"If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song"
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Sondheim is drawing a hard line against the musical theater sin he spent a career policing: songs that stop the show cold to deliver Pretty Feelings. His demand that a story song "sound like speech" is less a technical note than a philosophy of honesty. Speech is where character lives - the tics, the evasions, the little cruelties and self-justifications people use to get through a day. If a musical is going to claim it tells a story, its music has to carry that behavioral truth, not paste melody over it like wallpaper.
The catch is in his second sentence: it still has to be a song. That's the tightrope Sondheim loved. If it only mimics speech, you get recitative that feels dutiful, a conveyor belt of plot. If it only chases "song-ness", you get anthems that could be swapped between characters without anyone noticing. His intent is to fuse the two so seamlessly that the audience doesn't feel the gears: the melody emerges because normal speech can't hold the pressure of the moment anymore.
Context matters: Sondheim came up in a Broadway ecosystem trained on big, declarative numbers, then pushed the form toward conversational rhythms, internal rhyme, and psychological precision. The subtext is an argument about craft as ethics. Musical theater isn't escapism by default; it's a medium with rules, and those rules should serve character and cause. When it works, the "song" isn't a break from realism - it's realism, intensified.
The catch is in his second sentence: it still has to be a song. That's the tightrope Sondheim loved. If it only mimics speech, you get recitative that feels dutiful, a conveyor belt of plot. If it only chases "song-ness", you get anthems that could be swapped between characters without anyone noticing. His intent is to fuse the two so seamlessly that the audience doesn't feel the gears: the melody emerges because normal speech can't hold the pressure of the moment anymore.
Context matters: Sondheim came up in a Broadway ecosystem trained on big, declarative numbers, then pushed the form toward conversational rhythms, internal rhyme, and psychological precision. The subtext is an argument about craft as ethics. Musical theater isn't escapism by default; it's a medium with rules, and those rules should serve character and cause. When it works, the "song" isn't a break from realism - it's realism, intensified.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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