Geoffrey Block | |
---|---|
Born | May 7, 1948 |
Education | PhD, Harvard University, 1979 AM, Harvard University, 1973 AB, University of California at Los Angeles, 1970 |
Occupation | Musicologist |
Geoffrey Block (born May 7, 1948) is an American musicologist and author. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music History and Humanities at the University of Puget Sound. He has written numerous books, essays, and journal articles on American musical theater and musical film, and books on Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Ives, Richard Rodgers, and Franz Schubert. He was the General Editor of Yale Broadway Masters and is the Series Editor of Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, two series of scholarly books accessible to general audiences.
Block received his B.A. from UCLA and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University, the latter in 1979. He began his teaching career at The Thacher School from 1977 to 1980 before moving to the University of Puget Sound where he taught from 1980 to 2018. [1] Block began his writing career with several articles based on his dissertation on the compositional process of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15 and No. 2 in B-Flat Major, Op. 19. His interest in Beethoven's compositional process combined with his interest in musical theater both as a scholar and a composer led him to explore the genesis and compositional process of Frank Loesser's sketchbooks for The Most Happy Fella in The Musical Quarterly (1989), the first musicological examination of a Broadway musical (other than Porgy and Bess) to appear in a mainstream music journal and according to one scholar, “provided one of the first moments of legitimacy to scholarship on the American musical [and] essential reading for anyone interested in the genre and its historiography.” [2]
His article on the Broadway canon in The Journal of Musicology (1993) broke new ground in the discussion of the genre. Several years later, in the absence of a textbook that seriously engaged the crucial role music played in the dramatic realization of a musical, Block wrote his own, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim (1997). [3] In the second edition (2009) Block expanded the title to include "and Lloyd Webber" and added two new chapters on musical film adaptations. Books on Richard Rodgers and numerous articles would follow (see the Selected Bibliography). One scholar has written that “Block is unquestionably the leading academic authority on the American musical.” [4] Stephen Sondheim described another Block essay as “virtually unique in its specificity and intelligence.” [5]
Since 2000, much of Block’s work on stage musicals pays close attention to their often maligned film musical adaptations. This work led to his most recent book, A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era (2023), in which Block explores the symbiotic relationship between a dozen Broadway musicals and their Hollywood studio film adaptations from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. [6]
In discussing the dramatic and musical consequences at play in the often differing artistic and commercial choices made by Broadway stage musicals and their Hollywood film adaptations, Block regularly challenges the conventional wisdom that critically favors stage musicals as invariably superior to their film offspring.
Perhaps Block’s longest-lasting contributions to the field of musical theater and film are the dozens of books on the Broadway musical he has commissioned and edited. From 2003 and 2010 he served as general editor for Yale Broadway Masters (Block’s Richard Rodgers was the first). Since 2010, he has been the series editor of Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, which includes volumes on composers, librettists, lyricists, directors, choreographers, and individual musicals.
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II was an American lyricist, librettist, theatrical producer, and director in musical theater for nearly 40 years. He won eight Tony Awards and two Academy Awards for Best Original Song. Many of his songs are standard repertoire for vocalists and jazz musicians. He co-wrote 850 songs.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborations with Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim's Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
Rodgers and Hart were an American songwriting partnership between composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and the lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895–1943). They worked together on 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs from 1919 until Hart's death in 1943.
Rodgers and Hammerstein was a theater-writing team of composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and lyricist-dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960), who together created a series of innovative and influential American musicals. Their musical theater writing partnership has been called the greatest of the 20th century.
Adam Guettel is an American composer-lyricist of musical theater and opera. The grandson of musical theatre composer Richard Rodgers, he is best known for his musical The Light in the Piazza, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.
Susan Kaye McClary is an American musicologist associated with "new musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology with feminist music criticism, McClary is professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University.
Sigmund Romberg was a Hungarian-born American composer. He is best known for his musicals and operettas, particularly The Student Prince (1924), The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928).
New musicology is a wide body of musicology since the 1980s with a focus upon the cultural study, aesthetics, criticism, and hermeneutics of music. It began in part a reaction against the traditional positivist musicology—focused on primary research—of the early 20th century and postwar era. Many of the procedures of new musicology are considered standard, although the name more often refers to the historical turn rather than to any single set of ideas or principles. Indeed, although it was notably influenced by feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, new musicology has primarily been characterized by a wide-ranging eclecticism.
Absolute music is music that is not explicitly "about" anything; in contrast to program music, it is non-representational. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Robert Russell Bennett was an American composer and arranger, best known for his orchestration of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.
Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theatre critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.
The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D 804, Op. 29, was written by Franz Schubert between February and March 1824. It dates roughly to the same time as his monumental Death and the Maiden Quartet, emerging around three years after his previous attempt to write for the string quartet genre, the Quartettsatz, D 703, that he never finished.
Carl E. Schachter is an American music theorist noted for his expertise in Schenkerian analysis.
Don Walker was a prolific Broadway orchestrator, who also composed music for musicals and one film and worked as a conductor in television.
John Joseph Daverio was a violinist, scholar, teacher and author, best known for his writings on the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. His research interests centered around Austro-German composers including J. S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner and Post-Romantic composers such as R. Strauss and Mahler. Just before his sudden death, he was exploring the concept of "late Style" in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. All of his writings feature the relation of music to literature and philosophy.
Elaine Stritch at Liberty is an autobiographical one-woman show written by Elaine Stritch and John Lahr, and produced by George C. Wolf, which is composed of anecdotes from Stritch's life, as well as showtunes and Broadway standards that mirror Stritch’s rise and fall both on and off the stage.
Timothy Carter is an Australian musicologist with a special focus on late Renaissance music and Italian Baroque music. An active member of the field of musicology, Carter is a department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds the position of David G. Frey Distinguished Professor. He has worked on the editorial boards or staffs of a number of prominent musical publications and has published extensively in the field.
Frank Scheck is an American film critic. He is best known for his reviews in the New York Post and The Hollywood Reporter. He formerly edited STAGES Magazine and worked as a theater critic for the Christian Science Monitor in the 1990s.