Clarity

I traveled down to my local big book store this morning to purchase a book that their web site said was there.  Then their in-store puter said it wasn't but when I turned around two copies were out on the table behind me.  Sometimes one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

No matter, it was worth the journey so long as I could use my 40% coupon.  I usually don't buy coffee table books but I had to have Finishing the Hat...Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes  by Stephen Sondheim and so far, having read about 25 pages, I have not been disappointed.  
What has struck me the most is his preface in which he says something that applies, I believe, to all writing:

"There are only three principles necessary for a lyric writer, all of them familiar truisms....they underlie everything I've ever written.  In no particular order, and to be written in stone:

Content Dictates Form

Less Is More

God is in the Details

all in the service of

Clarity

without which nothing else matters."

Thank you Mr. Sondheim.  I'm going to enjoy reading this and savoring your lyrics and listening to your music in my head.

A digression...

I'm allowing myself a digression today, a digression from blogging about writing to blogging about Broadway.

I was raised on Rogers and Hammerstein.  I danced to Lerner and Lowe.  I watched the movie versions of every Cole Porter.  My understanding of Broadway came, however, the first time I watched Sondheim.  

At first hearing I said "What's this crap?"  I had been so indoctrinated to formulaic music.  But then I realized that Sondheim made people think.  I was used to just feeling.  I first heard (like everyone mostly did) his lyrics in West Side Story.  I was paying attention to Bernstein but those lyrics, how they stole into my consciousness.  I missed Anyone Can Whistle (it flew by so fast) but then, just before I married (probably bad timing) I saw the original Company.

Who was this man?  Where did he come from?  How did he gain entry to my brain?  Forty years later I would see the revival of Company for my sixtieth birthday and I could still marvel at the newness of it.

Mr Sondheim, you changed Broadway, you changed the way we think about musicals and, in many ways you wrote the songs that parallel my life.  On the occasion of your Eightieth birthday, thank you for Being Alive.