|
How Sondheim Found His Sound
|
| List Price: | $18.95 |
| Price: | $14.21 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
31 new or used available from $8.99
Average customer review:
Product Description
“Steve Swayne’s How Sondheim Found His Sound is a fascinating treatment and remarkable analysis of America’s greatest playwright in song. His marvelous text goes a long way toward placing Stephen Sondheim among the towering artists of the late twentieth century!”
—Cornel West, Princeton University
“Sondheim’s career and music have never been so skillfully dissected, examined, and put in context. With its focus on his work as composer, this book is surprising and welcome.”
—Theodore S. Chapin, President and Executive Director, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization
“. . . an intriguing ‘biography’ of the songwriter’s style. . . . Swayne is to be congratulated for taking the study of this unique composer/lyricist into hitherto unnavigated waters.”
—Stage Directions
“The research is voluminous, as are the artistry and perceptiveness. Swayne has lived richly within the world of Sondheim’s music.”
—Richard Crawford, author of America’s Musical Life: A History
“Amid the ever-more-crowded bookshelf of writings on Sondheim, Swayne’s analysis of Sondheim’s development as a composer stands up as a unique and worthy study. . . . For the Sondheim aficionados, there are new ideas and new information, and for others, Swayne’s How Sondheim Found His Sound will provide an intriguing introduction into the mind of arguably the greatest and most influential living Broadway composer.”
—talkinbroadway.com
“What a fascinating book, full of insights large and small. An impressive analysis and summary of Sondheim’s many sources of inspiration. All fans of the composer and lovers of Broadway in general will treasure and frequently refer to Swayne’s work.”
—Tom Riis, Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and Director of the American Music Research Center, University of Colorado
Stephen Sondheim has made it clear that he considers himself a “playwright in song.” How he arrived at this unique appellation is the subject of How Sondheim Found His Sound—an absorbing study of the multitudinous influences on Sondheim’s work.
Taking Sondheim’s own comments and music as a starting point, author Steve Swayne offers a biography of the artist’s style, pulling aside the curtain on Sondheim’s creative universe to reveal the many influences—from classical music to theater to film—that have established Sondheim as one of the greatest dramatic composers of the twentieth century.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #43106 in Books
- Published on: 2007-05-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
There have been so many books written about Stephen Sondheim and his revolutionary scores that it's hard to believe anything's left to analyze. But Swayne has found a new angle, and in this scholarly tome, he examines the impact other artists and mediums have had on Sondheim's work. The Dartmouth music professor offers some fascinating and fresh insights into possible inspirations behind characters and musical moments in shows including Follies, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George and Passion, citing classical and Broadway composers Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin and Arlen, as well as dramatists like Sondheim mentor Oscar Hammerstein and, most intriguingly, French new wave filmmaker Alain Resnais. The author probes Sondheim's past and excavates his classical record collection, student papers and musical compositions, early musicals written at Williams College and even all the college plays he took part in. Amid the trove of details, Swayne doesn't always successfully connect the presumed influence to something in Sondheim's oeuvre. That he owned a lot of records by certain classical composers, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that every composer greatly shaped his work. Additionally, the author offers lengthy dissections of the songs "What Can You Lose?" from the movie Dick Tracy and "Putting It Together" from Sunday that will best be appreciated by music scholars. Sondheim enthusiasts who are not musically inclined will most enjoy the chapters on his film and theater influences.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Customer Reviews
Good but not Great
This book got off to a good start, analyzing Sondheim's favorite classical composers and how they show up in his own musical language. The next chapter is devoted to Sondheim's broadway influences, and gives a good examination of these as well.
The second half of the book is devoted to Sondheim's theatrical and cinematic influences. It is here that Swayne goes off track. Though he makes some interesting connections between film technique and musical composition, it seems to me that this is where his thesis falls short, and could have been developed much more cogently. Also, one would think that Swayne would devote more attention to actual film scores.
My main complaint is that in a book called "How Sondheim Found His Sound", one would expect to find at least a mention of the orchestration in Sondheim's shows. Perhaps this is just my own personal bent, as I have always wondered just how Sondheim works with his orchestrators and to what extent he thinks in orchestral terms.
In terms of the writing, this book (especially in the later chapters) all too often reads like an undergraduate music paper. All this being said, there's enough in here to warrant purchase by real Sondheim junkies.
A severely flawed look at pieces of the craft.
To the writer: For whom was this book written? Who was the intended audience? What's with the "thesaurus" words peppering the text? Why all the conjecture? Why not just ask the composer? This is a treatise I'd hand back to the student for major rewriting.
Worth Reading
"How Sondheim Found his Sound" is a book full of very interesting information, although my reasoning for allocating only 4-stars is because I feel that more musical examples could have been used.
That having been said, it is a very thouroughly researched book, and I would recommend it to Sondheim fans, myself included.
One last note would be that having the vocal scores in question along side this book would allow a person to garner more of an understanding of the analyses (due to the general lack of musical examples).
