Interpretation and Characterization in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot

This chapter looks at how Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapt T. H. White’s The Once and Future King in both original 1960 Broadway stage production and the 1967 Hollywood film adaptation. Specifically, this chapter looks at how the musical Camelot interprets White’s version of Arthurian legend, tracking the changes Lerner and Loewe made and especially how song affects characterization. Drawing on archival research completed at the Library of Congress, this chapter examines the process of adapting this long unwieldy myth into a musical. Although Loewe did not work on the 1967 film, Lerner wrote the screenplay. Since the film version remains fixed and widely available, it is worth investigating how the changes made to it further adapt the tale. Since Lerner and Loewe chose to focus on the love triangle between Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot, this chapter pays particular attention to how Lerner and Loewe alter their characters.

“I'll Never Know Exactly Who Did What”: Broadway Composers as Musical Collaborators

Though published vocal scores of Broadway musicals imply sole musical authorship the archives reveal a more complex picture. Five case studies illustrate different approaches to the compositional process in the 1940s and 1950s: Richard Rodgers, who produced fair copies in piano-vocal score for each of his songs; Cole Porter, who regularly used an amanuensis but sometimes produced fair copies; Frank Loesser, who initially used an amanuensis but later in his career produced detailed fragments of music for his arrangers to turn into performance scores; Frederick Loewe, who worked closely with an arranger to produce fair copies; and Robert Wright and George Forrest, who went through a complicated process of selecting and adapting the work of composers of art music such as Borodin and Rachmaninov. Detailed study of the available manuscripts makes clear that score production was nearly always a collaborative activity on Broadway, whether it involved amanuenses, copyists, arrangers, or orchestrators. Although in each of these cases the named composer retains an authorial role, in practical terms the archives reveal them to be “collaborators” rather than “authors,” working as a member of a team to create each performance score. As such, their aims were to facilitate performance events rather than to produce fixed works.

Sentential Lyric-Types in the Great American Songbook

This article investigates the musico-poetic role played by the sentence in songs of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Frederick Loewe, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. The phrase-type can be understood as an architectural frame for both composers and lyricists, fundamental to both musical and lyrical designs and crucial to the interaction between the two. This study classifies lyrics that display sentential characteristics of repetition, intensification, and cadence and explores their correspondence to those features of musical sentences. The result is a more detailed picture of text-music relationships and phrase structure in the Great American Songbook.