For the students: 'shoes on' and 'noon on' don't rhyme. It's not technically part of the scheme, but it sounds like it should rhyme.
There's a few examples in Sondheim. Finishing the Hat has a near rhyme - 'late' and 'wait's'
Ashman has more. His lyrics aren't always technically perfect, though they're very facile and clever. -
I admire the discipline of an Ira Gershwin or Lorenz Hart, who stuck to perfect rhymes while contriving language, but personally I've always felt perfect rhyme contrives speech.
But it depends - some characters are smarter than others: I'm writing teenagers for this one, so it'd be totally phoney if they sounded like Porter or Berlin.
I like to rhyme stanza endings. My fanciest trick is the bridge of Knight on my Couch with the ABCCBA sestet.
But yeah, the Beach Song rhymes the stanza endings. 'last' 'passed' -- see, it's a very subtle way of creating unity.
-
I love that the cycle doesn't rhyme conventionally, but Emanuel said to note the internal rhymes, and I think I mostly was able to catch those. The rhythms were inspired by the Carpenters. Some of my arrangements from POAK evince that influence too - I know they nicked the ideas off Burt Bacharach, but I prefer their ones.
-
One of the tricks I learned from Sondheim was that syllabic counts can be bent. It's interesting, though: as he said, he was too square to really take advantage of that trick.
But I grew up with rhythm, so I can do tricky counts and deliberately make my stanzas uneven. Sondheim's mostly metrically even, with even phrase lengths; he does bend those, but similarly to Arlen or Martin or Porter -- the formal sophistication is in his contrapuntal pieces: I tend to think of him as the last of the AABA songwriters when it comes to his songs.
While my music is metrically fluid, though POAK is mostly even phrases and riffs on conventional song structures*. Plus I like fragments of songs, and that's become a feature of my style.
*(I think of Here and Now as my Rodgers pastiche).
-
A key difference between movies and stage is that movie musicals require a greater degree of verisimilitude. This is why I think Shipwrecked in 2030 is more plausible: people wouldn't buy into the 2023 story with songs.
That's me the musicals expert saying that the futuristic setting has suspension of disbelief built-in, while a contemporary setting wouldn't, and that's why people tend to hate movie musicals.
I don't consider Once a musical. The songs are diegetic - I tend to think the word 'musical' is excepted for when parts of the song are non-diegetic. For example, whether Rachel and Reginald hear the orchestra is ultimately up for interpretation, but the audience does, and that's 'non-diegetic' -- diegesis refers to whether the sounds are part of the world of the film or not.
As a result, movie musicals tend to be written about the place they're set, while stage musicals have a much more complicated legacy as white people's views of exotic locales or cultures. I'll bring up a great quote to explain the difference between stage and screen: this is from Bernard Herrmann's biography (p. 126) "Years later, as Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II began work on their musical based on Anna, The King and I, Herrmann reportedly offered Rodgers his research on Siamese music.
According to Herrmann, Rodgers declined, saying he was "not interested in Siamese music." What rare good words Herrmann had had for Rodgers's work were soon replaced with active contempt."
- most movie musicals aren't great, though. I love the chamber-like orchestrations of stage musicals before 1970, and I think those songs have a lot of staying power, though certain parts of the catalogue are waning in popularity.
I think there's been some very strange movie musicals, though, and that's something I like about the genre. It's much more global than Broadway.
Komentar