What Made You Like Sondheim's Music?

[Chris L]

I'm tempted to title this "What Made You Love Sondheim's Music?", but while I think it can be fairly assumed that anybody browsing this side is at least intrigued by the work of SJS, "love" is something that only the most fanatic of us can claim to feel. That being said...

I was aware of Sondheim's work as a lyricist by age 14, because I was obsessed by the score to West Side Story, but he was only a name to me then and one that seemed subordinate to that of Leonard Bernstein, who I'd see regularly on television, explaining the nuances of music theory in a way that the mass audience could understand.

The real epiphany -- forgive me if I've talked about this several times before -- came when my girlfriend played me the score to Company in the 70s. Those opening "Bobbys," the cacaphony of requests to come over for dinner, to visit various friends, were such a miraculous and complex piece of musical exposition that I felt a thrill running up my spine. I was losing interest in Broadway music by then and I remember thinking that the opening number of Company contained everything I'd ever loved about showtunes with all the crap squeezed out. It was like nothing I'd ever heard in its ability to establish the central character's relationship with everyone else in the show and I was spellbound.

I played my girlfriend's copy of the Company OCR until even she got sick of it, though it wasn't until several years later that I acquainted myself with the rest of Sondheim's work. For a long time Company was the Sondheim show for me. Sweeney Todd subsequently replaced it, but I knew almost from the opening notes of the Company theme that Sondheim was a genius.

[KathyB]

I thought I mentioned this in the "Introduce Yourself" thread, but maybe not. 

I knew that Stephen Sondheim was the person who wrote "Send in the Clowns" at least since middle school, but I wasn't aware of his vast body of work until high school--senior year of which was when Sunday in the Park with George was on Broadway. It took me a while (several months) to get into the Sunday cast recording, but once I fell, I fell hard. My being an art student had a lot to do with my falling for the score. I  decided to check some of his other work out and thus became introduced to A Little Night Music, Follies and Company. I saw Sweeney Todd my freshman year in college and loved it. 

I probably wouldn't say I was "hooked," though, until I started seeking out stuff like Merrily, which had only played for what? ten or so performances? and wasn't especially easy to find out there in the wild in the late '80s. I ended up buying that one on used vinyl for $10, which was an extravagant expense for a broke college student. (And it didn't include "It's a Hit.")

I'm just going to leave it at that, because now I'm starting to think about what made me like any of the other music I like, and I really have no idea...