RESEARCH REVIEW • MARCH 2004MUSIC • WHY STUDY MUSICALS?

➜ materials circulate freely. To give acontemporary example: you still cannotbuy a complete piano/vocal score ofPhantom of the Opera.

The same applies to scripts, withoutwhich musical comedies cannot beunderstood, for they are spoken playswith songs and finales and the oddextended musical scene. A script and ascore have to be studied side by side

before you can see what is going on,and whenever you manage to do this,discrepancies between them quicklyarise because you are reading materialsthat were never reconciled in print forposterity, but lived a hand-to-mouthexistence in the theatre. Ironically, aswith the cast recordings, it was whenKern’s musicals played in far-awayEngland that his scripts were nationallyconserved, due to an accident ofBritish theatrical censorship. Everyscript offered to the London andprovincial stage had to be passed bythe censor who, for example, insistedthat the phrase ‘He’s had her’ beomitted from Kern’s The Cat and theFiddle. Consequently, the best place tostudy the history of the musical in

Britain is in The Lord Chamberlain’sPlay Collection in the Manuscript Roomof the British Library.

I am particularly interested in Kern’sBritish profile, for his appropriation toAmerican cultural history sidelined it.He learnt much of his trade inEdwardian London, then the musicaltheatre capital of the English-speakingworld. More importantly, Kern wrote

four major shows for London in the1920s and 30s, none of whichtransferred to Broadway, and all ofwhich have been done scant justice byAmerican commentators. Studying itsscript in the British Library, I wasamused to see that in the first of these, The Cabaret Girl, with book andlyrics by PG Wodehouse and GeorgeGrossmith, the first-act dialogue, set ina London music shop, begins with SirEdward Elgar at the other end of aphone. Alas, none of his British showsis properly performable because theorchestrations are lost. Theatricalpractitioners tend to make light of thisand regard wholesale re-orchestrationas comparable to a new production:taken for granted, indeed desirable.

Musicians take a different, historicallyinformed view, that the work in a senseno longer fully exists without the originalfull score.

Those scores may yet turn up; thingsdo. I could hardly have written a bookon Kern’s musicals at all were it not for the treasure-trove of discardedBroadway materials discovered in aWarner Bros New Jersey warehouse in1982. On a more modest but personalnote, I can report that the day beforegiving a public lecture on Kern in Bristollast October, I was phoned by a local bookseller. Was I interested in acache of research material on Kernwhich dated back to the 1950s andrepresented the collection and investi-gations of an amateur from SouthWales? I was round there in a flash. Thesheet music covers gracing this articleare taken from the 321 publishedsongs included in the collection, manyof them sufficiently rare that the onlyother known copies in this country are inthe British Library or the Bodleian, Oxford.The Bristol suburbs do us proud. ■

www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Music

Stephen Banfield is currently researching abook on Jerome Kern for a new Yale

University Press series, Yale BroadwayMasters. The book is funded by the Arts

and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy.…because Stephen Banfield, a newly-appointed Professor

in the Music Department, believes that a Jerome Kern theatresong and a Bach chorale have much in common.

32

Jerome Kern (1885-1945) is oftenthought of as the father of the Americanmusical. He wrote some of the world’sbest-known and most enduringpopular songs, including ‘Smoke getsin your eyes’ and ‘Ol’ man River’, yetonly one of his 44 stage musicals,Show Boat, is known today. Further-more, all but a handful of his thousandpublished songs are out of print,hundreds more were never published,and none of the major books on himcontains a bibliography. With rareexceptions we do not even know whathis musicals sounded like on Broadwayin the 1920s and 30s, for in those daysanything approaching an original castalbum was a British eccentricity ratherthan an American standard product.

Two broad problems have to beaddressed by students of musicalcomedy, who range from under-graduates (yes, it is on our syllabus at

Bristol) to professors. The first is whymusicals, as an opportunistic andcommercial art form, are worthstudying at all. The current intellectualclimate is all in favour of popularculture, but music and literaturestudents trained in the classics do notalways know how to handle vernacularproducts critically, for there are fewmodels to guide them (those bookswithout bibliographies do not help).Nevertheless, I firmly believe that aKern theatre song and a Bach choralehave more in common than you mightthink and can probably be approachedin the same way. Bach’s day-to-dayenvironment was pretty opportunistictoo, but left us a canonic legacy all thesame. But how was that legacyestablished and transmitted to us? This raises the second problem, forresearchers of the American musicalare in much the same position now aseditors of the great collected editions of

literature and music in the 19th century:reclaiming for posterity repertoires thathad fallen out of use. ‘Sheep may safelygraze’ would have remained unknownwithout the intervention of scholars.

Similarly, many obstacles stand in theway of conserving not so much Kern’ssongs, but the shows for which theywere written. Musicals are ephemeraland interdisciplinary products, with nogoverning authority except money. Inopera, at least ideally, the composersets an entire libretto to music; thescore, including all the words and stagedirections, is the definitive artefact,henceforward available for a variety ofproductions. A musical, on the otherhand, is the commercial property of theproducer who may have good reasonsfor not publishing it at all. Long runs atprestigious metropolitan theatres, withall the attendant merchan-dising, isachieved by not letting the performing ➜

Why StudyMusicals?

Conservation was an accident of British theatrical censorship

MUSIC • WHY STUDY MUSICALS?RESEARCH REVIEW • MARCH 2004

Jerome Kern

Key

ston

e P

ress

Age

ncy

RESEARCH REVIEW • MARCH 2004MUSIC • WHY STUDY MUSICALS?

➜ materials circulate freely. To give acontemporary example: you still cannotbuy a complete piano/vocal score ofPhantom of the Opera.

The same applies to scripts, withoutwhich musical comedies cannot beunderstood, for they are spoken playswith songs and finales and the oddextended musical scene. A script and ascore have to be studied side by side

before you can see what is going on,and whenever you manage to do this,discrepancies between them quicklyarise because you are reading materialsthat were never reconciled in print forposterity, but lived a hand-to-mouthexistence in the theatre. Ironically, aswith the cast recordings, it was whenKern’s musicals played in far-awayEngland that his scripts were nationallyconserved, due to an accident ofBritish theatrical censorship. Everyscript offered to the London andprovincial stage had to be passed bythe censor who, for example, insistedthat the phrase ‘He’s had her’ beomitted from Kern’s The Cat and theFiddle. Consequently, the best place tostudy the history of the musical in

Britain is in The Lord Chamberlain’sPlay Collection in the Manuscript Roomof the British Library.

I am particularly interested in Kern’sBritish profile, for his appropriation toAmerican cultural history sidelined it.He learnt much of his trade inEdwardian London, then the musicaltheatre capital of the English-speakingworld. More importantly, Kern wrote

four major shows for London in the1920s and 30s, none of whichtransferred to Broadway, and all ofwhich have been done scant justice byAmerican commentators. Studying itsscript in the British Library, I wasamused to see that in the first of these, The Cabaret Girl, with book andlyrics by PG Wodehouse and GeorgeGrossmith, the first-act dialogue, set ina London music shop, begins with SirEdward Elgar at the other end of aphone. Alas, none of his British showsis properly performable because theorchestrations are lost. Theatricalpractitioners tend to make light of thisand regard wholesale re-orchestrationas comparable to a new production:taken for granted, indeed desirable.

Musicians take a different, historicallyinformed view, that the work in a senseno longer fully exists without the originalfull score.

Those scores may yet turn up; thingsdo. I could hardly have written a bookon Kern’s musicals at all were it not for the treasure-trove of discardedBroadway materials discovered in aWarner Bros New Jersey warehouse in1982. On a more modest but personalnote, I can report that the day beforegiving a public lecture on Kern in Bristollast October, I was phoned by a local bookseller. Was I interested in acache of research material on Kernwhich dated back to the 1950s andrepresented the collection and investi-gations of an amateur from SouthWales? I was round there in a flash. Thesheet music covers gracing this articleare taken from the 321 publishedsongs included in the collection, manyof them sufficiently rare that the onlyother known copies in this country are inthe British Library or the Bodleian, Oxford.The Bristol suburbs do us proud. ■

www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Music

Stephen Banfield is currently researching abook on Jerome Kern for a new Yale

University Press series, Yale BroadwayMasters. The book is funded by the Arts

and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy.…because Stephen Banfield, a newly-appointed Professor

in the Music Department, believes that a Jerome Kern theatresong and a Bach chorale have much in common.

32

Jerome Kern (1885-1945) is oftenthought of as the father of the Americanmusical. He wrote some of the world’sbest-known and most enduringpopular songs, including ‘Smoke getsin your eyes’ and ‘Ol’ man River’, yetonly one of his 44 stage musicals,Show Boat, is known today. Further-more, all but a handful of his thousandpublished songs are out of print,hundreds more were never published,and none of the major books on himcontains a bibliography. With rareexceptions we do not even know whathis musicals sounded like on Broadwayin the 1920s and 30s, for in those daysanything approaching an original castalbum was a British eccentricity ratherthan an American standard product.

Two broad problems have to beaddressed by students of musicalcomedy, who range from under-graduates (yes, it is on our syllabus at

Bristol) to professors. The first is whymusicals, as an opportunistic andcommercial art form, are worthstudying at all. The current intellectualclimate is all in favour of popularculture, but music and literaturestudents trained in the classics do notalways know how to handle vernacularproducts critically, for there are fewmodels to guide them (those bookswithout bibliographies do not help).Nevertheless, I firmly believe that aKern theatre song and a Bach choralehave more in common than you mightthink and can probably be approachedin the same way. Bach’s day-to-dayenvironment was pretty opportunistictoo, but left us a canonic legacy all thesame. But how was that legacyestablished and transmitted to us? This raises the second problem, forresearchers of the American musicalare in much the same position now aseditors of the great collected editions of

literature and music in the 19th century:reclaiming for posterity repertoires thathad fallen out of use. ‘Sheep may safelygraze’ would have remained unknownwithout the intervention of scholars.

Similarly, many obstacles stand in theway of conserving not so much Kern’ssongs, but the shows for which theywere written. Musicals are ephemeraland interdisciplinary products, with nogoverning authority except money. Inopera, at least ideally, the composersets an entire libretto to music; thescore, including all the words and stagedirections, is the definitive artefact,henceforward available for a variety ofproductions. A musical, on the otherhand, is the commercial property of theproducer who may have good reasonsfor not publishing it at all. Long runs atprestigious metropolitan theatres, withall the attendant merchan-dising, isachieved by not letting the performing ➜

Why StudyMusicals?

Conservation was an accident of British theatrical censorship

MUSIC • WHY STUDY MUSICALS?RESEARCH REVIEW • MARCH 2004

Jerome Kern

Key

ston

e P

ress

Age

ncy