Post for Tuesday, July 26

I find it interesting to see how music works on an audience. Playwrights and composers create music that triggers something, whether it is an emotion or a past connection, in their audience. For example, in The Beggar’s Opera, Gay used popular ballads with new lyrics. This created a different meaning for the song, but also it added another layer of depth to the play’s meaning. It is interesting that a composer can use the same melody or tune in a different way throughout his entire piece. As I listened to the audio of Sweeney Todd, I found myself trying to find the same pattern or tune. It reminds me of the musical cues that alert the audience to certain moments in the action. I kept thinking about the movie Jaws and those few notes that alert the audience when the shark will appear. It amazing how those few notes heighten the suspense and how the audience knows what is about to happen, when the characters do not. It is not at all surprising that earlier playwrights played with this same concept. I never knew the kind of work that went to crafting a lyric or score. The composer does so much to trigger a certain reaction from the audience both consciously and unconsciously. For example, how Sondheim repeated dies irea or a tune. Near the end of Sweeney Todd (The epilogue track , he repeated various songs. Not only did he repeat the whistle , but also it sounded as though he repeated the song from act 1, “There’s a hole in the world,” but slightly different. Furthermore, the Judge and Sweeney Todd, sing pretty women again. Sondheim wants the audience to recall the moment where Todd’s revenge was interrupted, but this time, Todd gets revenge on the judge. The audience, or at least for me, knew that this time Todd would not be interrupted. These are the things I do not normally think about as I watch a movie or play, but rather I let them happened or let the music do its job. It is interesting that the music or lyrics may have been different, but the reaction is the same throughout different audiences. Despite cultural and social differences, we have similar reactions and emotions and those are triggered or highlighted through music.

“Laugh, Cry, Hum, Quake?”
Dr. Sherman, on Monday, July 18th, said words to this effect: “Title should be a syntactical arrangement that presents the foci and the argument of the paper.” If the same may be said of a course of study, then I guess I must request a refund. “Laugh, Cry, Hum, Quake.” I laughed a lot. I could not claim otherwise. I did also do quite a bit of humming: “Fill ev’ry glass, for wine inspires us, / And fires us” or “Let us take the road. / Hark! I hear the sound of coaches!” Who would not hum? I think I quaked sufficiently. But about crying. The only times I cried were when I laughed so hard, I cried. My eyes misted when the Sweeney Todd cast—especially Angela Lansbury—took their curtain calls, but that’s because, like David, I am a sentimental “butterfly.” —Seriously, “Laugh, Cry, Hum, Quake” was an amazing class: amazing lectures, amazing discussions, amazing readings, and fun postings. My postings tended to go way pass the two-hundred-fifty word mark, so I am going to cash in those extra words tonight and just say, “Thank you, Dr. Sherman and Everyone. Enjoy the rest of your summer.”

One “what” that this course provided was a clear time line of the evolution of (mostly)British theater since Shakespeare. We tracked trends in social values, audience attitude, production elements, and the use of music from the The Beggar’s Opera through She Stoops to The London Merchant to The Bells to G & S, culminating in Sweeney Todd. In our studies, we looked through a telescope at the world of John Gay and Oliver Goldsmith, at the genres of the weeping comedy and the melo-drama and the musical. We also looked through a microscope in our study of the original lyrics of ballads used in The Beggar’s Opera and how they worked in concert with the Gay’s lyrics as a mash-up of stinging social comment; and the goose bump popping analysis of hidden Dies Irae melody lines.
Big picture + little picture = whole picture(in 3D). Glorious.

I particularly loved learning about the role of theater in the lives of people from all levels of society. That everyone went to the theater was a universal through most of the times we visited. The Dickens article places us directly in the smelly and raucous (but highly varied) audience of Victorian England. Eighteenth and nineteenth century theater seems to have been a powerful medium for social conversation and change, and reminds me of the influence of television in the mid twentieth century.

In addition, we followed an arc of the musical’s development as an art form. The Beggar’s Opera bookends Sweeney Todd perfectly. The first musical started us off, and we finished with study of the musical at its sophisticated zenith. I wonder what John Gay would think if he saw a production of Sondheim’s work. Would he recognize his connection, or how he helped spark its creation when he took on Jonathan Swift’s challenge 283 years ago?