Sondheim on Songwriting

ON OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II. Oscar taught me that a song should be like a little one-act play, with an exposition, a development and a conclusion; at the end of the song the character should have moved to a different position from where he was emotionally at the beginning. This was how Hammerstein and Dick Rodgers revolutionized the American theater. I mean, God knows every opera composer dating back to Monteverdi knew about development, but it was never used in the musical theater.

ON COLE PORTER. He wrote a valid but entirely different kind of song, in which you take a particular idea and play with it and develop it in terms of cleverness, wit, intellectual or romantic intensity. Essentially, Porter's songs restate ideas over and over again; he was just better at it than the others of his period.

ON LORENZ HART. Most people think that Hart is one of the two or three best lyric writers this country has ever known. I find him sloppy all the time. His lyrics don't sit on the music properly. When he is just futzing around with words, he doesn't even do it neatly. He misaccents words. One example is in Pal Joey, the line in Take Him: "I know a movie executive/ Who's twice as bright." It's a good joke, but you don't misaccent a word if you want to write a good lyric. Technically it's deficient and to my ear unprofessional.

ON RHYMING. Clever rhyming is easy. To rhyme orange is no trick at all. Anybody can do it. You can say

an orange, or a porringer.

Hammerstein said that the really difficult word to rhyme is a word like day, because the possibilities are so enormous. One of the things I've learned is that the way to get a laugh in a song is not through the cleverness of the rhyme but by what you're saying. The biggest laugh in Forum is the line in the warriors' song: "I am a parade." That's a brilliant line--and it's not mine, it's Plautus'.

ON LYRICS AND POETRY. Poetry exists in its conciseness, how much is packed into it; it's important to be able to read and reread it at your own speed. Lyrics exist in time, second to second to second. Therefore lyrics always have to be underwritten. You cannot expect an audience to catch more than the ear is able to catch at the tempo and richness of the music. The perfect example of this is Oh, What a Beautiful Morniri, the first part of which I'd be embarrassed to put down on paper. I mean, you just don't put down

Oh, what a beautiful mornin'

, Oh, what a beautiful day . . .

It's just ridiculous. What Oscar knew was that there was music to go with it. The minute that Dick Rodgers' music is added, the whole song has an emotional weight. I really think that Oklahoma! ran seven years on that lyric.

ON PERIOD MUSIC. I truly love the body of musical comedy of that period. The minute you hear the first line of the "Loveland" sequence song You're Gonna Love Tomorrow--" 'What will tomorrow bring,VThe pundits query"--it evokes an entire period. That's the kind of language they used. It could be parody, but obviously it's done with such affection and also it's really dealing with something. In Follies I imitate people. But in each of the pastiche songs, there's always something of me added to the imitation of Kern or Arlen or whoever it is. That's something I couldn't avoid--my own comment on the style.

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