Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheimis an American composer and lyricist known for more than a half-century of contributions to musical theatre. Sondheim has received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has been described by Frank Rich of The New York Times as "now the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theater." His best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth22 March 1930
CountryUnited States of America
If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story.
Music is structure out of Chaos
Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.
It ain't just a question of misunderstood, Deep down inside him, he's no good
Stephen Sondheim was there to coach us. It was wonderful. He'd say surprising things: I shouldn't enunciate too fully when I sang 'Not Getting Married Today' from 'Company' because it would throw the rhyme scheme off. Usually you are encouraged to enunciate as clearly as possible. But his tips would make a song more effective.
I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.
I certainly wanted my name in lights. I wanted my name on a marquee. I wanted recognition on Broadway.
When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.
I don't find my life that interesting. The shows, maybe. But not me.