Happy Birthday Claude Debussy! 22 August 1862

 

Watching Musicals As A Classical Music Enthusiast

When I watched Cats about a month ago, I realized that classical music remains with us always in a variety of modern musical forms, including musical theatre.

The Overture to the hit Broadway musical Cats, to me at least, borrows both resonant and/or tonal elements from the Classicism and Romanticism movements, as well as dissonant and/or atonal elements from later composers such as Debussy and to an extent 20th-century composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. The beginning of the Overture contains almost exclusively musical tension for a solid third of the two-and-a-half minute long piece, leaving the audience waiting and waiting for resolution and when it finally arrives around the 1:10 mark it’s glorious.

That’s just one example of how classical music influences modern musical theatre, and musical theatre is just one modern musical form that has influences from classical music. I am glad that I can appreciate modern music as someone who also has a background in classical music, because this allows for me to enjoy the music through an interesting lens.

Originally posted March 30, 2019 on WordPress

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