Listening Guides

Listening Guide 2.1

Listening Guide 2.2

Listening Guide 2.3

Listening Guide 2.1
"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" 4 beats per measure

iTune link = Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Analysis of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (American Musical Theater, CD format, Smithsonian RD 036 A4 20483, 1/23)

"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is from Kern's musical Roberta, his last big Broadway venture. Based on the Alice Duer Miller novel Gowns by Roberta, it is a sophisticated comedy about an American football player and a Russian princess. The song that carried the show was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which, in earlier incarnations, had been intended as a fast tap dance number in Show Boat, then as a march for an NBC radio series. It was lyricist and librettist Otto Harbach's idea to slow the song down and to add a lyric based on an old Russian proverb.
       Beautiful Ukranian-born Tamara Drasin was chosen to play the part of Princess Stephanie and to sing "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and it is she who we hear on this recording. In the show Tamara accompanied herself on guitar, but on this recording she is accompanied by a dance orchestra. Since Harbach's staging called for a jazz band onstage, the dance band accompaniment may not be totally out of place here.

Listening Guide 2.2
"Sunrise, Sunset" 3 beats per measure

iTune link = Sunrise, Sunset

Analysis of "Sunrise, Sunset" (American Musical Theater, 4/18)

"Sunrise, Sunset," from Fiddler on the Roof, is sung during the wedding of Tevye's oldest daughter, Tzeitel. In this song, we hear the musings of Tevye, his wife Golda, and other characters attending the wedding. They sing about how fast the years pass and children blossom. It is a touching moment that counters the boisterous "To Life" that is heard earlier in the action.
       The song is in a minor key. The melody and the instrumentation of the accompaniment capture the culture flavor of the Russian Jewish peasants and the traditions depicted in the story. Zero Mostel is a perfect Tevye, possessing the expressive range to depict both the rowdy jubilation and the deep pain his character experiences. Golda is played by Maria Karnilova.

Listening Guide 2.3
"The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" 3 beats per measure

iTune link = The Ballad of Sweeny Todd

Analysis of "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" (Sweeney Todd, RCA 3379-2-RC)

Stephen Sondheim wrote Sweeney Todd as a macabre, yet playful musical based on a popular English nineteenth-century story. Sondheim wanted the music to have the effect of a score to a horror movie. To that end he used the sound of a pipe organ, often associated with Gothic horror, and dissonant chords. To show the underlying lighthearted nature of the musical, Sondheim has pointed out that he kept using a certain chord in the music throughout the show, a chord borrowed from the movie music of Bernard Herrman, who wrote for such movie thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. There is also extensive use of the Dies Irae, the music used in the Mass for the Dead (see Figure 2.1) in the Roman Catholic Church, which Sondheim found both moving and frightening. (French composer Hector Berlioz used the Dies Irae to great effect in his chilling Symphonie Fantastique from 1830.)
       "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" is the opening of the show. The setting is a graveyard, and two gravediggers are unceremoniously dumping a wrapped body into the hole in the ground. Members of the company begin to come on stage and sing a prologue describing the character Sweeney Todd and his deeds.
       The opening melody sung by the first two members of the company is in a fast triple meter, reminiscent of the rhythm of a British folk jig. Then the entire company admonishes Todd to swing his razor wide to a melodic variation of the Dies Irae. It is done in grand, full choral style. The first melody comes back, passed around to various members of the company as they sing about how calculated and inconspicuous Todd was as he carried out his sinister deeds. There follows a musical bridge, a climbing section. Sondheim begins playing around with the accents and rhythm of the meter, creating jagged and agitated effects in the music. Added to this, the company begins climbing in their vocal range and increasingly singing different music on top of each other. This climaxes with the group practically screaming the name "Sweeney," a cue for the dead Sweeney Todd to appear from the grave and join the chorus for the last verse before the first act. The orchestra ends the selection with the brittle sound of the xylophone over the orchestra, a mallet instrument with wooden bars struck with hard mallets. In many Halloween and horror settings its sound has been associated with the clattering bones of skeletons dancing. The piece closes with low trombones and percussion, suggesting the slamming of a coffin's lid.