Songwriters of the American Musical Theatre

A Style Guide for Singers

Nathan Hurwitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138914414
• eBook ISBN: 9781317428329
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From the favorites of Tin Pan Alley to today's international blockbusters, the stylistic range required of a musical theatre performer is expansive.

Musical theatre roles require the ability to adapt to a panoply of characters and vocal styles. By breaking down these styles and exploring the output of the great composers, Songwriters of the American Musical Theatre offers singers and performers an essential guide to the modern musical. Composers from Gilbert and Sullivan and Irving Berlin to Alain Boublil and Andrew Lloyd Webber are examined through a brief biography, a stylistic overview, and a comprehensive song list with notes on suitable voice types and further reading.

This volume runs the gamut of modern musical theatre, from English light opera through the American Golden Age, up to the "mega musicals" of the late Twentieth Century, giving today's students and performers an indispensable survey of their craft.

Chapter 1

Light opera

Jacques Offenbach, Johann Strauss II, W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Franz Lehár, Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg

While opera dates back to the late sixteenth century, light opera began in the late seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, light opera had become opera buffo, and by the mid-nineteenth century had evolved further into operetta. Operetta thrived throughout Europe, particularly in France, whose star composer was Jacques Offenbach and in Germany/Austria, whose star composer was the Austrian Johann Strauss II. Perhaps the biggest hit operetta was The Merry Widow, by Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. Gilbert and Sullivan created English-language operetta, which became immensely popular around the world. The works of these men were embraced, emulated, imitated and advanced by the three great American writers of operetta, Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several important vocal styles existed, such as canto spianato, cantabile, canto fiorito and canto declamato. But by far the most important and widely respected vocal style of this time was bel canto, which translates as “beautiful singing.” Bel canto, which can be traced back to the sixteenth century, had become firmly entrenched as the most common operatic vocal technique by the nineteenth century. Aspects of bel canto technique include

•an impeccable legato production throughout the singer’s registers (a seamless range)

•the use of a light tone in the higher registers

•an agile, flexible technique capable of dispatching ornate elements, embellishments such as singer-supplied cadenzas

•the ability to execute fast, accurate divisions (articulating rapid notes with pitch-perfect precision)

• the avoidance of aspirates and the eschewing of loose vibrato

•a pleasing, well-focused timbre

•a clean attack

•limpid diction

•graceful phrasing rooted in a complete mastery of breath control.¹

Bel canto singers used the following tools to bring color and inflect their text, to be convincing in their acting:

accent, emphasis, tone of voice, register, phrasing, legato, staccato, portamento, messa di voce, tempo, vibrato, ornamentation and gesture. Bel Canto performers sang in an emphatic way, accenting individual syllables appropriately, matched register and tonal quality […] to the emotional content of the words; employed a highly articulate manner of phrasing; varied their delivery with several types of legato and staccato; liberally applied more than one type of portamento; considered messa di voce to be one of the principal sources of expression; altered tempo frequently through rhythmic rubato and the quickening and slowing of the overall time; introduced a wide variety of graces and divisions into the music they sang; and regarded gesture as a powerful tool for enhancing the effect of their delivery. They reserved vibrato, however, for heightening the expression of certain words and for gracing longer notes.²

Coming from Italian opera, bel canto is a vocal technique in which the quality of the voice is judged on the smoothness of the vocal line, both in terms of its legato quality and the lack of any perceptible register shift. The technique results in “resonance and purity of tone, consistency of tone across the registers of the voice.”³ According to bel canto acolyte Chris Tondreau, the fours stages of the bel canto technique are 1) the lift of the throat, using the hard resonant surfaces of the vocal mechanism such as teeth and the hard palate to create vocal size, 2) placing the voice high in the face and using the mask of the face to create resonance, 3) using the visualization of the inhalation of sound and 4) holding the breath rather than using the diaphragm to force air out. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Italian opera singers were judged on their ornate embellishments such as trills and runs. In order to accomplish these with a sense of effortlessness, this bel canto style offered an agility through the lightness of the technique and the lack of any discernible break between registers.

As operettas were reaching the peak of their popularity in Europe, the traditional bel canto style of singing had given way to the newer verismo style, which replaced pure beauty of tone with intensity of dramatic situation, heightened emotions and the need to get the voice out over a thicker orchestral accompaniment.

By the later nineteenth century the verismo style had replaced the earlier Italian style, and opera composers were writing heavier vocal lines, pushing singers higher in their ranges, and requiring singers to extend vocal registers. Tenors, for instance needed to produce high Cs and even Ds in their full voice rather than falsetto to create the desired emotional truth and to overcome the thicker instrumental accompaniment. While bel canto singers had been judged by the beauty of line (the legato quality) and the singer’s agility, verismo vocal technique was judged on the power of the voice and the emotional “truth.” Verismo required substantially more muscling of sound than bel canto, and frequently singers would combine techniques; the demands of such muscular singing as a sole ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Light opera: Jacques Offenbach, Johann Strauss II, W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Franz Lehár, Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg
• Chapter 2 Popular musical theatre songs of the early 1900s: George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern
• Chapter 3 The great songwriters of Tin Pan Alley: Harry Warren, Jimmy McHugh, Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and Harold Arlen
• Chapter 4 The great wits and sophisticates: Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields and Vernon Duke
• Chapter 5 The great jazz composers: Eubie Blake, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, and Fats Waller, and the great jazz singers
• Chapter 6 The Golden Age – the integrated musical: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner and Fredrick Loewe, Frank Loesser, Kurt Weill, Burton Lane, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and Jule Styne
• Chapter 7 The culmination of the Golden Age of the American musical: Jerry Herman, Charles Strouse, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Cy Coleman, and John Kander and Fred Ebb
• Chapter 8 Sui generis: Stephen Sondheim
• Chapter 9 New sounds – the 1970s: Galt MacDermot, Stephen Schwartz, Marvin Hamlisch, Maury Yeston, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Richard Maltby Jr and David Shire, and William Finn
• Chapter 10 The mega-musical: Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil
• Chapter 11 Musicals of the 1990s and 2000s – the new eclecticism: Elton John, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Ricky Ian Gordon, Frank Wildhorn, Jonathan Larson, Jason Robert Brown, Jeanine Tesori, Michael John LaChiusa, Andrew Lippa, Adam Guettel and Tom Kitt
• Chapter 12 Other popular styles: The jukebox musicals
• Bibliography
• Index of names
• Index of show titles