Word: songs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with the Coolidge Quartet and now a staff musician at CBS, turned in an hour-long score of easy melodies and rather plush harmonies. When an elephant became perplexed, the violins and xylophone played good-humored glissandos. When a camel strode, the tuba booped in tempo. And when a song showed signs of becoming too sugary, its harmonies were spiced with dissonance. Berezowsky's best moments came in the circus scene, when he let him self go in razzle-dazzle imitations of a wind band...
...Gigi's grandmother, Josephine Brown dominates the rest of the cast, but Margaret Bannerman is properly imperious as a retired mistress of kings. To the role of Gigi's mother, a frustrated Lakme in whom champagne brings out the Bell Song, Doris Patston contributes a giddy charm and a hefty coloratura. Michael Evans is too flamboyant as the roue snared by innocence, but Bertha Belmore's comic maid is the most accomplished scene stealer on the current stage...
Find a "New" Sound. When Miller has found a song for a singer, he calls in the musical arranger, looking for the best way to lift the tune out of the humdrum category. The first objectives: a "new" sound effect-e.g., reverberating echoes or the use of such unlikely instruments as braying French horns or a jangling harpsichord-and an insistent rhythm. To top off the arrangement, Miller asks for a full, rich sound. Sometimes this can be had by a clever distribution of instruments, sometimes it calls for a big orchestra and a massed chorus...
...only 75% of herself, with her managers and booking agents owning the other 25%. Above all, it was a world where the click or smash hit was the ultimate goal, where clearance (by payment to publishers' societies ASCAP and BMI) was necessary for permission to play a song on the air; a world where cut-ins (giving a performer a share of a song's profits), hot stoves (open bribes) and other forms of payola were standing operating procedure; a world of concern with P.D. (public domain, the graveyard, or seventh heaven, where tunes land when their copyrights...
...with a brass fanfare in antique vein, worked its often dissonant way through a series of style movements reminiscent of Handel, Mozart and, occasionally, subdued Verdi. It had uncharacteristic lyrical moments, e.g., Tenor Eugene Conley's lament in the brothel scene and Hilde Gueden's pretty love song in the garden, and jabs of vulgar humor in Blanche Thebom's bearded-lady scenes. But it never found anything to get excited about, and rarely attempted to follow an idea very...