ArticleIP_2896.txt

   
   
      
         
            Where Have You Gone, Oscar Hammerstein?

            The subtitle of Geoffrey
Block's new book tells you the whole story-- Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway
Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim . For some of us, that's not
progress. In 70 years, what was once the mighty Mississippi of American popular
culture, an ol' man river that seemed set to jes' keep rollin' along forever,
has shriveled away to one toxic little stream on a dry, barren mud flat. You
can measure the difference between Show Boat and Sondheim in a thousand
ways, but a Los Angeles Times column earlier this year is as good a way
as any. Defending the cause of "Ebonics," Professor Ron Emmons of Los Angeles
City College asserts, among other fancies, that "Black English is in Negro
spirituals ('Dat Ole Man River,' 'Ah Got Shoes')."

            "Ol' Man
River" is not a Negro spiritual. It's a show tune cooked up in 1927 by a couple
of middle-class honkies who needed something for a spot in the first act. Yes,
Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is full of "dat" and "dese" (obviously, he was
self-taught at Ebonics), but funnily enough, when Paul Robeson sang the song in
the London production of Show Boat in 1928, the biggest problem he had
was wrapping his beautiful, impeccable vowels around the soi-disant
dialect lyric. Ever since, most black singers have preferred to sing
"That Ol' Man River." If I were a sweating stevedore on the levee out by
Los Angeles City College, it would be sorely tempting to mock the
professor:

            Ol' man
Emmons,Dat ol' man Emmons,He mus' know sumpin'He don' check nothin'.

            But, in a way, he has a point, albeit not the one he thinks
he's making: Hammerstein's is an unobtrusive craft, an artless art. "Ol' Man
River" was the song in which he first found his lyrical voice, compressing the
suffering, resignation, and anger of an entire race into 24 taut lines and
doing it so naturally that it's no wonder folks assume the song's a Negro
spiritual. If it's any consolation to Emmons, Hammerstein's very last lyric,
"Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music , is invariably assumed to be a real
Austrian folk song--indeed, a few years back, the White House went further,
playing it at a state banquet for the Austrian president, under the impression
that it was the country's national anthem. The great strength of these songs,
one of the reasons they seep into our collective consciousness, is that they
barely seem written at all.

            Geoffrey
Block, professor of music at the University of Puget Sound School of Music in
Tacoma, Wash., is determined to change all that. Enchanted Evenings is
less concerned with enchantment than with the painstaking artistic judgments
that lead to it. So here he is getting stuck in to Show Boat :

            In the
thrice-repeated opening phrase of "Where's the Mate for Me?" the first shown in
Example 2.5a ("Who cares if my boat goes up stream" and two statements of "I
drift along with my fancy") Kern ingeniously varies the harmony of the final
melodic note D (Example 2.5b and c). Its first appearance on the words
"upstream" (the third measure) is paradoxically the lowest note of the
phrase--after all, the point is that Ravenal does not care whether he is going
upstream or downstream. Here Kern harmonizes the tonic or central key, D, with
a conventional tonic D-major triad. In the third measure of the next statement
(Example 2.5b), Kern sets the word "fancy" with a fancy (and deceptive)
resolution to a minor triad on the sixth degree of the scale. On the final
statement of this phrase (Example 2.5c), moments before Ravenal hears
Magnolia's piano theme and Kern displays his fanciest chord, again on the word
"fancy."

            
Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore.
There's only one problem with Block's approach: That's not how it happened. In
99 percent of his songs, Jerome Kern's music was written before the words, and
he was notorious for declining to accommodate his lyricists--no extra notes so
that an ingenious word might be made to fit, and certainly no concessions to
literal meaning in his melody or harmony. He didn't "set" the word "fancy" at
all, and that fanciest chord was there long before Hammerstein fixed the words
to those notes. It's possible that Hammerstein, coming upon "the lowest note of
the phrase," thought, "Hey, I'll write 'upstream' there. How's that for a
paradox?" but I doubt it: That's not the way the ear hears music, and
Hammerstein was too sensitive a lyricist to be so numbingly literal. Herbert
Kretzmer, one of the lyricists of Les Misérables , put it to me this way:
"It's a question of finding what Johnny Mercer called the sound of the
music. You're trying to capture something as elusive as a sound, which suggests
a word, from which eventually a complete lyric emerges."

            Still, you can't blame Block
for trying. He's coming at it from the conservatory end of things and, if
you're used to opera, the union of words and music in American song must take
your breath away. Operas have plots and lyrics. But the words have no
relationship to the music. Or, to put it the other way round, the music takes
no account of the words.

            
"
                  La donna è mobile. " The worst Tin Pan Alley hack wouldn't give
so much weight to the definite article because he'd know it was the most
insignificant word in the line. But Verdi? He couldn't give a hoot. Insofar as
he gives the lyrics a thought, it's only to say, "Stand well back, boys. I'm
flyin'!"

            Good musicals are both specific and universal. But they're
specific because the words fit the shape of the tune, not because the tune is a
translation of the words--the method Block appears to favor. Here he is
banging on with his upstream/downstream, high note/low note approach again:

            [I]n
"You're the Top" Porter does not capitalize on the text's potential for
realism. Although the "I" always appears in the bottom throughout most of the
song, the "you" blithely moves back and forth from top to bottom. The upward
leaping orchestral figure anticipates the word, "top," but the sung line does
not, and at the punchline, "But if Baby I'm the bottom, / You're the top," both
Billy and Reno ("I'm" and "You're") share a melodic line at the top of their
respective ranges.

            Phew! That entire paragraph deserves a rousing chorus of
"You're the Pits!" With his fixation on tops and bottoms, Block's beginning to
sound like the gay personal ads in the Village Voice. Unlike Kern with
his top paradoxically on his bottom, poor old Porter gets no credit for having
his bottom paradoxically on his top. Block's so busy following the vocal score
that he's not hearing the song. For nonmusicologists, that "upward leaping
orchestral figure" he mentions is the bit that goes:

            
[Plink-plink!] You're the top!

            
[Plink-plinketty-plink-plink!] You're the Coliseum ...

            Not only
is "You're the Top" one of the few songs where the little orchestral fill-ins
are an intrinsic part of the song but, more than that, the fill-ins actually
are the song: The sung bits "paradoxically" are the fill-ins--little
conversational lyric phrases that fall in the gaps between the
plinketty-plinks. If you know that, good for you; if you don't, it doesn't
matter. But how could you sit down and analyze the thing and fail to notice it?
As to the bottoms winding up on top, as a self-contained composer/lyricist
Porter knew enough to let a good strong lyric-thrust set itself. How could
Block be so Block-headed as to think that "But if Baby I'm the bottom,/ You're
the top" could possibly be improved by putting "I'm" and "bottom" on low notes?
It's the (relative) musical monotony of the phrase that makes it so insistent,
so driving, and such a brilliantly effective cap to the song. It's the punch
line; it's the exclamation point. How sad that Block, for all his technical
ability, can't hear that.

            So maybe we're better off with ol' man Emmons and the White
House misattributing Hammerstein's work to dirt-poor cotton pickers and lonely
goatherds than with Block's misguided praise. In great popular art, after all,
you notice the art, not the artist. Which brings us to Block's final chapter:
Stephen Sondheim. One reason "Ol' Man River" is a powerful, memorable lyric is
that there's no rhyme until the eighth and 10 th lines. Hammerstein
rhymes when the song requires it--a lesson his pupil, Sondheim, has forgotten.
In Into the Woods , the mother of Jack (as in the beanstalk) tells her
son to sell the family cow because:

            We've no time to sit and
dither

            While her
withers wither with her.

            We're back
to the pre-Hammerstein era: you're distanced from the character because all you
can hear is the voice of the author. Sondheim has given us plotless musicals
( Company ) and characterless musicals ( Pacific Overtures ) and
pointillist musicals ( Sunday in the Park With George ) and musicals that
go backward ( Merrily We Roll Along ), but for all the supposed range and
depth and variety, what you mainly notice about these musicals is Sondheim.
It's the triumph of the artist over the art: the man who knows more than anyone
else about musicals except how to write one where you don't notice how much he
knows; the one subject who repays Block's analytical approach if only because
that seems his natural home. I think of "Good Thing Going," his wonderfully
brooding ballad from Merrily , with its expert title resolution:

            "We had a good thing going
...

            Going ...

            Gone."

            And, with Sondheim, it
is gone.