Le 1er juillet 2017
de 10h00 à 10h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3209
Séance - Modern American Composers
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Dan Blim
As musical theatre scholarship has flourished in recent decades, many scholars have sought to justify its academic study by asserting the Broadway musical as an art form. Accounts of musical theatre frequently emphasize the “integrated” musical, whose dramatic structure achieved through musico-dramatic unity. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, with its serious, socially motivated plot and leitmotivic score, is often positioned as the operatic capstone of this narrative—a goal Bernstein himself acknowledged pursuing. Yet little attention has been given to how showtunes themselves might participate in asserting an artistry, perhaps due to their formulaic structure. This study examines modulatory practices in Broadway songs to expand analytical approaches to the showtune as a conventional genre and to deepen our understanding about Bernstein’s artistic contributions to the American musical. To do so, I first analyse modulatory practices employed by composers of the Great American Songbook—Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter. I then examine how Bernstein broke with traditional techniques in three key ways: modulating more frequently, modulating to more distant keys, and modulating in places other than the bridge. Integrating this research within extant research on the Broadway musical, I discuss how modulations serve the dramatic function of these songs within the larger dramatic arc of their shows.
