Bernstein Meets Broadway

Author : Carol J. Oja
Publisher : Broadway Legacies
ISBN 13 : 0199862095
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bernstein Meets Broadway written by Carol J. Oja and published by Broadway Legacies. This book was released on 2014 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A super-star of 20th-century music, Leonard Bernstein is famous for his multi-faceted artistic brilliance. Best-known on Broadway for "West Side Story," a tale of immigrant struggles and urban gang warfare, Bernstein thrived within the theater's collaborative artistic environments, and he forged a life-long commitment to advancing social justice. In 'Bernstein meets Broadway: collaborative art in a time of war', award-winning author Carol J. Oja explores a youthful Bernstein-a twenty-something composer who was emerging in New York City during World War II. Devising an innovative framework, Oja constructs a wide-ranging cultural history that illuminates how Bernstein and his friends violated artistic and political boundaries to produce imaginative artistic results. At the core of her story are the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub act called The Revuers. A brilliant group of collaborators joins Bernstein at center-stage, including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. With the zeal of youth, they infused their art with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and it featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military.

Author : Carol J. Oja
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199862109
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bernstein Meets Broadway written by Carol J. Oja and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society When Leonard Bernstein first arrived in New York City, he was an unknown artist working with other brilliant twentysomethings, notably Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. By the end of the 1940s, these artists were world famous. Their collaborations defied artistic boundaries and subtly pushed a progressive political agenda, altering the landscape of musical theater, ballet, and nightclub comedy. In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, award-winning author and scholar Carol J. Oja examines the early days of Bernstein's career during World War II, centering around the debut in 1944 of the Broadway musical On the Town and the ballet Fancy Free. As a composer and conductor, Bernstein experienced a meteoric rise to fame, thanks in no small part to his visionary colleagues. Together, they focused on urban contemporary life and popular culture, featuring as heroes the itinerant sailors who bore the brunt of military service. They were provocative both artistically and politically. In a time of race riots and Japanese internment camps, Bernstein and his collaborators featured African American performers and a Japanese American ballerina, staging a model of racial integration. Rather than accepting traditional distinctions between high and low art, Bernstein's music was wide-open, inspired by everything from opera and jazz to cartoons. Oja shapes a wide-ranging cultural history that captures a tumultuous moment in time. Bernstein Meets Broadway is an indispensable work for fans of Broadway musicals, dance, and American performance history.

Author : Leonard Bernstein
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300186541
Total Pages : 903 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Leonard Bernstein Letters written by Leonard Bernstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With their intellectual brilliance, humor and wonderful eye for detail, Leonard Bernstein’s letters blow all biographies out of the water.”—The Economist (2013 Book of the Year) Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic and versatile musician—a brilliant conductor who attained international superstar status, and a gifted composer of Broadway musicals (West Side Story), symphonies (Age of Anxiety), choral works (Chichester Psalms), film scores (On the Waterfront), and much more. Bernstein was also an enthusiastic letter writer, and this book is the first to present a wide-ranging selection of his correspondence. The letters have been selected for the insights they offer into the passions of his life—musical and personal—and the extravagant scope of his musical and extra-musical activities. Bernstein’s letters tell much about this complex man, his collaborators, his mentors, and others close to him. His galaxy of correspondents encompassed, among others, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, Thornton Wilder, Boris Pasternak, Bette Davis, Adolph Green, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and family members including his wife Felicia and his sister Shirley. The majority of these letters have never been published before. They have been carefully chosen to demonstrate the breadth of Bernstein’s musical interests, his constant struggle to find the time to compose, his turbulent and complex sexuality, his political activities, and his endless capacity for hard work. Beyond all this, these writings provide a glimpse of the man behind the legends: his humanity, warmth, volatility, intellectual brilliance, wonderful eye for descriptive detail, and humor. “The correspondence from and to the remarkable conductor is full of pleasure and insights.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Exhaustive, thrilling [and] indispensable.”—USA Today (starred review)

Author : Helen Smith
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 9781409411697
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book There's a Place for Us written by Helen Smith and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Smith takes an in-depth look at all eight of Bernstein's musical theatre works and analyses them against a background of musical and social context, as well as looking at Bernstein's other orchestral, choral and chamber works. One important aspect examined is Bernstein's use of motifs in his theatre compositions. Smith provides an indispensable overview of the musical theatre works of an eclectic composer, and shows what it is that constitutes the Bernstein 'sound'.

Author : Leonard Bernstein
Publisher : Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bernstein on Broadway written by Leonard Bernstein and published by Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated. This book was released on 2007 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (P/V/G Composer Collection). 30 songs from Leonard Bernstein's revered Broadway shows, including West Side Story, Candide, On the Town, Wonderful Town, Peter Pan , and more, with plot notes, insightful facts, quotes from Bernstein and a bio. Includes a foreword by conductor John Mauceri, and the hits: America * I Feel Pretty * Lonely Town * Maria * New York, New York * Ohio * One Hand, One Heart * Somewhere * Tonight * and more.

Author : Katherine Baber
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252051211
Total Pages : 459 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz written by Katherine Baber and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.

Author : Nigel Simeone
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351560379
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story written by Nigel Simeone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Broadway musicals that can genuinely claim to have transformed the genre, West Side Story has been featured in many books on Broadway, but it has yet to be the focus of a scholarly monograph. Nigel Simeone begins by exploring the long process of creating West Side Story, including a discussion of Bernstein's sketches, early drafts of the score and script, as well as cut songs. The core of the book is a commentary on the music itself. West Side Story is one of the very few Broadway musicals for which there is a complete published orchestral score, as well as two different editions of the piano-vocal score. The survival of the original copied orchestral score, and the reminiscences of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, reveal details of the orchestration process, and the extent to which Bernstein was involved in this. Simeone's commentary considers: musical characteristics and compositional techniques used to mirror the drama (for example, the various uses of the tritone), motivic development, the use and reinvention of Broadway and other conventions, the creation of dramatic continuity in the score through the use of motifs and other devices, the unusual degree of dissonance and rhythmic complexity (at least for the time), and the integration of Latin-American dance forms (Mambo, Huapango and so on). Simeone also considers the reception of West Side Story in the contemporary press. The stir the show caused included the response that it was the angular, edgy score that made it a remarkable achievement. Not all reviews were uncritical. Finally, the book looks in detail at the making of the original Broadway cast recording, made in just one day, included on the accompanying CD.

Author : Emily Abrams Ansari
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190649690
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sound of a Superpower written by Emily Abrams Ansari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Classical composers seeking to create an American sound enjoyed unprecedented success during the 1930s and 1940s. Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and others brought national and international attention to American composers for the first time in history. In the years after World War II, however, something changed. The prestige of musical Americanism waned rapidly as anti-Communists made accusations against leading Americanist composers. Meanwhile, a method of harmonic organization that some considered more Cold War–appropriate—serialism—began to rise in status. For many composers and historians, the Cold War had effectively “killed off” musical Americanism. In this book, the author offers a fuller, more nuanced picture of the effect of the Cold War on Americanist composers. She shows that the ideological conflict brought both challenges and opportunities. Some leftist Americanist composers struggled greatly in this new artistic and political environment, especially as American nationalism increasingly meant American exceptionalism. But composers of all political stripes would find in the federal government a new and unique channel through which to ensure the survival of musical Americanism, as the White House sought to use American music as a Cold War propaganda tool and American composers as cultural diplomats. The Americanists’ efforts to safeguard the reputation of their style would have significant consequences. Ultimately, they effected a rebranding of musical Americanism, with consequences that remain with us today."--Rabat de la jaquette.

Author : Paul R. Laird
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780239513
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Leonard Bernstein written by Paul R. Laird and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonard Bernstein was one of twentieth-century music’s most successful and recognizable figures. In a career spanning five decades, he conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras and composed scores for landmark musicals such as West Side Story. With an iron self-belief, he negotiated risky and challenging musical situations that resulted in always passionate, if sometimes mixed, reviews. Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bernstein’s birth, this engaging new biography provides a concise overview of the life and work of a prodigiously talented, endlessly enthralling, and controversial musician. Drawing on more than thirty years of study, leading Bernstein scholar Paul R. Laird describes Bernstein’s work as a conductor, composer, music educator, and commentator, evaluating all of his major compositions. Laird also explores the impact of Bernstein’s complicated personal life on his professional work, including his homosexuality and many affairs with men, and his strong yet difficult marriage. Featuring original insights into Bernstein’s life and work, including information gleaned from a 1982 interview with Bernstein, Laird’s book is the ideal introduction to Bernstein’s eclectic musical style and complex character, showing how both fit within the larger world of twentieth-century music.

Author : Paul Laird
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429662734
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book West Side Story, Gypsy, and the Art of Broadway Orchestration written by Paul Laird and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ground-breaking study, Paul Laird examines the process and effect of orchestration in West Side Story and Gypsy, two musicals that were among the most significant Broadway shows of the 1950s, and remain important in the modern repertory. Drawing on extensive archival research with original manuscripts, Laird provides a detailed account of the process of orchestration for these musicals, and their context in the history of Broadway orchestration. He argues that the orchestration plays a vital role in the characterization and plot development in each major musical number, opening a new avenue for analysis that deepens our understanding of the musical as an art form. The orchestration of the score in Broadway musicals deeply shapes their final soundscapes, but only recently has it begun to receive real attention. Linked by a shared orchestrator, in other ways West Side Story and Gypsy offer a study in contrasts. Breaking down how the two composers, Leonard Bernstein and Jules Styne, collaborated with orchestrators Sid Ramin, Irwin Kostal, and Robert Ginzler, Laird’s study enables us to better understand both of these two iconic shows, and the importance of orchestration within musical theatre in general.