Customer Reviews

How Sondheim Found His Sound

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sir Isaac Newton once said: 'If I have accomplished anything, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' Stephen Sondheim would probably say something similar.

He has acknowledged being influenced by classical music, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood and many more. In the end though, Sondheim's work has taken these together and produced something uniquely his own. The results speak for themselves: West Side Story, Gypsy, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Do I Hear a Waltz and the list goes on and on. In 2004 alone there was the first Broadway production of Assassins, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (London), The Frogs (Lincoln Center), Passion, Pacific Overtures.

This book though, is not a description of what he has done, it's an in depth analysis of the way his music came about. The author teaches music at Dartmouth. His analysis, aided by Sondheim himself talks not only about the origins of music, but the way Sondheim goes about developing a song. It's a fascinating look at the creative process.

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.

This is a great book on how Sondheim "found his sound." I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Sondheim's card system and it gave me greater insight into a person who knew Leonard Bernstein.

"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).

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.