We have finally reached the last installment of my passion blog! I am running low on the vinyl records I took pictures of before moving back to school, but I feel this last album does a great job summarizing my passion blog from last semester and throughout this semester. Because I went through lots of jazz last semester and through a small portion of my vinyl collection this semester, I present to you… The Sound of Music! While this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is extremely famous both on broadway and as a movie, I first saw this musical live as performed by my high school in 2013! The Central Bucks East Patriot Players sold out a number of shows for their performances of The Sound of Music and it was a wonderful production filled with talented performers and an amazing accompanying pit orchestra. Being an elementary schooler at the time, I did not know the exciting shows that I would get to play in in the future!

The heart of this musical, the music, was written by Richard Rodgers alongside lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. This legendary duo created the music for many famous musicals including Oklahoma!, Cinderella, and of course The Sound of Music. There is a lot of interesting information behind the creation of this musical that I did not know until reading it for this post! The musical is based on the 1949 memoir of Maria Von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. The musical is set in 1938 Austria on the eve of the Anschluss and tells the story of Maria Von Trapp. She takes on a role of a nanny, or “governess,” to a large family but then falls in love with the children and subsequently their widowed father. As the father is called to join the German navy, he and Maria plan to flee Austria due to his opposition to the Nazis. (Wikipedia)

The first Broadway production, which opened in 1959, won 5/9 nominations for Tony awards including best musical! It also allowed many of its songs to turn into timeless standards: “My Favorite Things” (later made even more famous by saxophonist John Coltrane!), “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” “Do-Re-Mi,” and “The Sound of Music.” Sadly, The Sound of Music was the last musical written by the famed duo Rodgers and Hammerstein due to Hammerstein’s tragic passing due to stomach cancer nine months after the Broadway premiere.  Now it’s time to talk about the sound of the music! I apologize for the pun but it had to be done. Unlike some other musicals, this musical doesn’t intially present an instrumental overture teasing all of the melodies throughout the show. The first track on TSoM’s soundtrack is a prelude and tease of the title track. This leads into the second song, which is the more traditional instrumental overture. Listen to this second song for an appetizer of the whole musical! As a whole, the music to this show is very light-hearted and traditional. It is neither jazz nor classical but truly in the “musical” genre of music. Featuring strings and band accompaniment, it is just the right music to support the leading vocals.

As I mentioned previously, the musical as a whole is very famous but there are some individual songs within that are incredibly famous as well. For reference, at the time of writing this blog, every song on the original soundtrack on Spotify has a minimum of 3,000,000 streams! The middle part of the show contains the best-known songs including “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” and “So Long, Farewell” among the others I listed earlier. Take a listen to the album or watch the film version of the show! Either way you should get the full experience. If you’re feeling particularly curious, check out the John Coltrane version of “My Favorite Things” but I must warn you, it is quite experimental and might not be traditionally pleasant to the ears…

It’s been a pleasure sharing my musical passions throughout these past two semesters and thank you for your time and your comments!