Notes on Broadway.
KASHA, Al; Joel Hirschhorn [Charles Strouse].
Notes on Broadway.
First Fireside Edition of Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn's Notes on Broadway; From the Collection of Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
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Item Number: 152228
First Fireside edition of this engaging collection of intimate conversations with Broadway’s greatest songwriters, by the Academy Award-winning songwriting team of Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. Octavo, original pictorial wrappers, illustrated with 135 black-and-white photographs. From the collection of Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning composer Charles Strouse and his wife, choreographer Barbara Siman. Over his 50-year career, Charles Strouse wrote the music for such iconic musical theater hits as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie, as well as the theme song for the classic sitcom All in the Family (“Those Were the Days”). His partnership with Martin Charnin on Annie produced one of Broadway’s most successful scores ever, with “Tomorrow” and other songs from the production becoming enduring American musical standards admired by generations. His reach knew no genre or generation, spanning a number-one Billboard hit in 1958 and Jay-Z’s Grammy-winning sampling of “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” four decades later, and his honors include three Tony Awards and induction into both the Songwriters and Theater Halls of Fame. With his ownership stamp to the front free endpaper. In very good condition with light rubbing and toning. Cover design by Joel Alvirom.
Notes on Broadway: Conversations with the Great Songwriters (1985) is an oral history anthology by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, themselves two-time Academy Award-winning songwriters whose credits included "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and "We May Never Love Like This Again" from The Towering Inferno (1974), and whose standing as working practitioners of the craft gave them an access and collegial candor that no outside journalist could have achieved. The volume presents revealing interviews with twenty-five of Broadway's foremost songwriters, including Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Marvin Hamlisch, and Tim Rice, lavishly illustrated with 135 photographs drawn from the songwriters' personal files, with each conversation combining biography, production anecdotes, and analysis of compositional methods, training, and influences on style in a manner that illuminates both the craft and the human experience of sustaining a career in the American musical theater. Kasha and Hirschhorn were themselves figures of considerable stature in the popular music world, having won back-to-back Academy Awards in 1973 and 1974, and the mutual respect between interviewers and subjects produced conversations of unusual depth and frankness about the creative process, the relationship between music and dramatic structure, and the economics and pressures of commercial songwriting at the highest level.
