bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chee-Chee, The Castration Musical
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

small it couldn’t have made any difference. Perhaps he was too ill for anything to have saved him. His poor body had taken such a beating in his short life-he was forty-eight-and his resistance was very low. He remained unconscious all the time he was in the hospital, and on the fourth night, just as the lights went out for a wartime practice blackout, he died. (Later when M-G-M made a movie called Words and Music about Dick and Larry, they fictionalized another ending for the story because they said no one would believe what really happened. It was too dramatic for Hollywood.) in some respects the forgotten Chee-Chee marks a crossroads in the career of Rodgers and Hart. In Rodgers’s four letters to Dorothy from September 1 to 17, 1928, the first letter written in New York and the others during the Philadelphia tryouts, he spoke proudly about this innovative work: “No matter what happens to us commercially we’ve accomplished what we’ve been after for years:’ Throughout these letters Rodgers conveys a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation about how the work would be received. On September 7 he wrote that “there are doubts as to its financial future and its reception by the New York press... but I know we’ve done something fine at last:’ On September 12 he wrote that “the show is the best musical thing I’ve ever seen:’ In the final letter he emphasized the varied press response and the views of the letter-writing public. Although no future Rodgers and Hart show came close to matching the popular debacle of Chee-Chee, the next three years were marked by less artistic daring (e.g., Spring Is Here, 1929), a sharp drop in quantity (a total of four shows), and only one unqualified popular success, the London production.
Cover Story: “The Boys from Columbia”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

In 1925 George Gershwin gained the distinction as the first composer, and first American, to make the cover of Time magazine, then only two years in existence. By September 1938 Gershwin had been dead a little over a year. From their return to Broadway in 1935 withJumbo until their final show seven years later, By Jupiter, the only consistent challenger to Rodgers and Hart was Cole Porter (who never did get his picture on the cover of Time). Although the Depression had so debilitated Broadway that the number of shows had ground to a virtual halt in 1937 and 1938, Rodgers and Hart had enjoyed an impressive run of consecutive hits, including On Your Toes in 1936, Babes in Arms and I’d Rather Be Right in 1937, and / Married an Angel earlier in 1938. “The Boys from Columbia’’ naturally focuses on The Boys from Syracuse, then on the eve of its November opening-it even includes previously unpublished lyric samples from three songs. In its sketch of Rodgers and Hart’s career from Garrick Gaieties through the recent Hollywood years, Time emphasizes the team’s originality and innovation and concludes that “nobody ever fused words and music more effectively than Rodgers & Hart.” The profile also introduces the Credo that Rodgers would espouse for the rest of his career: “The one possible formula was: Don’t have a formula; the one rule for success: Don’t follow it up:’  Time misspoke when it reported that George Abbott had “pitched out every line of Shakespeare’s dialogue, because he likes his own better:’ Abbott did, in fact, retain several lines from Shakespeare, most famously near the end of the evening when the Seeress proclaims that “the venom clamours of a jealous woman poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth:’ Rodgers writes in Musical Stages (p. 191) that “Lest anyone unfamiliar with the classics accept this as a sentence he had thought up all by himself, George had Jimmy Savo follow it by sticking his head out from the wings and proudly announcing to the audience: ‘Shakespeare!”‘ The Time cover is reproduced on page 9.
The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma! and Carousel
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

n his autobiographical The Magic Curtain, Lawrence Langner (1890-1962), a founding member of the Theatre Guild, whose fund-raiser in 1925 created the opportunity for the initial success of Rodgers and Hart, expresses his gratitude that the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! saved the Guild from precarious financial straits brought about by World War II. He also conveys his view that their Theatre Guild sequel, Carousel, developed into “the finest American musical play of our time: In one final paragraph Langner addresses the failure of the Guild’s third Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Allegro, a failure he attributes to the production rather than the essential artistic material. Langner describes the long and difficult fund-raising process for Oklahoma!, surveying the changes made during the out-of-town tryouts and numerous insider details related to the production history of both Oklahoma! and Carousel. He also offers insights into the working methods and character of Rodgers and Hammerstein, concluding that it is a “generous endowment of friendliness for others which has been at the base of Oscar’s poetic quality in his verse, and of Dick’s popular appeal in his music.” Theresa Helburn (1887-1959), the Theatre Guild’s executive director, revisits this material in her autobiography, A Wayward Quest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 281-95.
“R. ancl H”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

In this excerpt, Agnes de Mille (1905-1993), the choreographer of Oklahoma! and Carousel, and Allegro’s director-choreographer, recalls how Rodgers (in contrast to Aaron Copland in Rodeo) gave her considerable initiative in determining a detailed scenario for the ballet music in Oklahoma! and how Rodgers tacitly approved her decision to set the death struggle of Curly and Jud at the end of the central ballet in silence. Readers also learn that the “dramatic invention” required in Carousel’s second act ballet “represented probably the hardest challenge” of de Mille’s career to date.* De Mille focuses on the diverse individual personalities and artistic partnership of Rodgers and Hammerstein. She attributes their unique effectiveness to “their professional watchfulness” as well as their talent, and expresses her admiration for a professionalism and insight that enabled them to dispassionately discard whatever it took to make the second act of ‘‘De Mille’s other major Broadway success from this period was One Touch of Venus (music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ogden Nash, book by S. J. Perelman and Nash). Venus, which starred Mary Martin and Kenny Baker, opened a few months after Oklahoma! On October 7, 1943, and ran alongside its blockbusting predecessor for 567 performances, a smaller but nonetheless impressive popular success.
“What Is a Richard Rodgers?”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

It is indeed unfortunate that subsequent generations remember Joshua Logan (1908-1988) primarily as the man responsible for the outrageous colors that marred the 1958 film version of South Pacific. From the late-1930s through the mid-1950s Logan was one of Broadway’s most distinguished directors and producers with numerous major play and musical credits, including On Borrowed Time and Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Morning’s at Seven (1939), This Is the Army (1942), Mister Roberts (1948), Picnic (1953), Fanny (1954), and Middle of the Night (1956). His association with Rodgers began in 1938 with the Rodgers and Hart hit musical, / Married an Angel. Over the next few years Logan would serve as co-librettist as well as director for Higher and Higher (1940) and as the director of Rodgers and Hart’s last musical, By Jupiter (1942). Before co-producing, directing, and co-authoring the original stage production of South Pacific (1949), Logan directed another hit show, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), co-produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein one year after Carousel. In Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life Logan describes his role in the creation of the South Pacific libretto over a ten-day period on Hammerstein’s farm, and relates in painful detail how, in his view, the Rodgers and Hammerstein corporate juggernaut deprived him of what he felt to be his legitimate right to share an author’s copyright with Hammerstein. At the same time he blamed Rodgers for these decisions, Logan acknowledges that Rodgers did more to establish and maintain his career than any other man. Logan’s anguish, hurt, and anger loomed so large after his experience with South Pacific that he “politely refused” co-authorship and direction for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s next show, The King and I.
“There’s Hope for Everyone”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The Theatre Guild shows created new stars (Alfred Drake, Joan Roberts, Celeste Holm in Oklahoma!, John Raitt and Jan Clayton in Carousel). South Pacific began with stars already in public orbit, Broadway’s lustrous Mary Martin (1913-1990) and the famous bass Ezio Pinza (1892-1957) crossing over after several decades of leading roles with the New York Metropolitan Opera and London’s Covent Garden. By the time Rodgers and Hammerstein asked Martin to play Nellie Forbush, she had long since made her auspicious supporting debut in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me (1938) with the song that would provide her autobiography its title. Several years later, she attained stardom in the title roles in One Touch of Venus (1943) and in the first touring company of Annie Get Your Gun in 1947 (an Irving Berlin musical produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein the previous year). After playing Ensign Forbush for a little more than two years, Martin would go on to create the title role in Broadway’s Peter Pan (1954) and Maria von Trapp in R & H’s The Sound of Music (1959). In yet another claim to fame, Martin was also the mother of Larry Hagman (1931-), known to millions as J. R. Ewing in the long-running television series Dallas (1978-1990).
The Art of Adaptation
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

From The Cradle Will Rock {1937) to / Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) Lehman Engel {1910-1982) occupied a prominent and ubiquitous place as a Broadway conductor. Among his many recordings are the first (nearly) complete studio cast recording of Porgy and Bess in 1951 and a studio cast recording of Pal Joey in 1950 that is frequently credited as the impetus behind the successful revival two years later. In the 1960s Engel gained new distinction as a leading Broadway historian and developer of new talent in his role as a teacher at New York University, the American Musical and Dramatic Theatre Academy, and as the director of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. Since the largest share of the responsibility for a show’s success rests on the librettist-and since today’s exorbitant production costs seriously diminish the beginner’s opportunities for learning through doing, it is essential that potential librettists learn everything possible from the growing list of musical-show models-as well as from the formidable catalogue of failures.
“The Musical Stage”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) shared some of Bentley’s disdain for musicals that sing songs of social significance, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s message for racial equality in South Pacific, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Also like Bentley, but in contrast to Atkinson, Nathan, a Smart Set co-editor with H. L. Mencken beginning in 1914 and an early advocate for the serious dramas of Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey, proudly maintained a double standard when it came to the American musical. According to Nathan, the Broadway musical is doomed to fail when it tries to emulate higher artistic realms such as the Metropolitan Opera. As an advocate of “the lighter stage,” Nathan vigorously defends Hammerstein’s sentimentality and Rodgers’s relentless tunefulness and praises the team for “abstaining from an indulgence in the social significance deemed by some of their colleagues as desirable in lending a bit of weight to their shows” Marines [Seabees] is unquestionably offensive to the English critics, who like to think, however much they may pretend the contrary, that if it were not for their own soldiery, whether on land or sea, or in the air, we would long ago have been speaking German or Japanese as our national language. In the third place, such a key song number as “You’ve Got To Be Taught To Hate” [“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”] strikes them as being quite as violative of the show’s flow as it struck the New York critics. In the fourth place the appropriation of the Madame Butterfly theme in the secondary love story of the young naval lieutenant and the Tonkinese girl occurred to them just as it did to some of our critics. And, in the fifth place, though they liked the Rodgers score, they probably, as the local critics did not, here and there recognized some of its inspirations as, for example in the “Bali Ha’i” song, Saint-Saens’ second concerto in G minor. (Saint-Saens has surely stood some of our composers in good stead, as witness, among others, Gershwin and his “Rhapsody In Blue.”)
“Moving in the Direction of Opera”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The present printed selection from the best-selling The Joy of Music concludes what was originally a telecast on the American musical delivered by conductor, composer, pianist, and educator Leonard Bernstein (7918-1990). First seen on the Omnibus series, October 7, 1956, the lecture was broadcast only two months before the debut of his own Candide (December l, 1956) and less than a year before West Side Story (September 26, 1957). After exploring the continuum of musical theater from the variety show to Wagnerian music drama (with revue, operetta, comic opera, opera buffa, opera comique, and grand opera somewhere in between), Bernstein presents the history of the American musical as a period of growth from primitive Mozart came along. In 1750, the big attraction was what they called the Singspiel, which was the Annie Get Your Gun of its day, star comic and all. This popular form took the leap to a work of art through the genius of Mozart. After all, The Magic Flute is a Singspiel; only it’s by Mozart. [Ed. Bernstein inserts a note here to “compare with related ideas in ‘Whatever Happened to That Great American Symphony?,’ page 40.” We are in the same position; all we need is for our Mozart to come along. If and when he does, we surely won’t get any Magic Flute; what we’ll get will be a new form, and perhaps “opera” will be the wrong word for it. There must be a more exciting word for such an exciting event. And this event can happen any second. It’s almost as though it is our moment in history, as if there is a historical necessity that gives us such a wealth of creative talent at this precise time.
A Few Favorite Things about Rodgers with Hammerstein
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Alec Wilder (1907-1980), the author of the American Popular Song, a widely acknowledged classic in the field, was himself a composer of numerous works for stage, orchestra, and chamber music and whose songs were sung by Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra and performed by the Benny Goodman and Jimmy Dorsey bands. In the introduction to the Rodgers chapter in this widely quoted volume (see also his remarks on “My Heart Stood Still” selection in Part I), Wilder puts his critical cards on the table: “Of all the writers whose songs are considered and examined in this book, those of Rodgers show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication.”
“The Nicest Guys in Show Business”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Cleveland Amory’s profile of the pair who “not only have written the best musical comedies but have also changed the whole concept of the musical theater: is a worthy representative of the deferential media treatment Rodgers and Hammerstein received in the 1950s.* After quoting Rodgers’s defense of “sweetness and light” and Hammerstein’s defense of “sentimentalism,” Amory revisits such familiar territory as their “slow and painstaking” planning of a show and Rodgers’s speed in setting Hammerstein’s lyrics. Future journalists and historians would modify Amory’s depiction of Rodgers’s disposition as “placid” or the assertion that he was a nonsmoker and only an occasional drinker, but the profile nonetheless fairly attempts to address the familiar story of their interconnected careers and their lives in the last year of collaboration. Readers also learn that Hammerstein, to refute the accusation that he was the “nicest guy in the theater,” let a press agent know he had stolen a radish from a blind man (at a dinner party) and that Rodgers takes his croquet games more seriously than practically anything else in life outside of the theater. Amory concludes by discrediting three “outright canards” about the team: 1) “that Rodgers is the businessman, Hammerstein the poet”; 2) that they have made more money than is good for them; and 3) “that they are luck/’ To the first two canards Amory notes that neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein sees himself as a businessman and that both men generously donate their time and money to many organizations and good causes and have not allowed their wealth to lead to social or artistic complacency. In responding to the final canard Amory deftly shifts the topic from luck in the theater to personal luck and cites the misfortune of Rodgers’s cancer and Hammerstein’s gallbladder operations and a son’s divorce.
“Introduction” to Richard Rodgers
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

According to Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th ed., 1991), David Ewen (1907-1985) has “published more books on music and edited more reference publications than anyone else in the 20th century (some 85 in all).” His many American musical theater subjects include the dated but still useful New Complete Book of the American Musical (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) and books on Irving Berlin (1950), Jerome Kern (1953), George Gershwin (1956; rev. 1970), Leonard Bernstein (1960), and Cole Porter (1965).
‘You Can’t Force It”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

n 1938 Winthrop Sargeant (1903-1986) published one of the first serious book-length treatments of jazz: Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (third ed., Da Capo, 1975). The remarkable Rodgers profile that follows appeared midway through Sargeant’s tenure as music critic of The New Yorker (1947-72). He begins by crediting Rodgers as “a continuous and restless innovator” at the rebellious forefront of revolutionary chang s in the modern American musical. In addition to descriptions of Rodgers’s physical presence, personality, lifestyle, and a survey of his career from childhood to a pending creative union with librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, Sargeant ruminates seriously on the nature, uniqueness, and significance of Rodgers as a composer of original, distinctive, and memorable melody “designed to fit a given dramatic situation.” In Sargeant’s view, Rodgers’s melodic variety “is probably greater than that of any other Broadway composer.” Without denigrating the classical tradition, he also thoughtfully defends Rodgers’s inherent gifts and the creation of tunes, “fully as beautiful as any melody in ‘classical’ music: For Sargeant, “it is yet to be proved that melody is not the most inspired and the most fundamental ingredient of all music worthy of the name.” And if musical comedy is “not as lofty an art as opera,” “writing for it demands great talent-a talent that sometimes surpasses that of the operatic composer.”
“The Plot Against Musicals”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Increasingly, as Rodgers continued his work without Hammerstein, audiences had the opportunity to see and compare multiple eras in the career of a living legend. The selection that follows contains three parts: l) a review of a successful Off-Broadway 1963 revival of Rodgers and Hart’s 1938 classic, The Boys from Syracuse; 2) a comparison between Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!-in 1968 on the eve of a single concert performance in Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center to commemorate its 25th anniversaryand a pretentious new musical, Here’s Where I Belong (“burdened with substance and shackled to seriousness”), based on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, another production destined to last one night (but in this case an unplanned one-night stand); and 3) a review of the first performance of Rodgers’s new musical Do I Hear a Waltz? All three pieces are by Walter Kerr (1913-1996), widely considered one of the most distinguished theater critics of his generation, first with the New York Herald Tribune (1951-66) and then with the New York Times until his retirement in 1983. In the first review Kerr offers effusive praise for Hart’s sophisticated lyrics and Rodgers’s “inappropriately perfect” and invariably “unexpected modulations” in songs like “The Shortest Day of the Year:’ After extolling the virtues of the perennially fresh Oklahoma! at the expense of the short-lived and still-born Steinbeck adaptation, Kerr’s final review rejects the cognitive dramatic dissonance of Do I Hear a Waltz?, a show in which Rodgers’s excellent musical-comedy songs must be made to “carry the evening when the evening isn’t a musical corned.
The Perils of Producing Rex
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Respite his independent artistic achievements, Richard Adler (1921-) remains best known as the co-composer-lyricist, who along with Jerry Ross (1926-1955), created a double-header of hits in the mid-1950s, The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955). Twenty years later, he produced a Rodgers musical based on King Henry VIII (Rex) that lasted only forty-eight performances. The excerpt below chronicles this failed attempt (see also Mandelbaum’s remarks that follow). With disarming honesty Adler tells his readers what went wrong and what he learned. Perhaps the major mistake in retrospect was the decision not to accept the financial terms of director-choreographer Michael Bennett, who would soon be developing and directing the phenomenally successful A Chorus Line. Adler also relates how “collaboration with a legend [Rodgers] had a negative effect upon Sheldon Harnick,” the lyricist of Fiorello!, She Loves Me, and Fiddler on the Roof, when he tried to emulate Hammerstein rather than be himself. Another problem was the deleterious offstage behavior of the brilliant Nicol Williamson, who played the title role. As with most failures, “major book problems” proved insurmountable. All things considered, Adler concedes that he should have closed the show in Wilmington. He also realized, “in hindsight, that Elizabeth was the fascinating person about whom the musical should have been written in the first place:’
“Introduction” to Musical Stages
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Mary Rodgers (1931-) is the composer of the perennially performed musical Once Upon a Mattress (1959) and several works of popular fiction designed for younger readers, most notably Freaky Friday, both the original 1972 novel and the screenplay to a successful Disney film with Jodie Foster in 1977. At the time of her father’s death, his elder daughter informed well-wishers that her personal loss was no greater than theirs, since her father’s single-minded devotion to the theater precluded all else, including his presence as a warm and loving daddy. Introducing the 1995 reprinted edition of Musical Stages fifteen years later, Mary Rodgers discusses, perhaps for the first time in print, her father’s unhappiness and chemical depression. She also writes of Rodgers’s love of collaboration and his successful partnership with two contrasting geniuses, Larry Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. At the end of this touchingly honest remembrance, written, according to Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization President Ted Chapin, after she had rejected his offer to provide an introduction, Mary Rodgers publicly expresses feelings privately denied fifteen years earlier: “Granted, he was hardly your run-of-the-mill father, but of course I loved him. A lot. So there!” My father wrote in our living room with the door wide open. He would request that we, my sister and I, not sing or whistle or otherwise distract him, but aside from that, it was a rather public happening. A morning person, an enviably quick study, and cheerfully businesslike about his work, he’d go to the piano at nine and was usually through by ninethirty.
“Jerome Kern: A Tribute”
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

For composers such as Rodgers and Gershwin who wanted Broadway to adopt a more vernacular musical language, Jerome Kern {1885-1945), “the first man to break with European theatre tradition,” was a model and an inspiration. In the tribute that follows, Rodgers recalls with love and “a feelng of real gratitude” seeing Very Good Eddie (1915), a Princess Theater show, “at least a dozen times in one season;’ when he was about thirteen. Three years later, it was a recording of the song “Babes in the Wood” from this show that Hart played on the day he and Rodgers met, and it was their mutual appreciation of Kern that helped forge a deep and lasting bond between the new collaborators.
“The Right to Revive” (or “Revive and Let Live”)
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Rodgers’s ‘The Right to Revive” offers a spirited defense of a practice that continues to be viewed as a symptom of theatrical decline rather than health. In doing so, Rodgers addresses future critics who disparage the recently added, vigorously competitive, Tony Award category of Best Musical Revival. Among the recent winners in this category are revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel in 1994 and The King and I in 1996. Rodgers notes that stock and amateur companies were contractually prohibited from performing works during their initial Broadway runs-it remains common today for shows in Broadway revivals to prohibit regional and collegiate productions-and considers it another vital sign that 340 stock and amateur performances of Oklahoma! appeared the previous year. In contrast to most critics then and now, Rodgers argues that new productions of earlier shows (such as On Your Toes, which was to open the next day) “might even encourage a beginner to stay in the theatre;’ since their return would assure new talent that the best shows do not necessarily vanish. All lasting works of an art nature are continually in a state of revival. This is true of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, The Man with the Hoe, Brahms’s First Symphony, Falstaff, and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is revived by the persons who travel in vast numbers to see it every year. Musical comedy is entitled no less to be revived from time to time, simply because it is considered a lesser art, provided that what is being revived is a good example of that art. Actually, being more easily understood by a greater number of people than the more serious works, it might be entitled to more frequent revivals. Onstage, tastes change, mores are different, so that where language is understood, as opposed to grand opera, the life-revival span is usually limited; but The Merry Widow, a fine fantasy-romance with a lovely score, was greeted happily once more only a few years ago.
Reminiscences of Richard Rodgers
Authors: Block Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The longest selection in the Reader is excerpted from an extended interview with Kenneth Leish, arranged in twelve parts (392 double-spaced pages of typescript and a two-page index of names). Although only the first four parts include dates, It is clear from references to current productions at places like the Music Theater at Lincoln Center that the final portions of the interview did not extend much beyond Summer and Fall 1968.* In a portion of the Reminiscences not reprinted here readers learn that the press suppressed Hart’s excessive drinking as well as his homosexuality, not because Rodgers threatened the publisher of a scandal rag when confronted with questions about Hart’s sexuality, but “because the newspaper people were all crazy about him” (p. 200}. Also in this section Rodgers discloses that For the archivally curious this footnote offers topics, dates (when provided in the interviews), and page numbers for each section: (I) Rodgers’s current activities (December I4, I967), I-39; (2) Background (December I9, I967), 40-84; (3) Producing Avanti and The Garrick Gaieties through A Connecticut Yankee (February 2I, I968), 85-u8; (4) I927-I932 (March I, I968), II9-43; (5) I932-I936, I44-67; (6) Working with Hart, I68-203 [marked on the title page “closed during lifetime”]; (7) Pal Joey and Oklahoma!, 204-46; (8) State Fair and Carousel, 247-78; (9) Allegro and South Pacific, 279-307; (IO) The King and I, Victory at Sea, and Me and Juliet, 308-36; (II) Pipe Dream and The Sound of Music, 337-62; (I2) After Hammerstein, 363-92.
A Truly New World
Authors: Steinberg Ted
Published: November 2023

It was perhaps the most ill-timed expedition in the history of exploration. In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier and navigator, recruited 117 people—men, women, and children—to venture to the New World under the command of John White. Their destination: a spot of land roughly ten miles long and two miles wide off the coast of North Carolina now named Roanoke Island. White put the settlers ashore and a few weeks later returned to England to find supplies and additional recruits for the venture.
Conservation Reconsidered
Authors: Steinberg Ted
Published: November 2023

One of the ranchers who watched the blizzard of 1887 wipe out his herd of cattle was Theodore Roosevelt. In the early 1880s, Roosevelt, a New Yorker, built a ranch in North Dakota’s Badlands, stocked it with animals, and hired two cowboys to oversee his venture. In the spring of 1887, he headed west to check on the status of his 85,000-dollar investment, arriving in the Little Missouri valley only to find that death had beaten him there. He saw cattle carcasses—23 in just a single little spot—and found his once glorious herd reduced to just “a skinny sorry-looking crew.” The ground itself was in no better shape. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.”
The Context
Authors: Fossel Michael B
Published: November 2023

This bald statement, shorn of caveats and qualifications, is a simplistic (and so inaccurate) statement of the cell senescence model of aging. While reflecting the central tenet of this book, the model as proposed is complex, misunderstood, and ardently disputed and has little direct, confirming data. Despite this, a growing body of experimental work and the powerful implications of the hypothesis (Fossel, 1996; Liu, 1999) make it imperative that the model be defined, allowing it to become understood, testable, and perhaps even disproved.
Nervous System
Authors: Fossel Michael B
Published: November 2023

The human nervous system is ignorant when young, stores a great deal of information as it matures, but has considerable problems with access and processing that information as it grows older. The basis of this failure is known in outline, but the causes of aging and age-related disease in the central nervous system largely escape us. The bulk of our clinical interest lies in the central nervous system, most attributable to two major categories of disease: the dementias and cerebral infarcts.
Basic Research and Observations
Authors: Wenegrat Brant
Published: November 2023

The theatrical model is rooted in research and observations from social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. First, modern studies show that human behavior is strongly controlled by social cues. Since people may be unaware of the causes of their behavior, they may be unaware that they are responding to cues. People also enact social roles, sometimes in response to cues. Researchers have shown that enacting a particular social role can change beliefs and attitudes so that these become consistent with the role enacted. Finally, individuals differ with respect to their propensities to enact new social roles in general and illness roles in particular. To lay the foundation for the study of illness behaviors, I briefly describe some research from social psychology and sociology that pertains to each of these points. Anthropological research is cited in chapter 3.
Recovered Memory Roles
Authors: Wenegrat Brant
Published: November 2023

In the past two decades, increasing numbers of patients have reported recovering memories of severe abuse or trauma that no one else, except, presumably, the perpetrators, had known about previously. In most cases, the trauma recalled was child sexual abuse, but in some cases the trauma was ritual abuse by satanic covens. Therapists who treat such patients theorize that memories of extremely traumatic events, especially of early sexual molestation, are so painful that they are barred from awareness by repression or dissociation.1 “Repressed” memories are those that are strictly forbidden to surface, while “dissociated” memories are allowed expression only when the patient is in an alternate state of mind, as in MPD. Whether in the context of MPD or another disorder, repressed or dissociated memories are thought to cause various symptoms, both mental and physical. Patients with repressed memories of childhood rape, for example, may fear intimacy with others or have undiagnosable pelvic pain.
Discovering and Documenting the Life of a Community
Authors: Hardcastle David A , Powers Patricia R , Wenocur Stanley
Published: November 2023

How enjoyable it is to learn what makes a town tick—whether a quiet town with one grain elevator or a toddlin’ town like Chicago. The process takes us into libraries (research) and along thoroughfares (experience). A library provides facts and analyses about urban areas. We can learn that the largest concentration of Filipinos in the United States is near San Francisco (Eljera, 2000). We can analyze what underlies changes in the urban neighborhood of Kibby Corners in Lima, Ohio (Li, 1996). However, conventional publications do not convey daily life for new Hispanic residents along the thoroughfares of Wisconsin and New Jersey—that entails footwork and a reading of ethnic newspapers. Similarly, libraries allow us to delve into rural areas (Homan, 1994, p. 100). For instance, nonmetropolitan areas can be classified; they can be manufacturing dependent, mining dependent, persistent poverty counties, retirement destinations, and so forth. Certainly, we want to identify a place’s economic base and population characteristics (Davenport & Davenport, 1995, p. 2077). On the other hand, we want details about how this rural place functions and affects people, and that entails probing. Question: What is the current concern of the local planning board? Answer: Whether sidewalks should be added downtown. Question: How does local law enforcement plan to mount an antidrug program here? Answer: By asking residents to write down the names of suspected users and dealers and slide the paper under the town hall door (R. V. Demaree, personal communication, January 2, 1995).
Using Self in Community Practice: Assertiveness
Authors: Hardcastle David A , Powers Patricia R , Wenocur Stanley
Published: November 2023

Consider how dancers and social workers are alike. Both respect highly developed use-of-self1 abilities that contribute to professional accomplishments and benefits for others. Initiative and persistence also are basic to any success. While ballet and modern dance both require the same mastery over the body and an ability to relate to an audience, each requires specialized abilities; similarly, clinical work and community work draw on the same aptitudes while requiring the refinement of specific proficiencies.
Using Your Agency
Authors: Hardcastle David A , Powers Patricia R , Wenocur Stanley
Published: November 2023

Organizations are necessary and important because they enable people to accomplish collectively what cannot be accomplished by individuals acting on their own. The maintenance of complex industrial societies is inconceivable without the existence of large-scale organizations, together with a great number of very small organizations. As social workers, we will likely spend most of our professional lives practicing in human service organizations—governmental (public), nongovernmental nonprofit agencies, and proprietary organizations. These organizations profoundly affect our personal and professional well-being. Regardless of our talents and skills, organizational structure, culture, and management strongly influence how well and in what manner we are able to deliver services, that is, how well we are able to do the professional work for which we were trained. At the same time, our work organizations affect our self-image, our livelihoods, and our sense of accomplishment and worth as human beings. For these reasons, understanding how organizations operate is critical. We need organizational knowledge to create a personally and professionally more satisfying and capable work environment.
Using Networks and Networking
Authors: Hardcastle David A , Powers Patricia R , Wenocur Stanley
Published: November 2023

Clients with multiple problems and needs are increasing. An abusive mother may require income assistance, job training, day care, psychosocial therapy, parenting education and skills, and other social supports to change her behavior. If the father is present, family therapy may be needed. If not, she may need assistance in obtaining absent parent financial and social supports. Rarely are all needed services available from a single agency; usually they must be obtained from many autonomous organizations. The social worker and the client will need to construct and manage a service network. Whittaker, Garbarino, and associates (1983) and others (Payne, 2000; Travillion, 1999) hold that assessing, developing, and managing social networks and assisting clients in their assessment, development, and management of social networks is the crux of social work practice. Client needs generally do not coincide with a single agency’s service packets. The sheer number of agencies with varying service arrangements and regulations and a client’s informal social supports generates management complexity for the individual client and social worker and demands commensurate network management skills. Networks are equally important to macro community practice, which largely consists of building and managing social networks. Social workers network when they refer clients to other agencies, help clients develop social supports, and work with social action coalitions.
Using the Advocacy Spectrum
Authors: Hardcastle David A , Powers Patricia R , Wenocur Stanley
Published: November 2023

Economic goods are not the only kind of goods that are subject to considerations of justice; a minimal amount of a wide variety of social and psychological goods is also owed to each member of society as a matter of justice. As agents for change, we need to explore where we want to go and how to get there—ends and means. Therefore, this chapter will cover different types of advocacy available to practitioners. Advocacy and action have been conceptualized here in a variety of ways to illustrate the far-reaching nature and flexibility of these practice tools. Empowerment is a secondary focus. Another purpose of the chapter is to facilitate better communication between microand macropractitioners by spotlighting language and leaders of importance to change agents.
Training Eight-to Fourteen-Year-Old Children to Sing
Authors: Bartle Jean Ashworth
Published: November 2023

To build an outstanding children’s choir, the conductor must understand the basic tenets of singing. Exquisite tone, effective breath support, clear diction, musical phrasing, and perfect intonation are among the concepts that need to be nurtured during every rehearsal. When these concepts have been mastered, children should be introduced to a variety of musical styles and the communication needed to interpret and perform them. The selection of suitable repertoire is of paramount importance if the children are going to succeed in all of these areas.
A Developmental Perspective on Developmental Instability: Theory, Models, and Mechanisms
Authors: Klingenberg Christian Peter
Published: November 2023

The study of fluctuating asymmetry (FA) has become a burgeoning field in evolutionary biology (reviewed, for example, by Palmer and Strobeck 1986; Palmer 19966; Moller and Swaddle 1997). Most of these studies use FA as a measure of “developmental instability,” “developmental stability,” or “developmental noise,” but usually are less than explicit about the specific meaning of these concepts. Although these three key terms all contain the modifier “developmental,” it is unclear how the notions of instability, stability, or noise in theories of FA relate to the mechanisms that are the central issue of developmental biology. Indeed, it is unsettling to realize how little is known on the actual processes that generate FA. How can we rely on FA if we do not know exactly how it works? Empirical studies of FA for the most part are phenomenological rather than mechanistic. Even those studies that explicitly address the development of asymmetry in particular traits are mostly descriptive or infer from patterns of morphological variation to the processes that generated them. A number of these are longitudinal studies following the asymmetry of individual organisms through a number of growth stages (Chippindale and Palmer 1993; Moller 1996; Collin 1997; Swaddle and Witter 1997; Aparicio 1998; Tomkins 1999), whereas others base inferences on within- or between-species relationships between FA and age or size (Hallgrimsson 1993; Teather 1996; Hallgrimsson 1998, 1999). Even a study that used experimental manipulation to generate asymmetry did not unambiguously identify the specific mechanisms involved (Klingenberg and Nijhout 1998).
“ .. It Is Imperative to Advance Russian Nationalism as the First Priority” Debates within the Stalinist Ideological Establishment, 1941-1945
Authors: Brandenberger David
Published: November 2023

Faced With The Threat Of War and the need for societal mobilization, Soviet ideologists assumed an increasingly pragmatic, populist posture during the mid-to late 1930s. Prerevolutionary historical imagery was deployed to popularize the reigning Marxist-Leninist ideology, something that led in 1937 to the rehabilitation of Peter the Great, Aleksandr Nevskii, and other beloved heroes, myths, and iconography from the Russian national past. An initiative that at times threatened to compromise the regime’s commitment to internationalism and class consciousness, such a volte-face was viewed within the party hierarchy as the most expedient way to mobilize popular patriotic sentiments and loyalty among the USSR’s poorly educated citizenry.
Measurement of Trend (a 2 by c Table)
Authors: Selvin Steve
Published: November 2023

To compare the frequency of infants with a single congenital malformation to that of infants with multiple congenital malformations, focusing on evaluating changes over time. DATA Extensive data on infants with major congenital malformations are routinely collected as part of a state surveillance system called the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program. Records of infants identified as having a single major malformation or more than one major malformation were obtained from this program. A selection of these infants was made from the years 1983 to 1991 in two Bay Area counties (San Francisco and Santa Clara). A total of 9119 sampled infants were tabulated by the number of birth defects (rows: more than one major birth defect and only one major birth defect) and the year of birth (columns: year of birth-1983, 1984, ... , 1991), forming a 2 by 9 table. Since no population at risk is recorded, it should be kept in mind that these data cannot be used to compute rates of birth defects (estimate risk) but were collected to study the trends in the frequency of multiple defects over time.
Odds Ratio and Relative Risk
Authors: Selvin Steve
Published: November 2023

Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease were randomly divided into two groups. One group received a placebo (26 patients), and the other received a treatment of lecithin (25 patients). However, three patients refused the treatment. It was hoped that the treated group would show a slower rate of cognitive loss. Each subject participated in the trial for six months. A memory recall test was administered to all 48 participants at the beginning of the trial period and at the end of the period, producing two scores for each participant.
Survival Analysis (Cox’s Proportional Hazards Model)
Authors: Selvin Steve
Published: November 2023

The San Francisco Men’s Health Study is based on a sample of 1034 single men ages 24 to 54 years. These men were recruited using a multistage prob­ ability sample and were followed from July 1984 to December 1987. Mem­ bers of the cohort were interviewed and examined every six months. The vital status of 88.5% of these men was known. Other studies have noted an association of initial low CD4 lymphocyte counts and high /32-microglobulin levels with a poor prognosis and increased severity of AIDS. A group of 88 HIV-positive homosexual/bisexual men were identified among the partici­ pants of the Men’s Health Study. The progression time experiences of these men were analyzed to describe the role of these two measures in predicting the time from the diagnosis of HIV-positive status to the conversion to AIDS, referred to as survival time. By December 1987, there were 37 HIV-positive study participants and 51 participants with AIDS available for analysis.
Air Column
Authors: Debost Michel
Published: November 2023

In my terminology, the air column is not only the air inside the instrument, nor is it the flow of air from the lungs to the lips. The air column is a continuous unit from the inner part of the body to the tip of the foot joint. Thereafter it unfortunately escapes our control, even if the medium (air) keeps resonating. The physical definition of musical sound is a vibration carried by a medium (air). I define the air column as every part of the body or of the instrument in contact, directly or indirectly, with air. This includes the air not only in the lungs and in the mouth, but also in the cavities of the nose, forehead, and inner ear that singers, with good reason, call resonators. Everyone’s voice or flute tone is unique, due in great part to the characteristic sound components of these resonators. Resonance of the sound implies that none of the various elements of the air column counteracts the others: diaphragm, throat, mouth, nose, and nose cavities.7 Moyse used to compare the air column to a fountain. If it is well set, the flow is smooth and regular. If it is too weak, it breaks. If it is too strong, it splashes.
Attacks
Authors: Debost Michel
Published: November 2023

This word has an aggressive connotation, but is well understood by most wind players. Singing coaches prefer to use the word “onset.” The French language’s idiomatic tu attack cannot be reproduced in English. At best, a tu replica would be too, a muddy attack, or worse yet, tew. Both, however, are better than the ta or da jaw-dropping sound that some people advise, to disastrous effect: there is no direction in the tone, no follow-through with the airstream. Yet, the ta or da can be useful on some dark long notes. Therefore we are left with the ti (pronounced “tea” in English.) At least it slightly pulls back the corners of the lips, to me more necessary than relaxing the cheeks. It contributes to focusing the tone and to reliable articulation. Doesn’t that remind you of the flute? “Throughout all this, the tongue plays an essential part, but it must be remembered that it is simply a kind of spring valve that contains and releases the appropriate impulse of pressure of air behind it.”19 In other words, tone production does not involve the tongue. Moreover, you must keep in mind that whatever syllable is used for attacks, the actual sound is carried by the vowel, not by the consonant, which provides the attack or articulation. So get rid of the consonant and sing the vowel. If you try to make the consonant coincide with the piano’s attack, your tone and balance will be killed and the apparent ensemble will be problematic.