Geoffrey Block

Charles Ives' massive Concord Sonata, his second sonata for piano, named after the town of Concord in Massachusetts, is central to his output and clearly reflects his aesthetic perspective. Geoffrey Block's wide-ranging account of the work thus provides an ideal introduction to this fascinating composer. This handbook discusses the Sonata's reception history and its compositional genesis, as well as providing a detailed account of the work's thematic content, its use of borrowed material, and the degree to which the program is influenced by the Concord Transcendentalists.

Piano Sonata

Ives: Concord Sonata

This second edition offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America's best musicals. Geoffrey Block provides a documentary history of each of the eighteen musicals he discusses. He reveals how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to today, both on stage and on screen, and how librettist, lyricist, composer, and director work together to shape pieces.--[book cover].

The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

Enchanted Evenings

"The central topic of A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era is the symbiotic relationship between a dozen Broadway musicals and their Hollywood film adaptations spanning nearly a half century (1927-1972). The romance begins with the stage version of Show Boat and ends with Bob Fosse's cinematic 1972 re-envisioning of Cabaret. Between these end points are chapters on The Cat and the Fiddle, Roberta, Cabin in the Sky, Oklahoma!, On the Town, Brigadoon, Call Me Madam, Silk Stockings, West Side Story, and Flower Drum Song"--

Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era

A Fine Romance

Paul R. Laird

Todd Decker

Anne Dhu McLucas

Kate Van Winkle Keller

Sandra Jean Graham

Orly Leah Krasner

A survey of the history of musical theater in the United States. This ebook is a static version of an article from Grove Music Online, a continuously updated online resource, offering comprehensive coverage of the world’s music written by leading scholars. For more information, visit www.oxfordmusiconline.com.

American Musical Theater: Grove Music Essentials

Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals. Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.

Richard Rodgers

Experiencing Beethoven, music historian Geoffrey Block explores in layman’s terms a highly representative body of about two dozen Beethoven instrumental and vocal works, offering listeners who know him well, or are just discovering him, an opportunity to grasp the breadth and depth of his musical genius. Experiencing Beethoven places the composer’s works within the evolving context of his personal and professional life and social and cultural milieu. Block sheds light on the public and private audiences of Beethoven’s music, from the concerts for the composer’s own financial benefit to the debut of the “Eroica” Symphony at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz to the historic public premiere of his Ninth Symphony. Experiencing Beethoven paints a portrait of the composer’s youth in Bonn, his early triumphs and artistic maturation in Vienna, and—despite the challenges his music posed to his contemporaries— the recognition he received during his lifetime as the most acclaimed composer of the era. Block conveys the range and scope of Beethoven’s achievement, from his heroic style to his lyricism, grappling throughout with the composer’s power to communicate his idealistic musical vision to listeners in both his time and ours. Finally, Experiencing Beethoven explores why Beethoven’s music continues to enjoy an unwavering appeal in an age saturated with a range of musical styles.

A Listener's Companion

Experiencing Beethoven

Richard Rodgers was one of America's most prolific and best-loved composers. A world without "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady is a Tramp," "Blue Moon," and "Bewitched," to name just a few of the songs he wrote with Lorenz Hart, is scarcely imaginable, and the musicals he wrote with his second collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein--Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music--continue to enchant and entertain audiences. Arranged in four sections, Rodgers and Hart (1929-1943), Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943-1960), Rodgers After Hammerstein (1960-1979), and The Composer Speaks (1939-1971), The Richard Rodgers Reader offers a cornucopia of informative, perceptive, and stylish biographical and critical overviews. It also contains a selection of Rodgers's letters to his wife Dorothy in the 1920s, the 1938 Time magazine cover story and New Yorker profiles in 1938 and 1961, and essays and reviews by such noted critics as Brooks Atkinson, Eric Bentley, Leonard Bernstein, Lehman Engel, Walter Kerr, Ken Mandelbaum, Ethan Mordden, George Jean Nathan, and Alec Wilder. The volume features personal accounts by Richard Adler, Agnes de Mille, Joshua Logan, Mary Martin, and Diahann Carroll. The collection concludes with complete selections from more than thirty years of Rodgers's own writings on topics ranging from the creative process, the state of the Broadway theater, even Rodgers's bout with cancer, and a generous sample from the candid and previously unpublished Columbia University interviews. For anyone wishing to explore more fully the life and work of a composer whose songs and musicals have assumed a permanent--and prominent--place in American popular culture, The Richard Rodgers Reader will offer endless delights.

Geoffrey Block

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