Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXV, no. 1 (Spring 1999)
Letter from England
Actually I'm writing this in a music library in Minneapolis, and that's all a part of the story. We
live -- for how much longer? -- in an age of prosperous western economies, cheap and plentiful
flights, and easy communication. Add to that our postmodern aesthetics and new musicology, and it
should not surprise us to find musical theatre scholarship breaking out all over the place and
being celebrated internationally. "Why is everyone suddenly researching musicals?" was a cry
uttered, if surreptitiously, at the recent AMS conference in Boston, though one person's
perception of a topic center stage can be another's of relegation to the wings; you should have
seen the fuss that arose over the scheduling of the Sondheim session (on Friday evening). It was
a row over billing worthy of the most theatrical temperament.
Once Steven Gilbert and Allan Forte had told us that it was all right not just to analyze Gershwin and Berlin
and Porter but to show that you loved them, perhaps the flood was inevitable. As I traveled the
US last summer, visiting old friends (several Sonneckers among them), attending Tom Riis's musical
theatre conference in Colorado, feeling thoroughly lazy at that particular breathing space in my career
but casting an anticipatory eye nonetheless over the odd Gershwin manuscript in the Library of
Congress, a pile of Alan Jay Lerner scripts at the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York, and a breathtaking
wealth of musical film production files and orchestral scores in Hollywood. I felt the time had come
to start an annual musical theatre and musical film study day back home at the University of
Birmingham, not least because nobody with the exception of Tom seemed to be catering for the
demand on the other side of the Atlantic.
It's not just an American phenomenon, this growth in musical theatre research. Since I've been in
Birmingham I seem to have amassed up to a dozen graduate students at any one time, and it's now got
to the point where roughly half are working on musicals. The other half are British 19th- and 20th-
century art-music groupies. For them I've been running an annual British Musical Renaissance study
day for the past five or six years, the idea being to give them the opportunity to present a research
paper in a friendly, intimate and informal surroundings to similar specialists: fellow-students from
Birmingham and elsewhere in Britain, invited academics and amateur expers (a significant British
breed), and overseas scholars who happen to be passing. Every year, on virtually no budget, we've
managed to pick up at least one American, German, South African, or Australian.
But when I decided to start something similar for the other group of students, I never guessed I'd be
able to pick up no fewer than five Americans plus one German, all jetting into Birmingham (yes it
does have an international airport, and there are three daily flights from North America) just for the
weekend and camping out on various floors around the city. Tom Riis (University of Colorado) took
first prize for the longest journey, meeting up with me in Chicago by chance on the same plane on
his way over from Denver. Bill Everett (UMKC), as far as I know the only other person in the world
with the same two research interests as mine (though he sports about four more in addition), got
the Most Frequent Flyer to Britain Award. I was the craziest participant, flying home to Birmingham
from Minnesota two weekends in a row (so at least the house was wrm). Graham Wood (University of
Minnesota) and Peter Matthews (CUNY Graduate School) took the biscuit -- which was all the refreshment
they got -- for managing to fly 6,000 or 8,000 miles in dire poverty, while John Graziano (City College,
CUNY) showed extraordinary chutzpah in spending a weekend in Europe less than seven days before his
daughter's wedding in Queens (or was it Brooklyn?), fourteen before the AMS, at both of which
subsequent lesser events he appeared apparently unscathed. Would anybody like to top these feats next
time? The date for your diary is Saturday, 16 October 1999. I'd welcome offers of papers.
And the papers last time? We had a mixed group before lunch, on the geography of African-American
musicals, Elanor Powell, Sondheim and style pastiche, and the Warner Bros. musical film formula of
1933 (from Tom Riis, Robyn Stilwell, Helen Smith and Sally Plowright). Then a session on
operetta traditions, including John Graziano on Show Boat, Keven Clarke (Berlin) on
Benatzky (he of White Horse Inn), and Bill Everett on The Desert Song. Finally, no fewer
than three papers on Oklahoma!, from Peter Mathews on Green Grow the Lilacs, Graham
Wood on modernity and national conciousness, and John Snelson on its invasion of the West End and
British retaliation. Since I have long been convinced that the musical's Anglo-American interactions
have been downplayed, distorted, or forgotten in the nationalist narratives of history, I was pleased that we
not only enjoyed such a level of transatlantic traffic on this occasion -- it almost felt like a
West End opening prior to a Broadway one -- but ended the proceedings with a manifestly binational
issue. Discussion, of course, continued in the pub.
--Stephen Banfield
University of Birmingham and University of Minnesota
Updated 6/1/99