within their own repetitions but not quite with each other, so
that the syncopation is pronounced.
The composition is a study in repeats and mirrors. The pat-
terns do not exactly match each other. They actually jive with
each other, coming close to matching but keeping a little apart,
too, a distance where swing is possible, but they do coincide in
their endings. No one thinks of this song as subtle (especially
after Ethel Merman belted it out in the original production of
Girl Crazy), but it is extremely intricate.
My point is that such a completely worked out structure is
set off from the play in which it occurs by virtue of its syncopa-
tion of repetitions. The fashioning of repetition in the number
creates a formality of expression that the book does not have,
and that formality of expression results in a kind of characteri-
zation and a kind of dramatic action that the nonmusical play
either does without or must attain through other means. Yet
the formality of expression in musical numbers comes to an
end and the play returns to the book, a return from repetitive
time to progressive time, from lyric to dialectic. Lyric time can
be well paced, book time can be well paced, but what matters
most is the alternation between the two. That is what gives the
musical its lift, its energy, its elation.
An Integrated Number from Oklahoma!
An illustration of these two orders of time can be found in a
scene of such close articulation between book and number that
integrationmight seem the appropriate word. Early in Okla-
homa!the number “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” arises
because a cowboy named Curly feels so strongly about taking a
farm woman named Laurey to the box social that he breaks
into song as an imaginative way to get around her resistance.
Laurey has teased him by saying that the only way he can take
a girl to the box social is by having her “ride on behind ole
Dun,” his horse. Curly can imagine offering a girl a better way,
which he describes in the intricate repetitions of “Surrey.”
First, though, here is the same moment from the source play,