Musical Heroes Series; Tim Chipping chooses Stephen Sondheim
Tim Chipping is a singer, journalist, and surprisingly hardcore folkie for a man with such skinny trousers. You can view his work here at Holy Moly and you may spy him singing about sheep murdering around the place.
Tim Chipping and friend
FROM TIM:
It’s common to hear even the most broadminded music fan say they hate musicals. But all musicals are not the same. And all writers of musicals are definitely not the same.
I first became aware of Stephen Sondheim in 1988. I was visiting London a lot, ahead of my move there the following year, and staying with a couple of friends – one of whom was a dresser in the theatre. He’d just got hold of the Broadway cast album of Sondheim’s latest show Into the Woods – an amalgamation of fairytales and the lessons they do or don’t teach us about real life. He played the album every morning until it wore me down and I went and bought my own.
A year or so later I met the man who would become my bandmate in Orlando (our folly of a pop group). We bonded in a sea of jangly guitar-loving indie kids because we were Stephen Sondheim fans. His favourite was Company – a plotless musical which takes place in a single second of one man’s life, at the moment he is surprised by his friends on his 35th birthday. Most people will be familiar with the song Being Alive that closes the show. But this was the third attempt at a final number for the central character Bobby – the other two songs failing to come to anything like such a positive conclusion about the need for coupledom. He may have given in to the producers by the time the show opened, but anyone prepared to try and end a Broadway musical with a song in praise of solitude gets my vote.
Here’s one of those songs, Happily Ever After, coming to the opposite conclusion to Being Alive, which was later included in a show that hoovered up many of Steve’s orphaned numbers:
It occurred to me recently that Sondheim’s driving purpose in life is to be right, which is probably what unconsciously appeals to me about him. For Steve there is absolutely a correct rhyme and a correct melody progression and his joy is in the puzzling then solving the questions that writing lyrics and music pose.
And it is a joy, albeit one that he knows keeps him from the pleasures enjoyed by others less obsessive in their creativity.
Sondheim studied for a year under the compositional theorist and electronic music pioneer Milton Babbitt. Ultimately Sondheim decided he loved tonality too much to become an avant-gardist, but you can hear much of what he learned in his best score: Sunday In The Park With George. It’s pointillist music for a pointillist painter (the show was based on an entirely fictional imagining of the life and legacy of George Seurat).
Here’s the song Finishing The Hat, performed by Mandy Patinkin as George, in which we can hear not just the character’s but Sondheim’s artistic motivation explained:
Steve also called his recent two-volume lyrics and theory collection Finishing The Hat. For me, it’s an analogy that pinpoints why we all create.
He’s also an intellectual snob, which I love about him too. While he has sworn never to criticize a living writer (though he got enough flak for demonstrating why Noel Coward was a flawed lyricist), it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to know who he was talking about when he responded to criticisms that he didn’t write hummable tunes by saying that if you were humming a tune when you came out of the theatre it was probably because you were humming it before you went in.
The Sondheim song that everyone knows is Send In The Clowns, from A Little Night Music. Its ubiquity tends to strip it of meaning, and certainly of context, making it seem corny. But in that same musical he also wrote The Miller’s Son – a song celebrating youthful promiscuity in girls, and Every Day A Little Death – a heartbreakingly bleak song about giving reluctant but dutiful oral gratification to a husband. Starlight Express it ain’t.
Here are both of these songs performed to devastating effect:
Sondheim’s songs are joyously clever, frequently funny and genuinely moving. Well, they are to me. And to him, it seems. When asked at a recent Q&A in London to talk about his favourite of his own musicals – Assassins, he sobbed uncontrollably with happiness as he recounted the memories of creating it. The show is about the people who killed or attempted to kill US presidents!
His ability to combine smart and witty with tear-inducing sentiment is probably best demonstrated here by one of his regular cast members Elaine Stritch in a career defining performance at his 80th birthday concert.
There’s no one like him.
Thanks Tim, now nobody put money on Sondheim coming up, this is good, you just can’t guess what folk will choose (except Kris choosing Gaughan, I would have put a fair amount of cash on that). Anyway, good, good good, keeping it broad. x
