Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
49
result(s) for
"Snelson, John"
Sort by:
Andrew Lloyd Webber
John Snelson explores the influences that have informed the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber, from film, rock & pop music, to Lloyd Webber's own life story. In so doing he explores what has made the artist such a controversial figure. Does he challenge his audiences, or merely recycle the comfortable & familiar?
Book
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most famous-and most controversial-composer of musical theater alive today. Hundreds of millions of people have seen his musicals, which includeCats, The Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita,andSunset Boulevard.Even more know his songs.Lloyd Webber's many awards include seven Tonys and three Grammys-but he has nonetheless been the subject of greater critical vitriol than any of his artistic peers. Why have both the man and his work provoked such extreme responses? Does he challenge his audiences, or merely recycle the comfortable and familiar? Over three decades, how has Lloyd Webber changed fundamentally what a musical can be?In this sustained examination of Lloyd Webber's creative career, the music scholar John Snelson explores the vast range of influences that have informed Lloyd Webber's work, from film, rock, and pop music to Lloyd Webber's own life story. This rigorous and sympathetic survey will be essential reading for anyone interested in Lloyd Webber's musicals and the world of modern musical theater that he has been so instrumental in shaping.
eBook
Pop, Rock, and Classical
Despite lloyd webber’s preference for a dramatic context for his songs, and despite the descriptions of his early infatuation with musical theater (his own toy theater and its shows, his trips with his Aunt Vi to the West End), Broadway or West End musical theater is not at the foundation of his music in the earlier shows. Although his name and money have been made most conspicuously through the musical stage, his stylistic origins are more strongly in commercial pop. It was through pop that the cantataJoseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatwas endowed with the qualities of freshness
Book Chapter
Memory
Previous chapters have revealed elements of a common strand in the works of Lloyd Webber: the diversity of influences. In fact, his palette of forms, genres, and themes has been so broad that this repertory as an entirety can be read as a critique on the nature of creative influence. Lloyd Webber’s work has been thought to reference other music, inspiring such pejorative descriptions as “derivative” and even “soiled from previous use.”¹ But such voicings are a symptom of Lloyd Webber’s continual antagonism to some firmly inculcated beliefs about the nature of creativity, especially the importance of certain forms of
Book Chapter
Aspects of Life
Andrew lloyd webber is the most prominent figure in musical theater of his generation.¹ A household name throughout the world, he can boast a series of pop-chart successes and lengthy stage runs over a long career that must be the envy of most of his contemporaries. An awareness of his works is essential to the study of the musical, for he has become central to our understanding of the art form, both in its history from the late 1960s onward and in its identity as a genre.
By any measure of commercial success, Lloyd Webber is also a “Broadway master.”
Book Chapter
Now and Forever
Lloyd webber’s repertory of diverse and wide-ranging influences gains a sense of integrity through a web of expanding and shifting intertextual relationships and cross-genre reflections. At the heart of this web is a question, a constant challenge to the boundaries of the genre itself: what can a musical be? The work of a “Broadway master” requires challenge and change to the genre through a specific show that becomes canonical (held up in the future as a yardstick for other works) or through a more general approach that affects the course of the genre and brings in its wake reflection and
Book Chapter
I’m Ready for My Close-Up
Translation to cinema is not a surprising ambition for a fan ofmusical theater, for the life of a stage musical is complemented by a screen life. In the 1950s, the decade during which Lloyd Webber became aware of both stage and film, big-screen versions of many major Broadway shows were made, many of them quite faithful to their Broadway originals. There had always been a relationship between the Broadway musical stage show and the Hollywood musical. For example, in the 1930s several operettas were put on screen (Herbert’sNaughty Marietta,1935; Romberg’sRose-Marie,1936, andMaytime,1937; Kern’sShow Boat,
Book Chapter
Telling Tales
The name andrew lloyd webber immediately conjures up an image clear enough in many minds to be used as an adjective—he is of iconic status to the modern musical. But the works themselves are less susceptible to a group definition than the totemic evocations of a “Lloyd Webber show” might suggest. If anything, this repertory has an underlying restlessness, a resistance to simple categorization that has made its discussion difficult. The subjects, settings, and scales of these shows have been wide ranging, and their presentational formats have adapted to match. Creative relationships have been driven by the needs of
Book Chapter