Medleys from musicals or films are a popular way for a choir to be able to give its audience a taste of the original without having to worry about staging the entire work. Listeners who are familiar with the source material will be given an opportunity to hear it in a different venue; listeners who aren’t familiar with it may be encouraged to seek it out. These opportunities also apply to the performers. For instance, I had never seen Guys and Dolls, but when my own choir performed a medley from that musical, I was inspired to watch the film. And the same thing happened to me with Nightmare. I have to say that it sounded pretty icky to me when we first got our music, but I decided to watch the movie anyway so that I’d have a good basis for this post. Guess what? I totally fell in love with it. So very, very creative!
Image from Pixabay; reference is to “Noche de Lluvia,” the first of the three songs in the “Canciones.”
One of the great pleasures of writing the posts on this site is that I’m sometimes able to get in touch with living composers and badger them with nosy questions. I was extremely curious about this set of songs because they all have Spanish texts, and yet Sid Robinovitch is Canadian, has a Jewish background, and wrote the pieces as a commission for the Association of Canadian Choral Conductors. There didn’t seem to be much of a Latin tango connection in any of this. So originally I professed my mystification and moved on, but later it occurred to me that I could just ask. I e-mailed Robinovitch after looking up his contact info on his website, and here is part of his very gracious and prompt reply:
Fall is my favorite time of year: I love the colors, the smells, and the crisp air. I remember so vividly how exciting it was for me as a kid to go shopping for school supplies with my mom. There was the pristine Big Chief tablet and new pencils. Maybe even an unsmudged pink eraser. Everything seemed possible.
But for some autumn is a sad season, as it starts the inevitable slide toward winter with its darkness and cold. Two songs with lyrics by Johnny Mercer portray this viewpoint: “Autumn Leaves” and “When October Goes.” They’ve been put together in a lovely medley by the modern composer/arranger Paul Langford, a true powerhouse whose arrangements I’ve sung myself. Both of these songs have a fascinating backstory.
Elaine Hagenberg’s Illuminare burst on the classical choral scene in 2022 with initial performances by member choirs of a commissioning consortium. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, was privileged to be a part of this group and to perform the work in March 2022. We had the additional privilege of having Ms. Hagenberg on board for our final rehearsal. The composer was a full collaborator that evening, listening and critiquing gently but firmly. She clearly knew exactly how she wanted the piece to sound, and we benefited greatly from her input. I’m reminded of something that the director of my choir, Brian Patrick Leatherman, said when we started working on the piece: “This is going to be big.” He also said that when he’d been contacted about our participation in the consortium he’d “JUMPED AT!” it. I’d say that his enthusiasm has been fully justified. Illuminare was made available for sale in August 2022 and is now being performed widely all over the world. A gala performance in Paris is scheduled to take place on June 24, 2026; this concert will also include the performance of a new major Hagenberg work. I hope to write about the texts of that composition at some point.
My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, performed Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” from the movie Barbie in our May 2025 concert, California Dreamin’. The scene in which Barbie meets her creator, Ruth Handler (played by the great Rhea Perlman), and decides to leave Barbieland and live in the real world gets me misty-eyed every time I watch it.
(Side rant: Just because I choke up at the above scene doesn’t mean that I approve of everything in this movie, especially the portrayal of men. Honestly, folks: If there were ever to be a movie titled Ken, and women without men were to be portrayed the same way that men without women are shown in Barbie, there would be rioting in the streets—and the rioters wouldn’t be wearing pink pussy hats but Brunnhilde horned helmets, and they’d be carrying spears to boot! End of rant.)
Ho-kay. Where were we? Ah yes—Barbie’s decision to become “real.” Suddenly I realized that this is the same story as that of Pinocchio and also of the Velveteen Rabbit1, both about toys who become living creatures. Since the Chorale has sung a number from the Disney Pinocchio movie I’ve written a post about that story, which I’d encourage you to read. Pinocchio has to prove that he’s worthy of becoming a real boy by being “brave, truthful, and unselfish.” Becoming real is all upside for him once he rescues Geppetto from the whale, but it’s a different story for Barbie. Here’s the dialogue that comes right before the song, in which Barbie talks to Ruth Handler. I went to the trouble of transcribing it because I wanted to be sure that the meaning came through. I’ll post a video of the movie clip at the end of this post:
If my choir is performing a song from a film or play I always like to put the piece in context, which often means that I have to wade through summaries of plots that make very little sense. Many if not most musical comedies have plots that are simply frameworks, often flimsy, to hang the song-and-dance numbers on. (It’s okay for me to end that previous sentence with a proposition since one of these song titles does that, too.) Also, sometimes the musical numbers have outlived the production for which they were written and it’s very difficult to get access to the original story.
The quartet in 1959 during the Time Out sessions. From left to right: Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright. Accessed via Wikipedia. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5988905
My brother-in-law really likes jazz, and I’ve sometimes said in his hearing that I don’t particularly care for it as it seems formless, repetitive and tuneless to me. This comment has been received about as well as you’d expect.
Ho-kay. Brubeck’s origin story is truly fascinating, so let me take at least a dip into that before moving on to the piece at hand. Brubeck did the piano-lessons-at-age-four routine, but his family moved to a 45,000-acre ranch in California when Dave was 12 and he got roped into working there. His two older brothers were on track to become professional musicians due to his mother’s influence and training; his cattleman father insisted to his wife that “’this one is mine,” referring to Dave. Thus Brubeck moved from the piano bench to the saddle, but music still fascinated him:
Have to tell you that I’ve just finished doing a deep dive into the career of the composer/songwriter of “Sweet Rivers,” Shawn Kirchner, and I am exhausted. You can read his professional bio on his website1 if you’d like; just be sure you’re sitting down before you start.
Although Kirchner was classically trained, his compositions have become more and more attuned to popular music, whether folk, jazz, or bluegrass. Within those categories he’s written many sacred pieces, one of which is “Sweet Rivers,” pairing text by the itinerant preacher John Adam Granade with his own tune. Granade was an active participant in the “Great Revival in the West” that’s usually dated to 1800 and is part of the “Second Great Awakening” that swept over the Northeast and Midwest US especially, although outbreaks of religious fervor occurred all over the nation. Granade was known as “the wild man of Goose Creek” (a settlement in Tennessee) and became a prolific hymnwriter. Here’s a description of his behavior:
1919 publicity photo of Adele and Fred Astaire, accessed via Wikipedia.
Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.1
Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:
I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong; When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy. Won’t you take a day off? Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy! Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be! Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?
Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.
Dear disappointed subscribers–at least, I hope you’re disappointed:
My abject apologies for the big gap in your receipt of these blog posts. I’ve been writing them all along, as usual, but my e-mail service stopped sending them last July because I’d exceeded my subscriber limit for their free plan. We thought we’d addressed the problem but clearly hadn’t. That’s all I’ll bore you with about the issue, except to say that I shoulda listened to a friend who kept saying, “How come I never get your posts any more?”
Included in the recipients for this post are those of you who subscribed at some point after the limit was reached and who therefore have never received anything via these e-mails. I do hope you’ll stick around, along with all of you who subscribed before the Great Cut-Off. There’s a lot of interesting material here, if I do say so myself.
