Another outbreak of old-fartism
Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2022 1:40 am
As I've been announcing lately, I try to avoid the "things were better in my day" mode of operation. But I'm not always successful. Here goes.
Our public radio station has a local weekly program on Broadway musicals. I just listened to it. Tonight was Meredith Willson's The Music Man. And what a treat it was. I've got the LP, but so much music,so little time, and all that. But here it was on the radio, just one great tune after another.
There was a kind of golden age from the mid-forties through the 1950s. We got Oklahoma! and South Pacific and Carousel and My Fair Lady and Music Man and West Side Story. These are the giants, to my ears. Then there are some outliers like Show Boat and the Gershwins' shows. An underrated one was Meredith Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown. After the 1960s it was all downhill in my view. But there in the '40s and '50s we received the gift of wonderful music, shows that make me sing along.
One way I appraise music is to ask whether anybody will want to listen to it in 50 or 100 years. The current music that the NPR folks swoon over is pretty insubstantial as I hear it. Nobody is going to listen to it next year, never mind the next decade. But when Ezio Pinza sings "This Nearly Was Mine" or Harve Presnell does "Ill Never Say No," I just have to song along. This is music from 65-70 years ago. It's as tuneful and compelling as ever.
OK, end of this installment of "things were better in my day."
Chris Campbell
Our public radio station has a local weekly program on Broadway musicals. I just listened to it. Tonight was Meredith Willson's The Music Man. And what a treat it was. I've got the LP, but so much music,so little time, and all that. But here it was on the radio, just one great tune after another.
There was a kind of golden age from the mid-forties through the 1950s. We got Oklahoma! and South Pacific and Carousel and My Fair Lady and Music Man and West Side Story. These are the giants, to my ears. Then there are some outliers like Show Boat and the Gershwins' shows. An underrated one was Meredith Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown. After the 1960s it was all downhill in my view. But there in the '40s and '50s we received the gift of wonderful music, shows that make me sing along.
One way I appraise music is to ask whether anybody will want to listen to it in 50 or 100 years. The current music that the NPR folks swoon over is pretty insubstantial as I hear it. Nobody is going to listen to it next year, never mind the next decade. But when Ezio Pinza sings "This Nearly Was Mine" or Harve Presnell does "Ill Never Say No," I just have to song along. This is music from 65-70 years ago. It's as tuneful and compelling as ever.
OK, end of this installment of "things were better in my day."
Chris Campbell