How’s this for a sentence:
From Floyd Collins, where Southern string band music, contemporary folk song, and Feldman-esque introspection seamlessly blend with a dramatic sensibility totally informed by the tradition of the musical, to the quasi-operatic and completely infectious The Light in the Piazza, Guettel has shown himself to be a musical omnivore for whom the whole world is a stage.
Ahem.
Anyway, now on NewMusicBox.org there’s an interesting interview with theater composer Adam Guettel, whose latest musical The Light in the Piazza was recently televised on PBS, and is now making the rounds in a national tour.
I’ve been Guettel-curious for many years, but didn’t really start paying attention until a few months ago when I saw Piazza on television. Years ago I bought the cast album of Floyd Collins and listened to it exactly once. It wasn’t that it was bad, just that the style it was in (sort of a country, bluegrass thing) made it hard for me to appreciate. Also, it’s a total downer. I intend to listen to it again with fresh ears.
Piazza on the other hand is captivating from the opening harp glisses in the Overture to the final double bar. To me it sounds a lot like Sondheim, so I’m immediately attracted to it, for sentimental reasons alone.
Much has been made of how this piece resembles opera, and a variety of reasons have been offered for making this assertion, including the style of singing and the difficulty of the score. For me, it all comes down to one key component: a lot of the storytelling is coming out of the orchestra pit, which I’d say is the most important difference between what we call “musicals” and what we call “operas”. The accompaniments are contrapuntal, and by that I don’t mean they’re necessarily “busy”, but that the composer is thinking horizontally instead of vertically. In other words, the harmonic language is driven by inner and outer voices moving independently, whereas in a typical pop-oriented musical, it’s just a lot of block chords, really, and some filigree; a limited toolkit for storytelling.
As a disillusioned theater composer myself, I’m encouraged by some of the things Guettel has to say about this era, which I can only think of as “post-Broadway”. For starters, I hadn’t known this, but it’s mentioned that Guettel has relocated from New York to Seattle, which may signal a loosening of New York’s grip on the field.
Guettel:
I want to have an opportunity to develop things that are safer both in terms of the critics and economically, where the risks aren’t as high, which will allow me to stay fluid and take risks. There’s a guerilla spontaneity that you get from that. And theatre used to be produced like that.
So, now the future for “non-commercial” musicals seems to be in regional theaters, which is all right with me, and Guettel’s remarks seem to help legitimize that notion. This is good news for those of us composers for whom Broadway is no longer a “thing”.
Read the interview conducted by the American Music Center’s always-astute Frank Oteri.
