Theatre Song Research Articles

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

Translating the Gestus of “Mac the Knife”

“Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” probably the most famous theatre song of the twentieth century, is known to most Americans simply as “Mac the Knife.” That title is the legacy of the Hit Parade of the 1950s. Like many Broadway show tunes, it had been yanked out of its theatre context and made into a commercial commodity.

The travels of a tune: Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ and the cultural translation of 17th-century English music

Abstract The travels of a tune: Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ and the cultural translation of 17th-century English music This article discusses Henry Purcell’s theatre song ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ (from The Fairy Queen, 1692) and its journey into various contexts in England and abroad. The article analyses the song’s appearance in printed songbooks, broadside ballads and single-sheet engravings, and in the Dutch manuscript songbook Finspång 9096:7 (now in Norrköping, Sweden), to show how the song was adapted to various contexts and conventions. The appearance of ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in Finspång 9096:7 further suggests that there was greater reciprocity in the exchanges between England and continental Europe than hitherto thought. I nuance this claim by arguing that such exchanges were dependent on translation and mediation by musicians such as John Abell (1653–after 1716) or translators such as Abel Boyer (?1667–1729). Boyer used ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in his Compleat French-Master (1694) and his French lyrics appear in Finspång 9096:7. The article shows the variety of uses and adaptations of ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in English and French-language contexts. This both challenges notions of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ music as entirely separate, and invites scholars and performers to imagine Purcell’s theatre songs performed and consumed in new ways.

Utilizing circles of attention in musical theatre acting: a personal perspective

ABSTRACTPedagogy and methodology for acting curriculum is consistent among universities in the United States. Students are introduced to acting principles formulated by Konstantin Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Benedetti, Lee Strasberg, and other experts in the field. This is not always the case for musical theatre acting courses offered by these same institutions. Musical theatre “acting” courses usually just expose students to a broad range of songs within the historical canon of musical theatre repertoire. Primary focus tends to be on the singing technique and vocal interpretation of the song. Musical theatre students in the academic setting must understand that acting technique represents the intellectual life of a character. The musical structure employs the emotional colour to the given circumstances of the character’s reason for singing the song. As a practitioner and educator of musical theatre pedagogy and methodology, I have experienced great success by utilizing Stanislavski’s “circles of attention” when coaching students through musical theatre song performance. The technique provides a clearer path of analysis for song text, activates given circumstances more clearly, clarifies moment-to-moment work, and links musical notation to language in order to achieve a more meaningful performance experience. It has become the most effective teaching tool in my musical theatre courses.

Everybody’s Song Making

Since the late 1990s, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has written songs that surpassed human composers in reproducing recognizable styles. In 2016, London’s West End premiered the world’s first computer-generated musical, Beyond the Fence, based on digital technology to detect ‘hit’ musical theatre songs. As AI quickly learns and upgrades their song-writing skills, humans are developing new ways of working with AI to expand the forms of song making for homo sapiens. In our post-phonograph era of information technology, it is no longer possible for the human song maker to write, produce, perform and distribute songs without any AI assistance. Recent scholarship on algorithm bias and AI domination, however, reminds us the hazard of AI-dependent human society and the urgency of consciously working against AI. The human public DIY song making has thus contributed to a larger political discourse that resists AI and the forces behind it— technology-driven global capitalist and consumerist infrastructures. Revolutionary apps such as Vocaloid and Ocarina have made anti-AI song making attempts accessible to the public, yet are precariously entangled in global data-processing networks and commercial systems. This article explores the social dimensions of human DIY song making in the age of Artificial Intelligence. It argues that the DIY song making creates distinct virtual communities and engenders new soundscapes that not only defy past normative algorithms and patterns, but uplift under-represented voices and desist from data-centric cultural production endeavours.

Varia fortuna de un tono de comediantes: “Ama al que ama, Anajarte” de La fiera, el rayo, la piedra

Resumen La única fuente musical conocida hasta la fecha perteneciente al drama mitológico calderoniano La fiera, el rayo, la piedra corresponde a la intervención “Ama al que ama, Anajarte”, cantada por Anteros en el momento en que el dios se presenta ante la desdeñosa reina de Trinacria, al final de la segunda jornada. Aunque la fuente musical no está exenta de problemas, su localización y edición nos obliga a plantearnos el papel que La fiera... jugó en la interacción entre drama y música en la escena española durante la década central del siglo XVII. Al mismo tiempo, el estudio del tono cantado por Anteros nos da pie para rastrear la circulación, difusión y popularización de algunos tonos teatrales del barroco y su arraigo en otros repertorios, tanto religiosos como profanos.

Jan Chryzostom o śpiewie i muzyce. Zarys problematyki

This article has been divided into three parts. The first part discusses the im­portance of singing and music in Jewish and Christian traditions; the second part discusses Chrysostom’s observations on singing and secular music (a lot of space is devoted to criticizing the obscene songs) and Jewish; the last part of the article is devoted to Christian singing. John Chrysostom attributed the great importance of singing and music and pointed to their various positive functions and actions. However, he criticized apotropaic and convivial songs, and theatrical and wedding songs as well. He also spoke negatively about Jewish songs and music. Chrysostom encouraged to introduce the repertoire of Christian songs to every dimension of hu­man existence. It had several goals: 1) to raise moral values of Christians’ life, who should avoid singing or listening to obscene theatrical songs; 2) to resist the strong influence of Judaism on a significant part of Christians in Antioch; 3) to establish the repertoire of Christian songs that would be sung for the glory of God.

Mourning Purcell

The first several months of 1695 proved to be one of Henry Purcell’s most active and productive periods. For Drury Lane, he created the impressively varied set of incidental pieces for Abdelazer, the substantial masque of Cupid and Bacchus for Timon of Athens, and—though the date of the premiere is uncertain—most likely the full-blown semi-opera The Indian Queen too (save the music from the last act, later added by Daniel Purcell). The large-scale ode Who can from joy refrain?, noteworthy for its brilliant trumpet writing, flowed from his pen by 24 July, in time to celebrate the Duke of Gloucester’s sixth birthday. More privately, Purcell continued to arrange particular theatre songs for presumably more intimate performances in his autograph songbook (London, Guildhall Library, Ms. Safe 3). He also faced the substantial task, in March, as organist of Westminster Abbey, of presiding over the music for the state funeral of Mary II, who had succumbed to smallpox late in December 1694. Mary’s obsequies surely gripped all of London’s attention, and Bruce Wood’s sorting out of the various musics used for the processional and the service—including Purcell’s funeral sentence ‘Thou knowest, Lord’ and his instrumental march and canzona—suggests that significant coordination was required. (See Wood, ‘The first performance of Purcell’s funeral music for Queen Mary’, in Performing the music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), pp.61–81.)

Musical Theatre Song: A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer by Stephen Purdy

Musical Theatre Song: A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer by Stephen Purdy

‘Only the last song if we let it be’: Dancer in the Dark, The Sound of Music and song and dance as traumatic container

Abstract Lars von Trier’s homage to and critique of musical theatre and film in Dancer in the Dark (2000) uses the big musical theatre song and dance number as a place where the unfathomability of traumatic emotion is expressed. Trauma’s unfathomability comes from the inability of the person to process the traumatic event at the moment of its occurrence. It tears apart carefully constructed fantasies that structure reality and expose what usually hides from consciousness. Dancer in the Dark uses the framing device of The Sound of Music, both the original 1959 stage version and the 1965 film, and represents the absolute split between reality and fantasy as traumatized Selma dreams herself into musical numbers. This space of tragedy emerges framed by her dream of performing Maria in a community theatre production of The Sound of Music. The affective promise of musical theatre during ‘real’ rehearsals of The Sound of Music contrasts sharply against the cinematic fantasies rooted in the film The Sound of Music that serve to lift off the burden of traumatic reality. This article will explore the revision to the film musical that von Trier offers with Dancer in the Dark alongside the intertexts of theatre and film versions of The Sound of Music in relationship to trauma, emotion and the psychoanalytic concept of the ‘cure’.

The Henry VIII Book (British Library, Add. MS 31922) ed. David Fallows (review)

FACSIMILE OF THE HENRY VIII BOOKThe Henry VIII Book (British Library, Add. MS 31922). Facsimile with introduction by David Fallows. (DIAMM Facsimiles, 4.) Oxford: DIAMM Publications, 2014. [Acknowledgements, p. ii; introd., p. 1-68; bibliog., p. 70-73; indexes, p. 74-79; tables, p. 80-85; 273 color plates, unpaginated. ISBN-13 978-1-907647-00-0. £120.]This facsimile edition is the fourth in the series by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), which aims to publish facsimiles of the highest quality at a reasonable price. The first three editions in this series have likewise all been of English sources (The Eton Choirbook, The Dow Part - books, and William Byrd's Masses for 3, 4, and 5 Voices), although future volumes will include sources that originated in other countries. The facsimile is a lavish, fullcolor reproduction of the manuscript's 128 folios, as well as its binding.Because The Henry VIII Book is not nearly as well known as its more famous contemporary sources-The Eton Choirbook and The Fayrfax Book, both compiled approximately one decade earlier-a brief description is in order. It is the main surviving source of secular music from the court of Henry VIII. It was most likely copied between 1510 and 1513 for someone in the king's circle, though not the king or his immediate family. It contains 109 pieces in a variety of genres, both vocal and instrumental, including consorts (pieces with no title or cue), rounds, carols, theatrical songs, freemen's songs, and a few larger works. Freemen's is a disputed term, as David Fallows admits, and may be roughly defined as a cappella songs for male voices on a convivial text, often with hunting themes (p. 17). The composers represented in this manuscript are predominantly English, including Robert Cooper (Cowper?), William Cornysh, William Daggere, John Dunstable, Thomas Ffaredynge (Farthing), Robert Ffayrfax (Fayrfax), John Fflude (Flude), John Kempe, William Pygott, and Henry Rysbye; except for Ffayrfax and Cornysh, this manuscript has no composers in common with either The Fayrfax Book or The Eton Choir - book. The composer with the largest number of compositions, however, is King Henry VIII himself (hence the modern sobriquet of this manuscript), with thirtythree pieces; some of the anonymous works have also been attributed to Henry by modern scholars, although Fallows doubts these ascriptions. The manuscript also contains at least twelve compositions from the Continent, including some very well-known pieces such as Hayne van Ghizeghem's Alles regret and De tous bien plane, plus other works by Alexander Agricola, Jacobus Barbireau, Loyset Compere, Felice di Gio - vanni Martini (or, less likely, Antoine Busnoys), Antoine de Fevin, Henricus Isaac, Pierre Moulu, and Denis Prioris.The value of any facsimile edition can be significantly enhanced by its introduction, and Fallows's eighty-five-page prolegomenon does not disappoint in any way. It is divided into six chapters that deal, respectively, with the book (the composers and its context), a physical description, the repertory, Henry VIII, history, and a commentary on the compositions. This is followed by an extremely helpful four-page bibliography and three indexes: a general index, an index of related manuscripts, and an index of song texts. Finally, three tables complete the introduction: an inventory of the manuscript; differences between the body of the volume and the original index (table of contents); and a summary of the scoring, texting, and cleffing of each of the pieces. Fallows's writing is, as always, both engaging and erudite, and occasionally makes use of the wry humor we often associate with British scholarship (I spent a bit of time wondering whether Farthing [a possible copyist] had no serious interest in either the meaning or the metrical design of the texts; but later thought that viewpoint rather too much influenced by the classical music singers of today [p. …

Shuffling Roles: Alterations and Audiences in Shuffle Along

Shuffling Roles:Alterations and Audiences in Shuffle Along David S. Thompson (bio) On May 23, 1921, a new musical opened in New York at Cort's 63rd Street Music Hall near the intersection with Broadway. While Shuffle Along was not the first show to feature an entirely African American cast, it has been hailed as the first to extend such a company to include the creators of the book and score while boasting an impressive roster of additional innovations. Perhaps most significantly from the perspective of the confluence of art and society, the score featured a non-burlesqued love song between an African American couple, a rarity for any venue at the time and the first such moment in a musical performed in a Broadway theatre. Despite featuring a plot so paper thin as to be nearly transparent, the winding machinations of Shuffle Along proved overwhelmingly popular with audiences. The unlikely central premise concerns a pair of ne'er-do-well business partners who hatch a convoluted scheme to rig a mayoral election by running against one another in the hopes that the winner will appoint the loser to a position of prominence, thereby ensuring a favorable concentration of power in the city of Jimtown. Subplots feature a collection of crooks and cops, spouses and lovers in various comedic bits and musical interludes. The structure proved sturdy enough to support an additional assortment of vocal ensembles, musicians and dancers forming a lively and eclectic chorus. The resulting "musical mélange," as its creators termed it, proved popular enough to run for over five hundred performances in its initial Broadway run.1 The development and performance history of Shuffle Along contains many noteworthy features. The show paired two renowned vaudeville teams: musician-songwriters Nobel Sissle and Eubie Blake and comedians [End Page 97] Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Typifying the swings of fortunes of the production, the collaborators found it necessary to chip in $1.25 each in order to afford the cost of treating a potential investor to lunch. Prior to bringing the show into New York, the two duos had amassed a debt of $1,800. However, brisk ticket sales and low operating costs quickly transformed the modest investment into receipts topping $1.4 million.2 The score created a sensation in sheet music sales for many of its songs, but particularly for the signature tune "I'm Just Wild About Harry," a song that worked its way into nearly folk-song status through subsequent applications as varied as the Harry Truman presidential campaign and Warner Bros. cartoons. In addition to opening doors for Sissle and Blake as well as Miller and Lyles, it introduced several of its performers, including Florence Mills and Josephine Baker, to wider acclaim. In the years that followed, but particularly during the remainder of the 1920s, Shuffle Along exerted tremendous influence, as one might readily understand the desire of producers to duplicate its financial formula. As a result, the production set styles of music, particularly for musical theatre songs, combining elements of ragtime, blues, and jazz. The ensuing decade also witnessed a vogue for African American shows, even if such productions simply used the style as a theme or starting point. The development of dance, especially tap, for Broadway performance also accelerated after the success of 1921. Although one may measure success according to many standards, for theatre artists such standards must include the ability to reach an audience. Just as conversation may involve adjustments between message and feedback, reaching an audience may involve shifts in approach. The development of Shuffle Along represents three distinct relationships with the audience. The first phase offered a means of counteracting and subverting expectations of the time. The second phase attempted to change audience dynamics while shifting audience perceptions. The third reflected a moment of cultural exchange and expansion of influence.3 Vaudeville: Counteracting and Subverting Even before the duo of Sissle and Blake met the team of Miller and Lyles, each pair had established an approach to their presentation and a relationship with the audience that served to counteract or subvert expectations. Rather than entirely embrace the lingering vestiges of minstrelsy or the images of Plantation life...

Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power Arnab Banerji Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power. Edited by Lata Singh. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. 354 pp. Cloth $55.95. This collection of essays edited by Lata Singh draws attention to pre-independence performance practices in colonial India. Despite occupying an important position in India since precolonial times, theatre suffers from a “general oversight” when it comes to serious academic engagements. Serious scholarship on the subject is a very recent phenomenon. This collection, as the editor claims and this reader agrees, is an important step toward creating a body of scholarly material on the subject. The volume is also significant because, unlike most available material, it focuses on the intimate link that theatre had with colonial history from nineteenth century to independence instead of the period following independence, which is better known. The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Theatre: A Contested Site of Modernity and Appropriation,” talks about theatre being the significant hegemonic site for the emerging middle-class in India. It discusses middle-class appropriation from folk/popular culture and also the high culture/low culture classification propagated by this social group. The six essays in this section talk about newer trends in performance practices, which borrowed freely from both Western and indigenous forms. The essays also talk about the need of the middle class to define itself as a social group that had refined taste and was far removed from “obscene” and “vulgar” popular entertainment forms. Urmila Bhidirkar’s essay, “The Heroine’s Song in the Marathi Theatre between 1910 and 1920s: Its Code and Its Public,” talks about the tension between the need to create a respectable entertainment and the existing taste. This essay discusses the various modes of music that went into creating the music for the Marathi stage between 1910 and 1920 and traces the development of the Sangit Natak genre of Marathi theatre. Bhidirkar demonstrates how the use of classical music helped raise this genre from being regarded as a degenerative art form to a refined one. The next essay, by Devajit Bandyopadhyay, addresses the role that music occupied in the nineteenth-century Bengali theatre. Bandyopadhyay divides his essay, “Theatre Songs: The Alter Ego of the Nineteenth Century [End Page 588] Bengali Stage,” into sections that resemble the structure of a nineteenth-century Bengali play. He talks about song as always having had a significant role to play in Bengali entertainment and how this trend continued with the development of the proscenium stage in the late eighteenth century. He cites specific examples from the early Bengali theatre to show that, while attempts at creating a theatre used the Western model, the aesthetic largely remained rooted in indigenous forms. Thus Bengali theatre from its very early days becomes a site for cross-cultural exchange and interaction. The next essay, by Susan Seizer, details the history of the Special Drama of Tamil Nadu. The Special Drama derives its name from the fact that each actor or actress is hired “specially” for a performance, and this makes the popular theatre event a “special” one. Seizer traces the history of this genre of popular theatre in India from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its current status. She talks about the progression of the art form from a largely rural performance to an urban one and then the reversal or return to a middle ground referred to by A. K. Ramanujam as the “rurban.” This sparks a tension among senior male artists who fear that this shift will result in a loss of status and respectability for the art form. The fear that the introduction of women and rural performers within the performance leads to a consequent lack of discipline within the genre is also touched upon in the essay. Seizer contends that Special Drama today is a hybrid, rurban form of theatre that defies any straitjacketed definition. It thrives despite a largely dismissive hegemonic attitude about the genre and its artists. Mangai and Arasu’s essay, “Ushering Changes: Constructing the History of Tamil Theatre during Colonial Times through Drama Notices,” discusses an alternate approach to understanding the...

From Zheng Qiang to Jiang Shuiying: The Feminization of a Revolutionary Hero in Maoist Theatre's Song of the Dragon River

Since the 1980s, analysis of the representation of women in Maoist theatre has argued that the heroines of the Cultural Revolution "model works" (yangbanxi) were "genderless revolutionaries" "erased" of anything feminine. This article challenges such a view through a case study of Song of the Dragon River in which the male hero of the 1964 spoken drama version was changed to a female in the 1972 yangbanxi adaptation. Evidence is presented that the characterization of the heroine in the latter work conforms closely not only with traditional beliefs in innate female characteristics but also with current Chinese beliefs in the characteristics of successful women in leadership.

New Sources of Music from Spain and Colonial Mexico at the Sutro Library

The recent discovery of an anthology in manuscript of 124 late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Spanish theater songs imported to Mexico and three late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Mexican music manuscripts of theatrical, dance, and salon music enlarges and enhances our knowledge of the secular-music repertory performed in Mexico. The discovery of the anthology of Spanish theater music not only significantly expands the known repertory of baroque Spanish accompanied solo theatrical song but also points to the practice in colonial Mexico of importing and performing theatrical songs by such Madrid court and theater composers as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas, and Juan de Serqueira. The three Mexican manuscripts preserve many of the popular and classical instrumental music genres performed in the aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and upper- and middle-class salons and performance spaces, as well as in the public dance venues, academies, and theaters of the time. A wide range of music is represented: ballet music, performed at the Coliseo in Mexico City; arrangements of Italian opera overtures and arias; various kinds of European and Mexican dance music; and classic-period forms. These manuscripts also reflect an interest among Mexican musicians in earlier music styles and confirm that Mexicans knew and performed the music current in London, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe. I fortuitously discovered these manuscript collections when I visited the Sutro Library (part of the California State Library) in San Francisco, California, while in search of Mexican music imprints and publications relating to music in Mexico in the extensive Sutro Library collection of Mexican pamphlets. The Sutro Library houses more than eight thousand Mexican governmental and ecclesiastical imprints and other publications, which were inventoried as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project of the United States government in the 1930s. An extensive descriptive catalog was published by the WPA.(1) The Mexican imprints that relate to music are indeed of interest; however, the four manuscript collections described here are of special importance. The manuscript music at the Sutro Library has never before been studied, and only some of the several hundred other nonmusical Mexican manuscripts in the Sutro Library have been examined in depth by Mexican and North American scholars. The printed and manuscript Mexican materials now in the Sutro Library were purchased by the wealthy San Francisco book collector Adolph Sutro (1830-1898)(2) from the important Mexico City bookseller and publisher Francisco Abadiano and his son Eufemio in 1885 and 18897 Adolph Sutro, born in Alsace, arrived in San Francisco in 1850 at the height of the Gold Rush and established a lucrative career as a cigar importer. Great wealth came to him when he successfully planned and engineered the Sutro Tunnel to drain the Comstock Lode silver mine in Nevada, which at the time was flooded by water and generally inoperative. Influenced by social movements of the era, Sutro became a philanthropist: he built the Sutro Baths (a huge indoor swimming pool) and the famous Cliff House in San Francisco, created the Sutro Forest on San Francisco's highest hill, served as mayor from 1895 to 1896, and laid plans to establish a public library in the city. With the future library in mind, Sutro became a large-scale collector of manuscripts, rare books, and other materials, using the services of agents to buy entire collections in Europe and elsewhere. Before long, his collection included Hebrew, Egyptian, and medieval European manuscripts, and first editions of Shakespeare. To escape an understandably irate wife who had just found out about the mistress he had hidden away in Sutro, Nevada (the town he established near the entrance to the Sutro Tunnel, near Virginia City), Sutro traveled by train from San Francisco to Mexico City, where he encountered Francisco Abadiano's bookstore, one of the city's leading bookshops, which contained an eclectic array of manuscript and printed items. …

Milton Babbitt's "Three Theatrical Songs" in Perspective

XMANY OF US HERE know Milton Babbitt in several ways, some of which are being celebrated today. Milton Babbitt as songwriter for the American musical theater is perhaps a lesser known figure, but one who is nevertheless remarkable-which is saying quite a lot, since the individual in question is nothing if not remarkable. My talk this morning will deal with three of the songs he composed in the musical theater idiom, specifically, the Three Theatrical Songs, published by C. F. Peters in 1981.

International Conference on Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain; The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / La société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle

International Conference on Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain; The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / La société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 17, numéro 2, 1997, p. 1-143) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The American musical theatre song encyclopedia

Preface Glossary of Theatre Music Terms Theatre Song Encyclopedia Bibliography Musicals Listing Index

Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain

Music and Comedia Nueva 1600-1690 music in masques and early court spectacle plays Calderon's early court plays for Philip IV calderonian semi-opera opera, Spanish politics, Spanish conventions zarzuelas and other short musical plays for the court 1650-1690 the musical legacy of the Hidalgo Era. Appendices: the musical sources catalogue of extant 17th-century Spanish theatrical songs.

From Catfish Row to Granby Street: contesting meaning in Porgy and Bess

For reasons which would themselves be worthy of an article, the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by popular music scholarship. This has often puzzled me, since such factors as the musical theatre's ambiguous position in the high/low culture debate, its close relationship with film (film musicals were for a time a favoured subject – with film theorists), its persistent playing with the links between song and drama, the sociality of its performance conventions, the durability of the amateur performance tradition, to name but a few, together suggest a promising vein of study. Musical theatre songs have been the subject of intermittent scholarly investigation, mostly from a perspective derived from classical musicology. Wilfrid Mellers, characteristically, sought meaning through musicology (he speaks of Cole Porter's chromatics as telling us ‘regretfully, that we are kidding ourselves’ (in love) and of the ‘queasy honesty’ of ‘Anything Goes’), but found too many musicals tend to ‘create an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions’ and never get beyond that point. (Mellers 1964, pp. 384, 385).