A good song is its own one-act play. "Just Around the Riverbend," from "Pocahontas," fits the bill.
This is a classic "I Want" song. Pocahontas introduces us to the setting. We're outdoors, on a riverbank. The heroine makes an observation:
What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice.
The water's always changing, always flowing.
But people, I guess, can't live like that.
We all must pay a price.
To be safe, we lose our chance of ever knowing
What's around the riverbend.
The problem has announced itself. The stranger has come to town. It's Pocahontas's gnawing doubt--her belief that something better exists in some un-populated corner. This doubt isn't even fully conscious; it's present just in the "I guess." But the doubt goes from something submerged to something insistent; that is the journey we take in this song. (Sondheim--not this song's author--has said that a musical is like "a local train." There are many, many stops--for singing and reflection. Because you're continuously halting for music, you need a simple story with strong bones so you don't get lost. You need a protagonist with out-sized ambitions, with a real struggle ahead of her. Otherwise: You won't care.)
Form dictates content (and vice versa). In the chorus of this song, Pocahontas is much louder and more excited than she is in the verse. Here, she allows herself to indulge the fantasy that she might escape her safe, scripted future. We get four stressed, big syllables. "I. LOOK. ONCE. MORE." (Just around the riverbend.) The syllables are matched by a trumpet in the background. It's thrilling. There's also emphatic rhyming: "I look once more...Beyond the shore...Don't know what for..." Between these declarative lines, the words race around frantically: "Just around the riverbend...Somewhere past the sea....Why do all my dreams extend...." Pocahontas doesn't need to declare the fact that she is excited; the trumpets, and the stressed syllables, do the work for our heroine.
In the next verse, we move closer to rebellion. "Can I ignore the sound of distant drumming? For a handsome sturdy husband who builds handsome sturdy walls--and never dreams that something might be coming?" (The linking of "husband" with "walls"--via choice of adjectives--is particularly telling.) "Something might be coming" could be a tip of the hat to Sondheim, and to "West Side Story." We're at a crisis: The subconscious is no longer the subconscious. Pocahontas will need to choose, and soon. (Also, you can see subplots happening. A good story has some secondary characters. As P wrings her hands, various silly badgers and hummingbirds do their business in the background. There are crashes, waterlogged faces. This is the work that, e.g., Bottom does in a Shakespeare play.)
In the next-to-last scene of a musical, there tends to be quiet dialogue. Here, the main players establish the stakes in blunt terms. Important questions get answered. So, for example, in "Gypsy," Momma asks Louise: "Who do ya think I did it all for?" And Louise answers, quietly: "I thought you did it for me." Or, in "Fiddler," evicted from his home, a man asks his rabbi: "Where are we to wait for the Messiah?" And the rabbi answers: "I guess we'll do our waiting somewhere else." (And everyone shivers, because everyone realizes this has been the story of the diaspora all along.) At the end of "Riverbend," P gets very candid: "Should I choose the smoothest course--steady as the beating drum? Should I marry Kocoum? Is all my dreaming at an end?" She has made the implicit explicit. We're ready for a big finish.
Again: Form underlines content (and vice versa). P's choice seems to materialize from thin air; it's almost as if fate were guiding her. There's a quality of inevitability. As P dreams one more time of life around the riverbend, her canoe comes to a fork: One side is straight and safe, the other winds and seems mysterious. And of course P picks the mysterious route. She has answered her own question, without words. The die has been cast. A perfect two-minute Disney segment--concluded.
*P.S. "Pocahontas" was made before the days of hand-wringing about cultural appropriation. I get the terms of the debate. Why take a role written for a non-white person and give it to a white person? And how does a writer ensure that a culture is depicted respectfully? But I have to say, I'm grateful that artists such as Nicki Minaj and Chloe Zhao are pushing back. They're suggesting that answers to these questions are not clear-cut. Judy Kuhn, who sings "Riverbend," has a voice that is consistently labeled "perfect." It is one of the treasures of the American musical theater. I'm not sure I'd want to hear many other people sing the song she sings here. Something is lost if we are 100-percent rigid in our desire for an ineffable thing called political correctness.
https://www.google.com/search?q=just+around+the+riverbend&oq=just+around+the+&aqs=chrome.0.0l2j69i57j0j69i60j69i61.1956j1j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
This is a classic "I Want" song. Pocahontas introduces us to the setting. We're outdoors, on a riverbank. The heroine makes an observation:
What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice.
The water's always changing, always flowing.
But people, I guess, can't live like that.
We all must pay a price.
To be safe, we lose our chance of ever knowing
What's around the riverbend.
The problem has announced itself. The stranger has come to town. It's Pocahontas's gnawing doubt--her belief that something better exists in some un-populated corner. This doubt isn't even fully conscious; it's present just in the "I guess." But the doubt goes from something submerged to something insistent; that is the journey we take in this song. (Sondheim--not this song's author--has said that a musical is like "a local train." There are many, many stops--for singing and reflection. Because you're continuously halting for music, you need a simple story with strong bones so you don't get lost. You need a protagonist with out-sized ambitions, with a real struggle ahead of her. Otherwise: You won't care.)
Form dictates content (and vice versa). In the chorus of this song, Pocahontas is much louder and more excited than she is in the verse. Here, she allows herself to indulge the fantasy that she might escape her safe, scripted future. We get four stressed, big syllables. "I. LOOK. ONCE. MORE." (Just around the riverbend.) The syllables are matched by a trumpet in the background. It's thrilling. There's also emphatic rhyming: "I look once more...Beyond the shore...Don't know what for..." Between these declarative lines, the words race around frantically: "Just around the riverbend...Somewhere past the sea....Why do all my dreams extend...." Pocahontas doesn't need to declare the fact that she is excited; the trumpets, and the stressed syllables, do the work for our heroine.
In the next verse, we move closer to rebellion. "Can I ignore the sound of distant drumming? For a handsome sturdy husband who builds handsome sturdy walls--and never dreams that something might be coming?" (The linking of "husband" with "walls"--via choice of adjectives--is particularly telling.) "Something might be coming" could be a tip of the hat to Sondheim, and to "West Side Story." We're at a crisis: The subconscious is no longer the subconscious. Pocahontas will need to choose, and soon. (Also, you can see subplots happening. A good story has some secondary characters. As P wrings her hands, various silly badgers and hummingbirds do their business in the background. There are crashes, waterlogged faces. This is the work that, e.g., Bottom does in a Shakespeare play.)
In the next-to-last scene of a musical, there tends to be quiet dialogue. Here, the main players establish the stakes in blunt terms. Important questions get answered. So, for example, in "Gypsy," Momma asks Louise: "Who do ya think I did it all for?" And Louise answers, quietly: "I thought you did it for me." Or, in "Fiddler," evicted from his home, a man asks his rabbi: "Where are we to wait for the Messiah?" And the rabbi answers: "I guess we'll do our waiting somewhere else." (And everyone shivers, because everyone realizes this has been the story of the diaspora all along.) At the end of "Riverbend," P gets very candid: "Should I choose the smoothest course--steady as the beating drum? Should I marry Kocoum? Is all my dreaming at an end?" She has made the implicit explicit. We're ready for a big finish.
Again: Form underlines content (and vice versa). P's choice seems to materialize from thin air; it's almost as if fate were guiding her. There's a quality of inevitability. As P dreams one more time of life around the riverbend, her canoe comes to a fork: One side is straight and safe, the other winds and seems mysterious. And of course P picks the mysterious route. She has answered her own question, without words. The die has been cast. A perfect two-minute Disney segment--concluded.
*P.S. "Pocahontas" was made before the days of hand-wringing about cultural appropriation. I get the terms of the debate. Why take a role written for a non-white person and give it to a white person? And how does a writer ensure that a culture is depicted respectfully? But I have to say, I'm grateful that artists such as Nicki Minaj and Chloe Zhao are pushing back. They're suggesting that answers to these questions are not clear-cut. Judy Kuhn, who sings "Riverbend," has a voice that is consistently labeled "perfect." It is one of the treasures of the American musical theater. I'm not sure I'd want to hear many other people sing the song she sings here. Something is lost if we are 100-percent rigid in our desire for an ineffable thing called political correctness.
https://www.google.com/search?q=just+around+the+riverbend&oq=just+around+the+&aqs=chrome.0.0l2j69i57j0j69i60j69i61.1956j1j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I like reading you, Daniel! Once you leave us, I, for one, will be sad, but will find you here.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Mahalia! That makes me very happy to hear. And I hope I will see you in Brooklyn next year; I will not be far away!
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