Can Ordinary People Burst Into Song?

Can Ordinary People Burst Into Song?

By Frank J. Oteri
According to John Kander, a convincing musical theatre work or opera needs to be at some kind of geographical or generational remove from the audience because “ordinary people during their ordinary day do not suddenly burst into song.”

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

I was born the year that the Beatles first came to America and grew up in a society where rock and its offshoots have been pretty much the dominant musical language ever since. So I’m a little too young to remember a time when musicals, both stage and screen, formed the backbone of American popular culture. But I’ve also never completely understood the seemingly vast aesthetic chasm between these two stylistic realms. Despite valiant and sometimes successful attempts to reconcile these two aesthetics over the past almost half century (e.g. Hair, Rent, Spring Awakening, etc.), to this day if you’re a hardcore connoisseur of Broadway’s Golden Age, you probably think that the coming of electric guitars and amplified voices was tantamount to the end of the world. And similarly it seems that if you’re a serious rock aficionado, you probably have little patience for show tunes.

But show tunes have been a welcome obsession for me these past six weeks. As a result of preparing for next month’s Cover, I’ve been completely immersed in the musical oeuvre of our interviewee, John Kander, one of Broadway’s most successful composers and one of the last survivors from that Golden Age whose career and compositional methods are utterly fascinating (stay tuned). Kander’s first blockbuster, Cabaret (1966), happened after the ascent of rock, but in that score and in his subsequent output he has remained firmly rooted in earlier traditions. It works because the plots of his shows typically take place in other eras and locales, so it doesn’t seem in any way unnatural for the characters to sing in earlier styles. But it is in no way an artistic volte-face from the present. According to him, rather, a convincing musical theatre work or opera needs to be at some kind of geographical or generational remove from the audience because, as he correctly points out, “Ordinary people during their ordinary day do not suddenly burst into song.”

I kept thinking of Kander’s comment yesterday as I was watching Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), a beautiful French film from, it turns out coincidentally (or maybe not), that pivotal year of Beatlemania and my birth—1964. In the film, which is a story about the lives and loves of ordinary people in a small town in Brittany, the entire screenplay is sung (to music by Michel Legrand). Although it gets typecast nowadays as a musical, it’s actually an opera since there is no spoken dialogue, although the style is probably more in keeping with the sound world of Hollywood musicals—though on second thought, not quite. If you haven’t seen it you might think it can’t possibly hold together. The idea of people doing everything in song could eventually feel like an irritating affectation. But I thought it was totally compelling from start to finish, and even believable. The fact that they were always singing effectively skirted around Kander’s dictum about ordinary people not bursting into song. There was no bursting. Once I got used to the idea that they were singing, and they always were, I just enjoyed the ride.

Ironically when Cabaret was finally made into a film, Bob Fosse totally rearranged the original stage score so that the songs mostly took place only during the sequences in the night club, in order to give it a greater overall realistic feel. Though Cabaret the film is quite effective, after being completely transported by Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, I began to think that we somehow lost something when we started to be disdainful of the escapism into an unreal world that is the hallmark of the Golden Age musical. Is watching any other type of movie or listening to any other kind of music any less escapist?