Contracts and Commitments

Oklahoma! ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 31-82
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Richard Rodgers ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein

Theresa Helburn was initially uncertain about whether to treat Green Grow the Lilacs as a “cowboy play” with songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Tex Ritter, as something aspiring to higher artistic status (music by Aaron Copland or Roy Harris), or somewhere in between. Richard Rodgers also needed to deal with his longtime but collapsing partnership with Lorenz Hart. Even after Helburn had fixed on Rodgers and Hammerstein, in summer 1942, there were important decisions to be made about the director (eventually, it was Rouben Mamoulian), choreographer (Agnes de Mille, chosen because of her work on Copland’s Rodeo), and the casting of the show. The Guild approached various Hollywood stars (Deanna Durbin, Groucho Marx, Anthony Quinn, Shirley Temple) but took a different path in the end. No less troublesome was how to generate the large amount of money needed to get a musical onto the stage.

Oklahoma!

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Final Shape ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein ◽  
Theatre Guild

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway on 31 March 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. When this book was first published in 2007, it offered the first fully documented history of the making of the show based on archival materials, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources. The present revised edition draws still further on newly uncovered sources to provide an even clearer account of a work that many have claimed fundamentally changed Broadway musical theater. It is filled with rich and fascinating details about the play on which Oklahoma! was based (Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs); on what encouraged Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Guild to bring Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first collaboration; on how Rouben Mamoulian and Agnes de Mille became the director and choreographer; on the drafts and revisions that led the show toward its final shape; and on the rehearsals and tryouts that brought it to fruition. It also examines the lofty aspirations and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.

Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler by Matthew Mugmon

Notes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-613
Author(s):  
Shih-Ni Prim
Keyword(s):  
Gustav Mahler ◽  
Aaron Copland

Israeli Folk Music

1994 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Arthur Honegger ◽  
Kurt Weill

During the 1930s several of Europe's most distinguished composers received commissions to arrange Hebrew songs collected from early settlers in Israel and circulated on postcards. In this edition, fifteen songs appear in voice and keyboard arrangements by Aaron Copland, Paul Dessau, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Toch, Stefan Wolpe, and Kurt Weill, making the volume a resource for performer and scholar alike. In addition, ten melodies are presented in facsimiles of the original postcards. An afterword is devoted to the significance of folk-song collecting and to the diverse uses of folk music during the period of nascent Israeli national identity.

The Best Years of Our Lives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
George Gershwin ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
The Common ◽  
Post War

Hugo Friedhofer’s widely acclaimed score to Best Years of Our Lives successfully evokes an American sound that simultaneously universalizes and authenticates this story of post-war readjustment. He accomplishes this through harmonic and rhythmic approaches indebted to Aaron Copland, but also borrows stylistic devices from jazz, as filtered through the likes of George Gershwin and other concert composers who used the jazz idiom. Friedhofer’s specific use of leitmotif in this film emphasizes the common over the specific, further unifying three stories and generalizing shared post-war experiences.

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