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Jessica Barbour

Marilyn Horne, world-renowned opera singer and recitalist, celebrated her 84th birthday on Wednesday. To acknowledge her work, not only as one of the finest singers in the world but as a mentor for young artists, I give you one of my favorite performances of hers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sesame Street has always been a powerful advocate for utilizing music in teaching. “C is for Cookie,” a number that really drives its message home, maintains its cultural relevance today despite being first performed by Cookie Monster more than 40 years ago. Ms. Horne’s version appeared about 20 years after the original, and is an excellent re-imagining of a classic (with great attention to detail—note the cookies sewn into her Aida regalia and covering the pyramids).

Horne’s performance shows kids that even a musician of the highest caliber can 1) be silly and 2) also like cookies—that is, it portrays her as a person with something in common with a young, broad audience. This is something that members of the classical music community often have a difficult time accomplishing; Horne achieves it here in less than three minutes.

Fortunately, many professional classical musicians have embraced this strategy. Representatives of the opera world (which is not known for being particularly self-aware) have had a particularly strong presence on Sesame Street, with past episodes featuring Plácido Domingo (singing with his counterpart, Placido Flamingo), Samuel Ramey (extolling the virtues of the letter “L”), Denyce Graves (explaining operatic excess to Elmo), and Renée Fleming (counting to five, “Caro nome” style).

Sesame Street produced these segments not only to expose children to distinguished music-making, but to teach them about matters like counting, spelling, working together, and respecting one another. This final clip features Itzhak Perlman, one of the world’s great violin soloists, who was left permanently disabled after having polio as a child. To demonstrate ability and disability more gracefully than this would be, I think, impossible:

Click here to view the embedded video.

American children’s music, as described in the new article on Grove Music Online [subscription required], has typically been produced through a tug of war between entertainment and educational objectives. The songs on Sesame Street succeed in both, while also showing kids something about classical music itself: it’s not just for grownups. It’s a part of life that belongs to everyone. After all, who doesn’t appreciate that the moon sometimes looks like a “C”? (Though, of course, you can’t eat that, so…)

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, “Foil thy Foes with Joy,” “Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” and “Wedding Music” and learn more about children’s music, Marilyn Horne, Itzhak Perlman, and other performers mentioned above with a subscription to Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The post C is for Coloratura appeared first on OUPblog.

In honor of Lena Horne, who passed away last Sunday at the age of 92, Philip Furia has reflected on her legacy.  Furia is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the author with Laurie Patterson of The Songs of Hollywood.

I would never pretend to be an expert on Lena Horne, but my research prompts me to make a few observations on her career as a singer of popular songs. Perhaps the most striking thing about her stellar career is that Lena Horne, alone among the great singers of her era, never introduced a hit song. The songs she is associated with are the “standards” of what’s been termed The Great American Song Book. In the television obituaries, for example, she was heard singing the classic songs of Cole Porter, Ira and George Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Even her signature song, “Stormy Weather,” was originally written by Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen for Ethel Waters in the 1933 Cotton Club Revue. (Waters, supposedly, always resented the fact that Lena Horne had co-opted “her” song).

One reason why Lena Horne’s song repertory was confined to the great standards is that for most of her career she worked in Hollywood films. In a few of these films, such as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather (both 1943), she had a leading role, but in most of her other films she had cameo roles where she sang songs as “performances” in night clubs and other settings. Rather than have her render new, untried songs, Hollywood studios took the safer route of having her sing tried and tested standards. Hollywood’s practice of recycling old songs, in fact, is one reason these songs became “standards” instead of simply fading away as most popular songs do after their heyday. (It didn’t hurt, too, that the studios often owned these old songs and stood to profit from their renewed popularity.)

Lena Horne’s greatest opportunity to introduce new hit songs came in 1946 when she was offered the lead in the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman, where she would have introduced such songs as “Come Rain or Come Shine” by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. Horne, however, refused the lead because she felt that the show caricatured blacks—even though the book was written by two African-American playwrights. Without Horne, St. Louis Woman quickly folded, and the singer lost one of her few chances to introduce hit songs.