An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 19 | MUSICAL THEATER IN THE 1970s 485

Listen & Refl ect

1. The same year John McLaughlin recorded this piece, he also collaborated with Carlos
   Santana on a tribute album to John Coltrane. Compare Birds of Fire with Coltrane’s “My
   Favorite Things” (see LG 18.1) and with Santana’s “Oye como va” (see LG 19.1). What are the
   similarities and differences?

timing section comments

4:10 head Full statement of head, aaa' b, as at 2:18, with small melodic variants.

4:52 coda Riff returns with rising synthesizer arpeggios; fadeout.

MUSICAL THEATER IN THE 1970s

Despite the success of West Side Story in the 1950s, the Broadway musical failed

to follow up on Leonard Bernstein’s assertion that therein lay the road to a truly

American operatic form. The most successful shows of the 1960s and 1970s either

carried on the tradition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein–style integrated musi-

cal, as in Jerry Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof (1964), or combined the old-fashioned

song-and-dance manner of the pre-Oklahoma! musical with a Brechtian self-

consciousness and ironic self-parody, as in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret

(1966) and Chicago (1975).

Operatic aspirations, meanwhile, arose not on Broadway but in British rock

in the form of the rock opera. Despite the name, rock operas like the Who’s

To m my (1969) and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Zigg y Stardust and the Spiders

from Mars (1972) originated not as theatrical productions but as concept albums,

“operatic” only in the sense that a narrative unfolds over several musical num-

bers with all the words sung, not spoken. The idea of the rock opera was quickly

transferred to Broadway, however, in the form of the British composer Andrew

Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). The same year saw the Broadway

opening of American composer Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell, like Superstar based

on the New Testament (an unlikely source for a Broadway show), but more akin

to the traditional musical, with spoken dialogue and discrete musical numbers,

some of which are in a rock style.

But the rock idiom proved uncongenial to the Broadway manner of storytell-

ing, and few successful 1970s musicals used the language of rock. African Ameri-

can popular styles fared slightly better thanks to Charlie Smalls’s The Wiz (1975),

an all-black musical version of The Wizard of Oz that incorporated soul and gos-

pel styles. Although the Broadway stage production was a success, the 1977 fi lm

version, featuring Motown stars Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, was a critical

and commercial fl op. Instead of embracing new popular styles, then, some of the

rock opera

Listening Guide 19.4

Birds of Fire

CD 4.3 MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA

172028_19_468-494_r3_sd.indd 485 23/01/13 11:05 AM