How Sondheim Found His Sound

6 Putting It Together

6 — — — — — Putting It Together “Bit by bit . . .” If you want your piece to be closely structured, allow for every single thing that should happen on the stage—a very important lesson and I think not a widely known one. . . . To avoid that static moment, plot and plan within an inch of its life every bar that you can. . . . Once the lyric starts to take shape, I don’t want it to get too far ahead of the music, and vice versa. Then it’s a matter of developing both simultaneously . I generally do it section by section, and I generally make a kind of long line reduction in the music, because I was trained in a sort of conservative school of composition about the long line. I generally make a reduction of the long line and know what the key relationships are going to be in the various sections of the song and how the general long line is going to go down or up or cover the third or ‹fth or whatever it is. But it is a matter of shaping a little bit at a time, like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It gradually closes in until it’s all there.1 While Sondheim’s comments here focus narrowly on the music (with its concomitant lyric), his description starts with the dramatic. The music must account fully for every action on stage. A song (which here is apposite to “piece” or “composition”) may have a structure that follows a certain musical logic (long lines and key relationships), but musical logic is made subservient to the dramatic requirements of the piece in question. Structure is dictated by the drama; content dictates form. Thus it is only now, with a better grasp of the components that inform Sondheim’s understanding of content, that we can more fully appreciate how his syntax operates. The ›eshing out of a character or a scene involves: the interplay of cinematic techniques imbibed and internalized over years and decades of movie watching; an eye for drama honed by Hammerstein and by Sondheim’s studies of, scripts for, and experiences in theater, ‹lm, and television; an af‹nity with the working methods and constraints of the Broadway songwriters of yesteryear (especially Gershwin and Arlen); and a respect for (and a deep knowledge of) a stratum of Western art music that is both conservative (compared to other trends in art music) and progressive (compared to more commercial styles of music). Sondheim found his sound—and an amazingly consistent sound it is, from Williams College to the present day— by amalgamating these seemingly disparate components into his unique patois. What better song, then, in which to examine Sondheim’s amalgamations and his “bit by bit” manner of construction than that song that most closely scrutinizes the art of making art? By any manner of accounting, “Putting It Together,” from act 2 of Sunday in the Park with George (1984), represents the pinnacle of Sondheim’s abilities. Its size alone—47 pages in a 246-page vocal score (nearly one-‹fth of the score)—gives it a unique place in Sondheim’s oeuvre. (Only the ‹nale of act 1 of Anyone Can Whistle—the interrogation sequence—is longer.) Soon after its completion, Sondheim joked about his Leviathan of a song. SONDHEIM: . . . “Putting It Together” is going be No. 1 on the Hit Parade. JAMES LAPINE: I know! Isn’t that hilarious? SONDHEIM: And the hilarity is that, next to “Comedy Tonight” and “Send In the Clowns,” “Putting It Together” has been recorded more than anything else.2 Horowitz’s discography shows that this is not true,3 but when Barbra Streisand released her version of “Putting It Together” on The Broadway Album (1985), the Xerox Corporation “was developing an advertising campaign that used a similar phrase. They changed their campaign, licensed the song and used it for over six years in all of their advertising. This was a tremendous opportunity for the song as it had a terri‹c recording and then great success as a commercial.”4 Such saturation virtually insured that Sondheim’s tune would acquire a popular cachet that few of his songs have ever earned, however extensive their discographies . Yet, there are other reasons to examine “Putting It Together.” Despite its size and popularity, which make it rare among Sondheim’s work, it exhibits a number of traits that are common to the bulk of his music. Its scope makes it easier to consider his manner...