Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post below we learn five new things about West Side Story.

1. Did you know that choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on making the Jets snap their thumbs against their index fingers instead of their middle fingers? Try it, it’s much harder. That’s the point. Robbins wanted to make the Jets stand out from other finger snapper.

2. Did you know that in Arthur Laurents first two libretto drafts Maria kills herself with dressmaking shears. Starting with the third draft, five more drafts, and the final draft, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria alive, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

3. Did you know that some of the great tunes in West Side Story contain recognizable connections with famous classical melodies? My favorites are the allusions to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the theme Wagner created to depict the Redemption through Love in his Ring cycle, since in these cases Bernstein’s references are so interesting dramatically as well as musically.

4. Did you know that Sondheim was originally listed as a co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein? When the early reviews ignored Sondheim’s contribution, Bernstein offered the Broadway newcomer sole lyricist billing and the royalty split that went with it. In an unthinking moment he would always regret Sondheim replied, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care about the money,” and turned down the opportunity to split the 4% lyric royalties. Instead of receiving 2% of the lyric royalties, Sondheim thus retained his original 1%.

5. Did you know that the film soundtrack of West Side Story was the Number 1 best selling album of 1962 from May 5 to June 16 and again for the week of October 6-13?

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 worst musical films ever made.

Musical films, as most of us are aware, are among the greatest mixed blessings in American art. They can be transcendent and glorious at times, and quite often they can be inept, foul, and obnoxious. On a few choice occasions, some individual movie musicals can offer us all these at once. They are part of our lives and our culture and our subconscious, and yet often we are not permitted to adore them unreservedly; they have let us down too often for that.

While I was writing my history of the early movie musical, I was struck again and again by the trial-and-error nature of how the musical was born, and how the mistakes counted for as much as the successes. The two coexist steadily, especially in early musicals, which usually lack the smooth-grained professionalism of later efforts. The filmmakers learned as much from what they got terribly wrong as what they did correctly, and sometimes more so. The resulting films demonstrate this so vividly that, as a historian, I found myself steadily compelled to reflect on both sides of the coin. This naturally sets aside the entire fact that the dogs are often a great deal of fun to write about.

Fourteen years after Oxford first published it, A Song in the Dark now sings anew in an extensively revised and updated second edition. In celebration, I’ve compiled a “Ten Worst” list—technically, it’s “Eleven Worst”—that spans nearly the entire 80-plus year history of musical films, with the genre’s most odious cinematic mistakes and annotations of how and why they got that way. While it may strike some as a somewhat perverse celebration of musicals to offer a list of their worst achievements, I remain gleefully unapologetic. We all learn from our errors, and if they should not be celebrated they must still, ever, be recalled. Naturally it all must remain subjective, much like politics and religion, and I hope that readers will feel free to compose their own lists as well. As a palate-cleanser, I promise a “Ten Best” list in the near future.

The Singing Fool (1928)
A major film, in fact the biggest sensation of its time. Far more important in many ways than The Jazz Singer, beloved by many millions, one of the highest-grossing films made prior to Gone With the Wind. Alas, all this history and triumph don’t count for much when you just try to sit through it today. The annoying technique—back and forth between silent and “talkie”—is the least of it. The most is Al Jolson, who redefines “star ego” for all time. For anyone wondering why The Jazz Singer is shown so frequently and this follow-up so seldom, spend a few minutes communing with Jolson and his excesses, and you’ll know. If you were ever inclined to like the song “Sonny Boy,” seeing it introduced here, and driven into the ground with bathetic repetition, will cure you.

Golden Dawn (1930)
Seldom has terrible ever been this irresistible. A monstrosity of a Broadway operetta—think Emperor Jones meets Rose-Marie—transferred to the screen with all its excesses utterly intact, and for good measure it’s almost as racist a tract as The Birth of a Nation. Stalwart British soldiers try to keep the peace in East Africa, and the native heroine is considered a goddess because she wasn’t born black. There’s lots more, including a fearful idol who resembles a Smurf, a put-upon cast who somehow manages to keep straight faces, and songs such as “My Bwana” and “Africa Smiles No More.” Until you’ve seen and heard a darkly made-up Noah Beery sing “The Whip Song,” you don’t know from bad taste.

Down to their Last Yacht (1934)
Have you ever seen a film destroy itself while it runs through the projector? Behold, then, this ridiculous indigent-millionaires-meet-randy-Pacific-islanders concoction, so incoherent that it appears to be slabs of several unrelated movies glued together. Sidney Blackmer (Ruth Gordon’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby) stars as one of the most ill-at-ease musical heartthrobs in history. There are lots of jokes about cannibals and sex, and if it had been made in recent years there probably would’ve been a song about Viagra. The climactic number, an enormous and incoherent “South Sea Bolero,” seems to have been done by Busby Berkeley while high on drug-spiked papaya juice. Depression audiences weren’t fooled, and Yacht lost so much money that the angry studio fired the producer.

Rosalie (1937)
Overblown, overpriced, overstuffed, overproduced, overlong, overeverything. There’s a teeny princess-meets-commoner story, which is buried under so many tons of rotten MGM meringue that watching it gives you a headache. Eleanor Powell was an incredibly skillful tap dancer, but this thing doesn’t give her enough opportunities to redeem tons of excess and inertia. Nor are Ray Bolger and the beautiful Ilona Massey treated well, while Cole Porter’s songs range from wonderful (“In the Still of the Night”) to stupid (the title song). And chunky, placid Nelson Eddy as a college football star? In what universe?

Panama Hattie (1942)
Ann Sothern, a talented and appealing performer, wasn’t a good fit for Ethel Merman’s stage role. Strike one. Most of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs are cut or mangled, and replaced with lesser work. Strike two. And the strike three nail in the coffin is some interminable and boring slapstick relief involving Red Skelton and a haunted house. Only Lena Horne emerges unscathed, probably because she’s only given two songs and no role in the wretched script. The producers reshot and tinkered with the film, and must have felt redeemed when wartime audiences, eager for escapist relief, made it a hit. Just remember that the public isn’t always right.

Pal Joey (1957) and Can Can (1960)
Sure, Frank Sinatra was a great singer and could be a fine actor, but these two Broadway adaptations were made around the time he decided that he would only need to do one take of any scene. The results of such a blasé lack of commitment? A pair of lavish, worthless dinosaurs. Pal Joey lost all the nasty cynicism, and many of the Rodgers/Hart songs, that made it so striking and innovative onstage, and Can Can—set in 1890s Paris—is about as French as a small order of McDonald’s fries. Some of the other performers do try, but Frank’s phone-it-in Rat-Packy attitude sabotages them. Definition of a dispiriting experience: watching an expensive movie whose center is occupied by a star who doesn’t give a damn. Listen to the soundtracks, and skip the rest.

Paint Your Wagon (1969)
The late 1960s was rife with expensive and bloated musical blockbusters that were totally out-of-step with the time. This was the worst of all of them, and further proof that even an accomplished stage director like Joshua Logan shouldn’t necessarily be allowed near a movie camera. There’s a dumb Gold Rush plot, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and poor Jean Seberg form a musical ménage-a-trois, both men do their own vocals (alas!), and the whole thing comes off like a suburban dad trying to pass as a hippie. Lerner and Loew’s Broadway show deserved better, but as Lerner was co-producer he doesn’t rate a pass. With overblown rubbish like this, no wonder audiences turned to films with smaller budgets, bigger brains, and less music.

Lost Horizon (1972)
A debacle that deserves its near-legendary reputation, this abomination spelled finis to the film career of producer Ross Hunter. There had already been a failed attempt at a Broadway musical version of Frank Capra’s classic romance, but this one, with painful songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was worse. Poor Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann head a worthy, completely misbegotten all-star cast, and the details, script, and musical numbers are all minor classics of wrong-headedness. Choicest detail: the shelves of the Shangri-La library, supposedly a repository for the world’s finest literature, upon which can be clearly seen a number of Readers Digest Condensed Books.

Showgirls (1995)
Perhaps not a musical in the conventional sense of the word, but why pass up any opportunity to call out this classic backstage stinker? Trying oh, so hard to be a scorching erotic exposé, it succeeds in being asinine, juvenile, and very funny. Writer Joe Eszterhas cribbed his plot from All About Eve and his dialogue from old issues of True Confessions and Hustler, forming a worthy setting for Elizabeth Berkeley’s star-breaking acting and hysterical (lap) dancing. Given the appalling musical numbers, it’s somewhat of a surprise to note that Marguerite Derricks is the credited choreographer, not St. Vitus. It’s all cheaper, in every sense of the world, than a trip to Vegas, and if you’re in the right mean mood a whole lot more fun. Viewing note: the hilarity is even greater if you have a pitcher of Cosmopolitans.

Glitter (2001)
Mariah Carey’s high-powered, multi-octave vocalism is not to all tastes, but at least it demands a certain amount of respect. Then there’s her acting… As with Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Johnnie Ray, and many other pop singers, she tries to make the leap onto the big screen and fails utterly. A downtrodden-waif-makes-good saga, this is a glaring of example of old, bad wine poured into a new, cheesy bottle. Nobody wins, Mariah can’t read lines and isn’t photogenic, and the single worthy moment is a shot—one of its final screen appearances—of the World Trade Center. It was fortunate that Chicago came along the following year to rescue movie musicals after Glitter nearly killed them.

IGNOMINIOUS MENTION

Mother’s Boy (1929), The Lottery Bride (1930), Take a Chance (1933), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Anything Goes (1956), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Mame (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), A Chorus Line (1985), From Justin to Kelly (2003)

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Earlier in the week we posted a musical riddle by Thompson and below he explains the answer.  Check out Thompson’s other riddles here.

Riddle me when, riddle me why; can you name the song this time?
Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.
More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.
Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Forty years ago, the Beatles were in the process of disintegrating: John Lennon and George Harrison were performing separately from the band and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would individually begin recording material for independent release. In the past, a separate but equally new single would shortly follow a new Beatles album. The first time they had done this had established the pattern: “From Me to You” (11 April 1963) came slightly less than three weeks after their first album, Please Please Me (22 March 1963), with both reaching the top of British charts in early May.

On 26 September 1969 (and on 1 October in the US), the Beatles had released the last LP they would record together, Abbey Road (see last month’s riddle). Returning to the studio to record a separate single presented an unlikely scenario: the fab four no longer functioned as a unified entity. Consequently, on 31 October 1969 (and on 6 October in the US), Apple released George Harrison’s “Something,” with John Lennon’s “Come Together” on the flip side of the 45 rpm disk. The recordings had already appeared on Abbey Road and the choice of these two songs suggested at least a partial symbolic ostracizing of Paul McCartney, the odd-man-out in the internal group negotiations.

Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.

George Harrison in the Beatles Anthology video seems to relish the ironic humor of Frank Sinatra (ole blue eyes) declaring “Something” to be his favorite Lennon-McCartney song. After years of laboring in the shadows of two of the most successful songwriters of the sixties (if not the century), George Harrison had grown into a consummate songwriter who saw his material routinely rejected by his band mates. These rejections meant more than simple social dismissal: a song on a Beatles album meant substantial income from royalties. While Lennon and McCartney held a substantial share in their publishing entity Northern Songs (a company their manager Allen Klein would soon let escape from their grasp), Harrison had recently established Harrisongs to handle the royalties accumulating from his material. “Something” would be one of the most substantial contributors to the coffers of that company.

More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.

“Something” (definitely more than nothing) began an era (a plateau?) of successful songs by the “quiet one” (as press coverage had characterized George Harrison). Songs like “My Sweet Lord,” “Wah Wah,” “Isn’t It a Pity,” and “All Things Must Pass,” which appeared on his first post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass, displayed a songwriter-producer-musician of substantial talent. They also revealed a musician who had discovered the art cooperative and communal creation. As he had initially with the Beatles and would later with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison had learned how to let other musicians graciously and generously contribute to his recordings. In the case of “Something,” Paul McCartney’s spectacular bass playing compliments Harrison’s singing and guitar playing such that it almost takes the center of the listening experience, much the way a concerto is meant to contrast a soloist with the rest of the ensemble.

Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Although Harrison had first tried his hand at pop imitations (e.g., “Don’t Bother Me”), he made his mark as a songwriter-composer with his explorations of Indian music. His sitar contribution to “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” demonstrated his interest in the textures he had heard percolating in London in 1965. “Love You To” on Revolver showed he had the ability to merge the basic ideas of the South Asian tradition into a pop format. However, after studying in India with Ravi Shankar, his contribution to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “Within You without You,” revealed a masterful combination of the Hindustani tradition and British pop. Taking the core instrumental idiom that North Indian classical musicians call “gat” (consisting of contrasting sections they identify as sthā’ī and antarā), he wove them together to produce perhaps the best representation of mid-sixties Indian-western musical fusion.

However, in the post-Sgt. Pepper world, he had found his own voice (e.g., “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) and, in “Something,” Harrison’s musical sophistication shone brighter than it ever had previously. In Hindi, “nahi” negates what has just come previously. Not only did he forgo use of the sthā’ī-antarā gat form, he adopted a new style of musical composition built on what he had written in the past, but that had evolved into something new.

Part of the song’s charm lies in its internal contrasts. Where the verse finds the singer obsessed with the beloved (“Something in the way she moves…”), the chorus surprisingly questions the very nature of the attraction. In response to a question that the author perhaps asks of himself (“Will your love grow?”), he responds with an expression of ignorance: he does not know the answer, a strange acknowledgement for someone who otherwise finds himself transfixed by the beauty of his lover.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle with sixties British rock and pop as its subject. Be sure to check back Friday for the answer. Check out Thompson’s other riddles here. Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

British pop musicians in the sixties transformed what had been quiet imitations of Americana into the height of hip artistic creativity. In the early sixties, the only British music to break into the American charts sounded weird (Joe Meek’s production of the Tornados performing “Telstar” in 1962) and wacky (Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It’s [sic] Flavor (On the Bedpost Over Night)” in 1961). A few years later, Time declared London to be the self-evident center of the western cultural universe. Whether you considered James Bond, Twiggy, Mary Quant, or the Who, the Brits had established a place in pop culture that in the fifties we could hardly have imagined.

In another twisted attempt to obscure the obvious, I offer one more of my riddles celebrating an anniversary in sixties British pop. I look forward to your guesses. We will post a solution in two days.

Riddle me when, riddle me why; can you name the song this time?
Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.
More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.
Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Jennifer Fisher, is Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders with Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College.  The book offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate.  In the original article below Fisher looks at the Tom DeLay’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”  You can watch the video of his appearance here.

It would be easy to say that Republicans shouldn’t dance because they are out of step with the times, so I won’t say that. Exactly. But sometimes, dance metaphors are really useful—like when you’re confronted with the image of former house majority leader Tom DeLay, who shook his booty as a contestant on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars.” It has to make you wonder if dancing doesn’t always reveal more than we suspect it might. It’s true that the popular TV series has traditionally been used to boost the image of fading or disgraced “personalities,” along with some merely adventurous athletes and soap stars, but this had to be a first. It was not only a moment designed to sell the products in commercials between the action (because it is, after all, television), it was one to make us ponder who should be dancing and who should not, bless their publicity seeking hearts.

I used to get a big laugh when I invited my dance history students to imagine a world in which then-president George W Bush had to study dancing in order to look powerful on the ballroom floor. That’s what world leaders from Louis XIV to George Washington had to do, in an age when a manly image did not exclude the wearing of silk brocade breeches and mastering the art of the pirouette. Alas, guys just don’t dance now if they want to be taken seriously as world leaders—they have to keep both feet on the ground, like John Wayne would have if he’d held elected office. A shame, really. Leaders in many locations in Africa, of course, have always danced to look powerful, taking up space, keeping their own rhythm, ruling a whole bunch of people not afraid to move.

But in today’s American political climate, nearly every man fears looking dorky while dancing—just picture Bush in that youtube clip trying to “get down” with between an African drummer and dancer on Africa Malaria Day. It’s no wonder it’s impossible for my students to imagine a conservative man in a suit who can let his hair down and boogie in flashy clothes like John Travolta. Could a solid but goofy looking Republican dip his partner? Let his backbone slip? Bust a serious move? The very idea was hilarious. And yet, in an odd twist of fate, this fantasy became reality on “Dancing with the Stars”. Tom DeLay actually became the poster boy for Republicans gone wild. When he made his first entrance as a contestant, wagging his nether regions and playing air guitar to the strains of “Wild Thing,” it was hard to know where to look. Maybe the intent was to look fun and vulnerable. He only succeeded in looking out of step.

Of course, because there is always a need for “news of the very weird” somewhere between the real news and the sports, we had been prepared for the event. Journalists must have burned the midnight oil winnowing down the number of catch phrases to describe it—“Republican Steps Left,” “The Hammer does the Hustle,” and, more to the point, “DeLay dances back into the limelight.” After all, no one mistook Delay’s decision to compete on a TV dance competition as a bid to master another skill or find his next career as a comedian. “Dancing with the Stars” is all about gaining visibility for the “stars” (the personalities) and, for the producers, it’s all about selling products with personal tales of triumph over the odds. Very quickly, dance metaphors in the press pointed to the real subject—partisan politics and a possible comeback for the disgraced politician. “DeLay dances all over the leaderless GOP,” one said after DeLay was interviewed, and “Delay cha-cha-ing back into the GOP fray.”

Stephen Colbert came up with a joke about how DeLay “gerrymandered” the bones in his feet in preparation for the competition—not a great laugh but a reminder about the fact that the former congressman had been accused of gerrymandering schemes and was indicted by a Texas grand jury for breaking campaign finance laws. “DeLay is no wild thing,” his reviews said, and surely they were referring to his terpsichorean skills rather than trying to counter the allegations that shadowed his political career. Or were they?

In the process of covering this painful (for dance lovers) DeLay dance debut, a lot was revealed about perceptions of dance, as well as the fear most men have of dancing. A few examples: An ABC interviewer started out by pointing out that DeLay’s daughter is a professional dancer, but DeLay himself was a very serious guy, so how did he put the two things together? Strike one for the seriousness of dance. But that wasn’t the point. DeLay answered that conservatives can also let their hair down and have fun. Strike two—we’ve all seen Bush wave his hands in imitation of dance and Obama sway with the instincts of the adept, so we know not everyone has success letting their hair down. Strike three was a rhetorical slip when Delay responded to, “Why go on Dancing with the Stars?” He said, “I love dancin’, I’ve been dancin’ all my life—I haven’t danced for about 20 years, but I love dancin’.” Yes, congressman, but are you or have you ever been a member of a dancing party? Dance-wise, he should have taken the fifth before he proved so inconsistent a witness.

But, you say, give the guy a break—he gave dancing a try, big-time. At least you might have said that after seeing him struggle in that “Wild Thing” number (check youtube if your stomach is strong). Does that make him part of that maverick breed of American men who don’t care about the “real men don’t dance” stereotype? It’s a very brave category of individualists who choose to dance despite the obstacles for men. It takes a man who is secure of his masculinity to let go of the iron man mentality and embrace his softer, more bodily articulate side. Now, they are brave, bucking macho trends and creating new visions of what men can do. Is Tom DeLay one such guy? Nah. In a pre-show interview, DeLay exhibited the classic timid male fear of sequins and pink and, although there was much kidding about developing his “feminine side,” this seems more of a gimmick that a growth experience for the man who’s house when he was a bachelor used to be known as “Macho Manor.”

You want to give him credit for wearing a sequin lined vest for his first cha-cha appearance, and for the sheer nerve of risking choreography in an arena where he couldn’t hide his incompetence. But then you feel an agenda somewhere, based on the knowledge of DeLay’s past views and inflexibility. Somehow, his dancing doesn’t look like he’s learning how to go with the flow or make a move in the right direction. It looks a whole lot more like faking it to get attention. “The body never lies,” Martha Graham said famously. But the jury is still out on that one.

Gerald Klickstein is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a renowned classical guitarist. His book, The Musician’s Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness, is a roadmap to artistic excellence which provides an inclusive system for all instrumentalists and vocalists to advance their musical abilities and succeed as performing artists.  In the excerpt below we learn about the value of being prepared.

When I play, I make love – it is the same thing.
-Arthur Rubinstein, pianist

If you’ve read much about performing, then you’ve probably run into the terms “peak performance,” “flow,” and “being in the zone.” Those synonymous labels refer to a zone of optimal functioning, an ideal inner state in which a performer achieves maximum fluency with minimum effort. When you’re having a peak experience with your music, your creativity seems boundless, and, technically speaking, you feel as though you can’t miss.

Discussions of peak performance now appear widely, and all of the talk has spawned a problematic myth. The premise of the myth is that all high-level performances are peak performances and that, therefore, unless a musician attains a peak inner state on stage, the performance falls short. Nothing could be further from reality.

Musicians deliver inspired performances when they’re in all sorts of inner states. Sometimes things flow easily, sometimes they don’t, and a performer works harder to execute with artistry and precision. Being in the zone is pleasant, but it’s beside the point. Art is the point, emotion-laden, penetrating art, irrespective of whether the musician is in the zone.

To put it another way, when you perform, the music and the audience are what count. Whether you’re cruising effortlessly or working through every phrase isn’t relevant to the music’s impact or the audience’s experience. An analogous example would be the athlete who scores a winning goal. The team is victorious, and no one cares whether the scorer was in the zone or whether she wrestled with a throbbing headache and a loosely tied shoe. Correspondingly, when an audience is transported by beautifully presented music, it’s unimportant whether the musician performed with ease or had to content with distracting thoughts and a stubborn itch. Of course, every performer wants to be as free as possible on stage. But if you can’t perform well unless you’re in a peak state, then you can’t function as a professional musician.

To reach professional standards in your music making, you have to be able to prepare such that you don’t require ideal circumstances to play or sing expertly. You need the flexibility to adapt to varied internal and external situations and then perform without a fuss. The musicians who lack preparatory skills fall apart when things aren’t just so. After going bust on stage, they often claim that in an earlier practice session they were in the zone and performed flawlessly. Actually, their fragile learning creates only an illusion of control. Because of their belief in the peak-performance myth, however, rather than improving their preparation skills, such musicians look for extraneous ways to induce a zone-like sate in which their flimsy foundations might somehow hold up.

To counter the peak-performance myth, I propose the thorough-preparation principle: When you prepare thoroughly, you don’t need to be in the zone to excel in performance, yet your security provides you with the most direct route into the zone (not that being in the zone matters). For example, if you’re a thoroughly prepared string player performing in a cold church and your fingers feel stiff, you don’t despair. You breathe and lead yourself through the music. Your fingers may by icy, but your spirit catches fire, and the music soars. Were you in the zone? Nobody cares, including you.

The peak-performance myth infects countless budding artists with a self-defeating attitude toward public performance. First, musicians may wrongly believe that getting into the zone is essential to performing. Second, instead of celebrating concerts as unique events, they rate them as peak or not peak, and by default, as either acceptable or unacceptable. It’s perfectionism by another name.

To make the most of a performance, the key is to be open to your experience and to discover new things in both the music and yourself. Author Jack Kornfield wrote, “This capacity to be open to the new in each moment without seeking a false sense of security is the true source of strength and freedom in life.” It’s also the true source of artistry on stage.

That brings me back to the quotation that begins this article. For Arthur Rubinstein, performing and lovemaking were of the same stuff. What did he mean by that? For one thing, I think he was conveying the sense of immersion that an artistic performer enjoys on stage. That is, when you hold someone closely, you don’t judge; you hug and let your emotions take over. As you perform, adopt an equally accepting attitude. Prepare thoroughly, and then embrace the music, audience, and performance situation, whatever they bring. Your listeners will thank you for it.

Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the excerpt below we learn about how Hammerstein mentored Sondheim.

Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a precocious, suitably specialized musical education.  While still a teenager and shortly after the premiere of Carousel, Sondheim had the opportunity to be critiqued at length be the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous coincidence that would be the envy of Show Boat’ second act, happened to be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James Hammerstein.  Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960, might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow and low-brow. His great aesthetic achievements have been as a loyal revolutionary (not unlike Beethoven) who thoroughly engaged with-rather than rejected-Broadway’s richest traditions. Before his collaborations with three major composers in this tradition as well as Robbins and Laurents and Merman, Sondheim was able to learn invaluable lessons about the craft of Broadway from one its greats pioneers. Sondheim never forgot Hammerstein’s priceless lessons in how to write and how not to write a musical. To help his student develop his craft and discover his own voice, Hammerstein suggested that Sondheim write four kinds of musicals to develop his craft. For the next six years Sondheim would attempt to follow this advice.

Some of what Sondheim learned about lyric writing and dramatic structure from the master soon became available to musical theater aficionados when Hammerstein published a seminal essay on the subject in 1949. One central premise stated early in the essay is Hammerstein’s conviction that “a song is a wedding of two crafts.” Later, Hammerstein articulates the importance of “very close collaboration during the planning of a song and the story that contains the song” and espouses the view that “the musician is just as much an author as the man who writes the words.” The resulting marriage of music and words, the welding of two crafts and talents “into a single expression” is for Hammerstein “the great secret of the well-integrated musical play.” Unlike Hammerstein, Sondheim would assume two mantles, author and musician-although, unlike his mentor, Sondheim did not write the librettos for any of his Broadway shows.

Throughout the course of his essay Hammerstein explores a number of the issues and ideas about theatrical songwriting that did not go unnoticed by his student and neighbor. For example, Hammerstein advocates what we might call a non-operatic approach to the musical that maintains clear and sharp distinctions between spoken dialogue and song. With few exceptions, and in marked contrast to his popular contemporary Lloyd Webber, Sondheim has followed this approach ever since. Hammerstein also never wavered from his conviction “that the song is the servant of the play” and “that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then try to wedge it into a story.” His protégé would follow this advice well, in fact unwaveringly for the next forty years…

…A quarter of a century later Sondheim published some of his own thoughts about lyric writing adapted from a talk he simply called “Theater Lyrics” first given to the Dramatists Guild and then later published in a slightly altered form in the collection Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theatre. On the first page of this talk in its published form Sondheim informs his audience and readers that most of what he knows he learned from Hammerstein, his first mentor (although he acknowledges the example of other lyricists, including Cole Porter).  Sondheim recalls that the mentorship officially began when Hammerstein critiqued a draft of a musical called By George, a musical à clef about the preparatory school where the young protégé was then a junior.

What Hammerstein taught the novice at their historic first session not only encompassed lyric writing but also addressed larger dramatic issues.  This is how Sondheim recalled his lesson nearly thirty years later: “Detail by detail, he told me how to structure songs, how to build them with a beginning and a development and an ending, according to his own principles, how to introduce a character, what relates a song to a character, etc. etc.  It was four hours of the most packed information.  I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, that I learned in that afternoon more than some people learn about song writing in a lifetime.”  Some of what his teacher told him (e.g., the remarks on rhyming, phonetics, and sincerity quoted earlier) appeared a few years later in Hammerstein’s essay.  Over the years Sondheim also often repeated Hammerstein’s anecdote about the importance of detail, which was inspired by his mentor’s astonishment when he learned that the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty carefully detailed the top of Lady Liberty’s head long before it was possible to anticipate the popularity of photographs of the iconic image from above…

Amy Nathan is an award-winning author of books for young people including The Young Musician’s Survival Guide: Tips From Teens and Pros, out now in a new expanded second edition. A Harvard graduate with master’s degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Columbia’s Teacher’s College, she is an ever-struggling piano student and the mother of two musical sons: one a composer and trumpeter, and the other a saxophone-playing government major.

Which six of the following professional musicians were instrument-switchers as kids (answers at the end of the post)? Instrument-switchers start learning to play one kind of instrument that either they (or their parents) thought would be great for them — only to discover later that there is another instrument that they love a whole lot more. And so they switch.

( ) Joshua Bell, violinist
( ) André Watts, pianist
( ) Paula Robison, flutist
( ) James Galway, flutist
( ) Ann Hobson Pilot, harpist
( ) Cynthia Phelps, violist
( ) Carter Brey, cellist
( ) Sherry Sylar, oboist

At this back-to-school time of year when kids are returning to music lessons, many parents have a nagging worry that their kids will turn out to be instrument-switchers. What if they don’t stick with the instrument the parents just shelled out a lot of money for? What about all the money spent on lessons? Will that be wasted? If they switch, how will they ever catch up with kids who didn’t switch?

Judging by the high level of musicianship of the pros in this quiz — switchers and non-switchers alike — switching isn’t the disaster that some parents fear it will be. However, the prevalence of instrument-switching does mean that it’s unwise to rush out and buy an expensive instrument for kids until they’ve spent a year or so learning to play it and are sure they really like it. If a family doesn’t already own an instrument a child can learn on, start by renting — or borrowing.

Making up lost time on the new instrument didn’t pose a serious problem for the switchers in the list above. Many had been reluctant practicers with their first instrument. But when they switched, practice time became less of a chore, turning instead into something they actually wanted to do — well, at least much of the time. After all, the new instrument was one that they chose for themselves, one whose sound spoke to them, one they really wanted to play. They were willing to put in regular practice time in order to master it. As for all those lessons with the first instrument — they weren’t a waste, but provided an introduction to music that carried over to the new choice.

“Switching is okay, but don’t switch too soon,” warns Daniel Katzen, who plays French horn with the Boston Symphony. He started on piano at age six, tried cello for a while at age nine, and then two years later finally found the instrument that was right for him, French horn. As he explains in The Young Musician’s Survival Guide, “You can’t tell about an instrument in just a few months. Other instruments always look cool. But after you start playing, you find that no instrument is really easy if you want to play it well.”

Instrument-switching may actually be something a parent could encourage a youngster to think about if the child loves music but never wants to practice. Of course, a lack of interest in practicing could come from other causes, such as the type of music the youngster is learning, the approach the teacher is taking or an overly busy after-school schedule. But it could also be that the instrument just isn’t the right one for that kid. A better match may present itself if the youngster does a little exploring by listening to a variety of kinds of music, going to concerts at school or in concert halls, watching performances on TV, having the school music teacher demonstrate different instruments. Maybe that reluctant practicer will discover an instrument he or she really wants to play, as happened with Ann Hobson Pilot, principal cellist of the Boston Symphony. She struggled with piano lessons for years, not liking them much and not wanting to practice. But when she had a chance to try harp in high school, “I felt more expressive,” she says. “I loved it from the start. So I practiced more.”

Answers to Quiz: In addition to the Boston Symphony’s Ann Hobson Pilot, three other instrument-switchers in the list above are also orchestral musicians, members of the New York Philharmonic: Cynthia Phelps, who switched from violin to viola; Carter Brey, from violin to cello; Sherry Sylar, from piano and flute to oboe. The other two are soloists: André Watts, switched as a youngster from violin to piano; Paula Robison, from piano to flute. The two who didn’t switch: Joshua Bell and James Galway.

In the post below, Gordon Thompson Professor of Music at Skidmore College, remembers Bobby Graham who passed away on Monday.

Forty-five years ago in September 1964, the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” stormed to the top of British charts and would soon accomplish the same on Billboard’s American rankings. The raucous guitar and explosive drums declared a new era of pop and an aggressive voice for rock. Indeed, in that juxtaposition of angry instruments and whining voice can be heard the beginnings of punk. With this recording and many others, Bobby Graham offers the example of a musician many have heard, but too few have heard of.

The leader of the Kinks, Ray Davies remembers in his autobiography how he suddenly understood what rock drumming was all about when they hired Bobby Graham. He and producer Shel Talmy arranged to record “You Really Got Me” at a midnight session in London’s IBC Studios with session musicians Graham and Arthur Greenslade (piano). They had made several attempts, but tonight when Graham played, he brought all the power and the authority to the session it had lacked. The drummer abandoned “the complicated introduction he had planned and just thumped one beat on the snare drum with as much power as he could muster, as if to say, ‘OK, wimp, take that!’ For the next three minutes he was one of us” (150). Graham would continue providing the beat for the Kinks until around 1966 when he tried his hand producing records and serving as a music director; but drumming would always be his first love.

Bobby Graham may not have looked like a mod, but his drumming graced many of mid-sixties British hits, including those by the Dave Clark Five (especially those disks featuring horn sections such as “You Got What It Takes”) and Them (“Gloria” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go”). His association with the Dave Clark Five proved particularly problematic given that the bandleader WAS the drummer; moreover, Clark routinely declared that no other drummer played in the studio. However, a close listen to early recordings such as “Do You Love Me,” “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces” reveals double-tracked drumming, suggesting that the drummer/producer had assistance from another musician. Graham maintained to the end that he was that drummer (a claim supported by unofficial correspondence) and who could doubt Clark’s good judgment at hiring the best. Indeed, many a British drummer cringed when they saw Graham at a session, knowing they had just been demoted to playing tambourine.

Graham had played on earlier hits by Johnny Leyton (“Johnny Remember Me”) and Joe Brown and the Bruvvers (“Picture of You”), but with the explosion of pop groups in 1963, Graham’s proven abilities in the studio made him the choice of producers looking to make quick hits. Younger musicians might break into a sweat when the red light burned in the studio indicating that the tape was running; but musicians like Graham buckled down and did what they knew best: play near flawlessly.

Bobby passed away in London on Monday 14 September 2009 with loved ones by his side. He leaves behind a treasure trove of great music. In my last communication with him, he lamented that he could no longer gig, not that he did not crave to be on the stage again, having a bash while the world danced to his drumming.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Last week Thompson stumped us with a musical riddle that had sixties British rock and pop as its subject. The answer and explanation are below. Check out Thompson’s other riddles here.

The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Released 26 September 1969

Forty years ago, as college students returned to their classrooms from that summer’s music festivals, as other students dropped out of school to join the “counterculture,” and as still others headed for Vietnam, the Beatles released one of their best-loved albums. After an acrimonious winter of false starts, the Beatles asked George Martin to return and to help them record in the way they had during happier times. In the few short years since the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967), their manager Brian Epstein had died, they had formed their own record and production company (Apple), they had retreated to Rishikesh in India to meditate, and they had seen much of what had taken them so long to build begin to crumble from within. The more they became involved in the business of being the Beatles, the less they seemed to enjoy it.

The Beatles sensed their impending demise as a functioning ensemble and, over that alternately turbulent and ecstatic summer, they pursued two visions of what they wanted to do musically. No longer simply four teenagers exhilarated with playing rock ‘n’ roll in strip clubs, dance halls, and subterranean clubs, they knew that the music world had evolved around them. When they first topped the charts, their music challenged the status quo of pop: the world of teen idols promoted by Dick Clark and saucy black women produced by Phil Spector or Berry Gordy. By September 1969, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Ginger Baker (with Rick Grech) had formed Blind Faith, released an album, and were already in the throes of dissolution while the Jimi Hendrix Experience had played their last gig. The summer had featured a number of important music festivals featuring live music by many of the best-known performers of the era; but the band that had jumpstarted it all in 1963 was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, John Lennon would appear with Eric Clapton as members of the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto on 13 September 1969, suggesting that the Beatles were no longer able to function as a musical ensemble.

Although the Beatles discussed other names for this album (including Everest, suggesting the pinnacle of their recordings, albeit also the name of a cigarette brand), they settled on the name of the street where they had recorded in the EMI Recording Studios. The first side resembles the kind of album they had made in the past: individual recordings with no internal linking. Side two, however, attempts to join a number of songs together in part through performance, but also by simply splicing together different recordings.

The last begun, but not the last;
The end was coming very fast.

Although Abbey Road would be the last album project that the Beatles would begin, it would not be the last album they released. The fiasco of trying to film themselves rehearsing and then playing in a concert—material that would later prove the basis for the film Let It Be—American producer Phil Spector would take the tension riven sessions of early 1969 and turn them into the album Let It Be, which they released in 1970. Not only did the Beatles sense the end quickly approaching, but the album Abbey Road also officially comes to completion with a song called “The End.”

Why did the chickens cross the road?
Maybe they had a heavy load.

Although they discussed the idea of a portrait of them posing in the Himalayas (apropos of the possible title Everest), they instead chose a much closer location: walking across Abbey Road, a few hundred feet from the front door of EMI’s Recording Studios. These facilities were where they had gotten their break, where they had made their historic recordings, and where fans had regularly congregated to greet them. While hardly chickens (I just could not resist the reference to the classic joke), the cover photo has inspired considerable interpretation, if not imitation. For those convinced that the Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and that the Beatles management had brought in a double, the image of John Lennon in white (the priest), Ringo Starr in a dark suit (the undertaker), a barefoot Paul McCartney in a suit (the corpse), and George Harrison in denim (the grave digger) proved too much to resist. Moreover, one of the closing numbers, “Carry that Weight,” itself became part of the PID (“Paul Is Dead”) rumor mill tied to the cover.

They come together and salute the Queen;
But something happens in between.

To open the album, John Lennon provided a song he had initially written for Timothy Leary’s bizarre campaign to become the Governor of the State of California. But like many other things in his life, Lennon had grown suspect of the benefits of LSD and the intentions and abilities of people like Leary. “Come Together” instead contributes some of Lennon’s darkest verbal gobbledygook since “Glass Onion” and grows from a snippet of a Chuck Berry tune.

At the very end of the album, indeed even after “The End,” they place a bit of McCartney whimsy that pokes affectionate fun at the Queen. They did not list “Her Majesty” in the contents of the album, but instead left it an uncomfortable distance from the sentimental ending (“The love you take is equal to the love you make”) of the closing medley. Just as the almost discarded edit had surprised them in the studio, they intended it to startle listeners the first time they waited for the tone arm to head into the end groove.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of this album is George Harrison’s “Something.” Positioned immediately after “Come Together” (and on the other side of that single), “Something” would be their biggest hit of the fall and ironically Frank Sinatra’s favorite Lennon-McCartney tune.