Pippin - Music Director’s Note

For over fifty years, Stephen Schwartz has been at the top of his game creating works of musical theatre for the stage. His songwriting is catchy, tuneful, and poignant, with a lyrical cleverness that rivals the likes of Cole Porter. Highly trained, but unabashedly “pop,” Schwartz has always referenced the trends of the time in which he is writing. And while each of his scores makes a specific nod to the musical landscape of its era, they somehow remain timeless, and unbelievably fresh, even decades after they are written. Pippin is no exception.

I discovered “Corner of the Sky” when I was only ten years old, rooting through our collection of sheet music. I had been taking piano for a couple of years and singing since I could remember, and as I pulled the selections book off the shelf my mom said “oh, that is a great show.” So I sat down at the piano and started plunking out the iconic opening riff and working my way through the vocal melody. I immediately became obsessed with the song, playing and singing it over and over and over. It could have been compounded by being a queer person of color growing up in the middle of the country, but at 10 years old I had never related to something so much. Even now, many years later, I still have plenty of days where I find myself questioning where I fit into this vast human experience and answering that “everything has its season.”

Musical moments like “Corner of the Sky” and “I Guess I’ll Miss the Man” possess a musical honesty and sincerity that are timeless and pure, and provide a stark contrast to the angular, rhythmic dissonance of numbers like “Glory” or the almost satirical use of Baroque pastiche in “War is a Science.” It is often said in writing workshops that “music is the dramatist” — in other words, the music tells you what to feel. Or more specifically, the way the music interacts with the content tells you what to feel. In many ways the music of Pippin challenges the content, letting the audience know exactly how the authors feel about the subject matter. Is war a science? Or is it a joke? Does the true magic lie in the extaordinary, or the extra ordinary? After you “join us” for this performance, what will you think?

-Arri Lawton Simon