“He used to be in Beethoven”:
One Scholar’s Journey from Beethoven to Broadway
Geoffrey Block
In the 1960s and 1970s scholars figured out that the great nineteenth-century sketch scholar Gustav Nottebohm wasn’t the only mystic who could decipher Beethoven’s seemingly illegible musical notation and handwriting. The New Age of Beethoven sketch studies had begun. Soon, senior Beethoven scholars and their graduate students were writing dissertations that investigate the complex and labyrinthine (but often generously documented) compositional process that led to works we admire, study, and perform. Beginning in the 1980s, another group of scholars (with at least one overlapping), often working in relative obscurity and with sparse encouragement from the academy at large, surreptitiously discovered that some of the methodologies used in the prestigious fiefdom of Beethoven manuscript studies could be usefully applied to what was then a virtually unknown field: American musical theater studies.
By the time Stephen Banfield organized an historic conference on manuscripts and other primary sources pertaining to American and British musical theater at the University of Bristol in 2006, scholars who had launched their careers in mainstream or in less-travelled (but nonetheless respectable) scholarly regions, joined a new generation of scholars no longer discouraged from writing dissertations and cultivating careers in American musical theater. Banfield himself had contributed path-breaking work on Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Kern that made considerable use of primary manuscript material. In fact, over the past thirty years the field has busted out all over, supporting mainstream academic conferences, the regular appearance of important books and articles, the exclusive subject matter of a scholarly journal, and no less than two series of books published by respected academic presses. What was once unthinkable has metamorphosed into the burgeoning field we celebrate in Sheffield in 2016.
But just as traditional musicology splintered in the 1980s to create what became known as the New Musicology, based largely on critical theory and other non-source based approaches, so has popular musical theater studies. Ironically, the study of primary sources at the foundation of this new musicological field seemed to reinforce the kinds of scholarly issues that concerned the so-called positivist Old Musicology rather than the critically oriented New Musicology. Fortunately, as with Beethoven studies and other now traditional scholarly fields, the study of the American musical theater (and its connections with popular British musical theater) is a rich terrain that can accommodate both the Old and the New. In this keynote I will argue that the Old American Theater Studies (i.e., an approach that focuses on manuscript and other primary sources) is perennially both young and new as well as an invaluable approach to the musicological discipline, an approach that continues to provide significant keys to the understanding of how musicals were created, what they mean, and how we might perform them.