“A whole note could represent four bars, eight bars, 12 bars, 16 bars,” but the “glue has to be harmonic” - “has to be spinning out the triad and spinning out the harmony.”īetween my first time seeing “Sweeney” - I went back twice! - and getting to know him personally in the late 1990s, Sondheim was a singular presence in my life and work. “I write long-line stuff in either whole notes or half notes,” he added. Of a passage in “Passion,” Sondheim says that two chords “represent the entire progression” of the sequence. If you want specifics, this is your source.
USSED EMERSON FLUTE SERIES
He did offer detailed analyses of several of his works in a series of interviews in 1997 with Mark Eden Horowitz, a music specialist from the Library of Congress, later published as an essential book, “Sondheim on Music.”
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Sondheim mostly just smiled and listened, nodding and saying, basically, “Yep, that’s it.” He never liked to discuss the inner workings of his music in front of the public. I tried to show the audience how those chunks break down and fit together. All the songs are “interconnected through chunks of melody, rhythm and accompaniment,” as he put it in the liner notes for the original cast recording. I also played excerpts from “Merrily We Roll Along,” never his most popular but perhaps my desert-island Sondheim musical, and one of his most appealing, ingeniously intricate and moving scores. In our interview, Sondheim acknowledged that the moment had this subtext, yet denied that he had calibrated the effect he said he had just followed his musical instincts. Yet, as we learn, it was this young woman’s beauty that made her the prey of the lecherous, powerful Judge Turpin. Shouldn’t the wife’s beauty be conveyed through something more melting, more radiant? It has always struck me as a counterintuitive touch. A graduate seminar in music theory could devote considerable time to deciphering the elusive harmony. Then, Sweeney adds, “And she was beautiful.” At that final word - “beautiful” - the chord below, which repeats three times, is piercingly, hauntingly dissonant. Here is what Sondheim had to say about it.
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Even two cultural gods faded before the engulfing beginning of “Sweeney.” Then who walks in and sits directly in front of me? John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I was unshaven, in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying a stuffed backpack.
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I assumed that Stephen Sondheim’s latest musical was sold out, but I decided to take a chance and see if I could get a ticket to the matinee.Īmazingly, there was a great one available - fourth row center. “Sweeney Todd” had been open for a few months on Broadway when, one Saturday afternoon in June 1979, I passed by the theater where it was playing.