Or am I losing my mind? As he was straightening his CDs – which are organized mostly in chronological order — he noticed a gap, at the far left-hand side of the shelf. Logically, since it's a CD — and they weren't invented until 1982 — it's a copy, and he notes that there are likely other copies. Spend sleepless nights. You said you loved me, Credits. But with no known copies of the script or lyrics, that's been more or less it — until journalist Paul Salsini started reorganizing his cluttered office shelves. The reason they've not been able to look at it before now, ironically, is that Sondheim hid his early work, even from Salsini's magazine The Sondheim Review.
A rare recording of a show Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wrote and performed —in college — has been discovered hidden in a bookshelf in Milwaukee. It's like I'm losing my mind. It is arguably Sondheim's first produced musical (he'd penned one in high school called By George), and it's the stuff of legend in theater circles because nobody's heard much of it.
As for whether Sondheim's collegiate efforts strike listeners today as literally sophomoric, Horowitz is sanguine. But he had to start somewhere. So Sondheim's "juvenilia" in this case hasn't so much been missing, as hiding in plain sight. Lyrics © CARLIN AMERICA INC. "I read somewhere that Hammerstein encouraged him to buy an acetate recorder and record his work and I'm sure that Sondheim himself did this recording, " he says. This came as a surprise to Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress whose specialty is musical theater and who worked with Sondheim on several projects.
He notes that a song called "Strength Through Sex" is reminiscent of "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story, for which Sondheim would write lyrics nine years later. Doing every little chore. Sheet music for three of the songs was published in 1948. Indeed, in a few hours of nosing around, Horowitz found another copy of Phinney's Rainbow in the private collection of playwright and screenwriter Michael Mitnick. The title was a riff on the then-popular musical Finian's Rainbow and the middle name of college president James Phinney Baxter III. But of recordings available to the public, there's just the overture, performed by Sondheim and recorded at one of the Williams College performances, which has been included in anthologies. In the middle of the floor. How did it get recorded? "He thought it was valuable for people to see early work and mediocre work and realize that even one's heroes grew over time, " he says. But as soon as he played it, he realized what he'd found: an hour and 20 minutes of never-published, long missing songs from Phinney's Rainbow. He always loved gadgets, and I know he used to make home movie type things. And think about you. "[Sondheim] was always an early adopter of technology and it wouldn't surprise me.
And I asked you when, and you said I would know. A yearning for affection. And it stayed there for who knows how long. But the song that really stood out for him was "What Do I Know? " — recorded the same year — was included on the album "Sondheim Sings, Vol. Said images are used to exert a right to report and a finality of the criticism, in a degraded mode compliant to copyright laws, and exclusively inclosed in our own informative content. "In this song from Phinney's Rainbow I think he is expressing that for the first time. "Here's this 18-yr-old teenager who's discovering himself and was sent away to school and he was longing for affection. Salsini says it was written in an hour to satisfy production demands. He is the founder and editor of The Sondheim Review, and author of the recently published memoir, Sondheim and Me: Revealing a Musical Genius. Salsini, who's donating the CD to the Sondheim Research Collection in Milwaukee, admits he's not sure where this particular discovery came from, though he's certain it wasn't from Sondheim. A rapid-fire patter song reminds him of the tongue-twisting "Not Getting Married" from Company.
The thought of you stays bright. © 2023 All rights reserved. "I think if he were coming back from the ether, this would not be something he would get apoplectic about, " Horowitz. Use the citation below to add these lyrics to your bibliography: Style: MLA Chicago APA. Horowitz hadn't heard that, but finds it plausible. But the Library of Congress' Horowitz suggests he might have been willing to bend in this case.