crossover music

I'm listening to one of those McGlinn recordings currently. It's got me thinking about how sniffy the opera world were about this type of music back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Yes, pre-dating the swinger revival of the 1990's -- it was a whole thing, and 'crossover' was what they called it. However, it's such an oddity; I mean, even in that era there were plenty of musicals that were using classically trained voices (like most of ALW's rep). - Nowadays, though, I think it's more or less a fait accompli that this is serious music. I honestly love the more swing-focused musical comedies from the era too, though, and that's high-calibre light music rather than those plodding R&H melodramas, which are operatic in terms of the seriousness of their stories, though the actual gimmicks that made R&H distinctive were lifted from operetta rather than serious opera. There isn't much in R&H that is formally different from G&S; the bench scene is one of those totally new things that they did. Underscoring is one of the really clever things that all the great American musicals use. I think that's from the Yiddish Theatre. That's what makes American shows distinctive. Like West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Follies, Cabaret... their underscoring is as dense as movies, and that's part of how that illusion is sustained. - I do listen to contemporary pop, but mostly on recommendations; I'm not much of a fan, but I listen to it, and I recognise a good earworm when I hear it. When I wrote my earlier musicals, I was much more harmony-focused, while this new score is more rhythm and tunes. There's still plenty of clever chords, but they're not where the surprise is coming from.