Rodgers was not so pleased when, at the request of the star Belle Baker, Berlin had written a song for her to interpolate into an otherwise all-Rodgers-and-Hart score...
...Oddly, or aptly, Warren was the composer Berlin most resembled in immigrant background (Warren was born in Brooklyn of Italian parents), natural melodic gift and lack of formal musical training. Most of the others - Kern, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Larry Hart - were of German Jewish stock from the educated middle-class; Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant, raised on the Lower East Side, quickly out of school and into the showbiz fringe as a singing waiter. Their music came from honing a natural talent with years of study; his songwriting gift was a freak of nature. No wonder he fretted that this...
...Most important, they wrote music people thought was important. Kern and Hammerstein made the Broadway musical respectable with "Show Boat." George and Ira Gershwin were the first songwriters to win a Pulitzer Prize for a musical ("Of Thee I Sing"). Berlin did some work for Broadway in this period, but mainly he ground out one-off songs. You could say that he made nothing but hits and money. He talked grandly about writing a "folk opera" (Gershwin finally did); Puccini supposedly wanted to collaborate with him on an opera. But Berlin was compelled to keep writing in a form that...