Word: musics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Townshend, 34, has been wrestling with the dynamic connection between his audience and his music ever since he wrote My Generation. One, indeed, is the life's blood of the other. Early songs like My Generation (with its stuttered chorus, "Why don't you all f-f-f-f-fade away") and The Kids Are Alright were youth anthems in the best sense, brash and savage declarations of independence. Even the rock opera Tommy, with its dazzling music locked in perpetual combat with a convoluted narrative, passed the palm to the audience as Tommy sang to his followers...
...coming here," says Salant. "They ought to be worried." But Salant still refuses to jazz up the news. Just before he arrived at NBC the network made an admirably Salantesque gesture: it abolished the bouncy Henry Mancini theme that introduced Chancellor-Brinkley, substituting a newsy sounding melange of electronic music. The new theme is properly unobtrusive, though not nearly so classy as that grand old snippet of Beethoven's Ninth used in the 1960s. Earlier this month he warned his colleagues...
...INTRICATE MUSIC, A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STEINBECK by Thomas Kiernan; Little, Brown; 331 pages...
Without the American musical theater there might not be any American theater. Except for a very occasional O'Neill or Williams, the great writers of the U.S. stage have not been playwrights but composers and lyricists: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, to name but a few. Beginning with the first modern musical, Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat (1927), these writers have created a durable and increasingly versatile native art form. Broadway musicals at their best fuse music, dance, drama and plain old show...
...Rodgers' legendary composing speed (ten minutes for Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin') and nudges Merman into an unflattering reminiscence of Porter's voice ("He sang like a hinge"). With the aid of Choreographer Agnes de Mille, Kaye re-creates the excitement kindled by Oklahoma!, the first musical to integrate all its songs into a story. A few of Kaye's points are debatable. She sweepingly dismisses rock musicals, even though rock is not necessarily incompatible with musical theater. (Indeed, the Beatles sang a song from The Music Man on their first hit American album.) Kaye...