From the Stage to the Studio: Musical Theater as Popular Recorded Music

Catalog description

For more than a century, the songs, scores and performances from the American musical stage have enchanted a vast audience; and show tunes — songs written for the stage — have been the wellspring of modern popular music. Broadway cast albums, and the pop songs they spawned, are an extremely popular yet underrated genre in the music business. In their time, the Broadway cast album presented an ongoing challenge for record producers: how does one get the on-stage Broadway show into people's living rooms (or iPods)? This 7-week, 2-credit course provides an overview of how producers met that challenge — how best to create the analogue of a live experience in a recorded medium; how to mediate the conflict between narrative and technology. We will witness that wrestling match across the evolution of musical artistry and popular tastes, from the 1920s to the 2020s, embracing in its reach the shifting modes of Broadway, Hollywood, pop music, television, and streaming. We will examine six seminal stage scores—Show Boat, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, A Little Night Music, Les Miserables, and Hamilton—and how their music was brought to a wider public. Most of all, this is a course about problem solving—how do you solve a problem like a theatrical narrative? How do you disseminate an event that happens for one night on Broadway and share it with millions of listeners? These are basic critical questions that can be applied to any creative endeavor where an artist has to make analogous decisions across a range of media.