Songs in musical theater are generally foursquare: working in groupings of four, eight, and sixteen bars. Phrases that run longer than that often signal a character’s passion, just as repetition does in rhetoric. “Momma” Rose, the central character in Jule Styne’s and Stephen Sondheim’s 1959 musical Gypsy, is nothing if not passionate—a characteristic that becomes her tragic flaw. Rose is a determined stage mother, whose larger-than-life personality and obsessive drive for success ultimately destroy the family she has tried to control. Each of her songs includes phrase expansions of different sorts, and these ever-larger expansions reflect her deteriorating mental state. When someone can neither hold her family together nor keep the man she loves (and who loves her), what hope does she have for maintaining normative phrase structure? My talk focusses on Rose’s problems with (musical) boundaries in four of her songs: “Some People,” “Small World,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and “Rose’s Turn.”
Michael Buchler is Professor of Music Theory at the Florida State University College of Music, where he has won both undergraduate and graduate teaching awards. He served as President of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) from 2021–2023 and his work appears in many of the field’s journals. His 2023 book Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater, co-edited with Gregory Decker, received SMT’s Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award in 2024.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Originally published at music.nd.edu.