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Convergences Between Leonard Bernstein's On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953) and His Contemporary Concert Music
Lin, Hsun
Lin, Hsun
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Abstract
"Convergences Between Leonard Bernstein's On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953) and His Contemporary Concert Music" On the Town and Wonderful Town are the two musicals that Leonard Bernstein wrote before Candide and West Side Story. These two shows won success in their original runs and On the Town was adapted by MGM into a film in 1949 while Wonderful Town was presented live as a television special on CBS in 1958. As an American composer, Bernstein sought out the "American voice" in all of his works, and merging traits from concert hall music and the popular idioms from the Broadway musical theater became a personal signature of his compositions. Chapter 1 deals with the background of the creation of On the Town and Wonderful Town, including how the creators conceived their ideas, the receptions of the original runs, and the historical circumstances they faced. Chapter 2 examines the application of popular idioms, which Bernstein used in his Broadway scores, in his large-scale concert works in the 1940s and 1950s, including Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah, Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, and Serenade after Plato's Symposium. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on the music of On the Town and Wonderful Town. In On the Town, the composer showed his ambition to apply techniques that he learned from his academic training: contrapuntal structure, fugal-like sections, highly dissonant sonorities, and developing motives to unify the work. In Wonderful Town, Bernstein continued the direction of his work On the Town and blended 1930s swing music and operatic moments, together with other music styles. Meanwhile, Bernstein reused materials from other works, which is a technique that is common to concert music composers, such as J. S. Bach, Handel, and Beethoven, and, instead of simply reprising songs, he applied small motives to help unify the entire work, a technique that one finds in opera more often. As an active musician, Bernstein was aware of new trends in the concert field and merged them into his musicals but did not abandon the conventions of writing memorable melodies. Through the examination of On the Town and Wonderful Town, we can see that Bernstein, as an ambitious musician from the concert hall, devoting himself to musical theater.
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Date
2013-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Music, Green, Adolph, Comden, Betty, Robbins, Jerome, Bernstein, Leonard, On the town, Wonderful town