Appreciating Listening for America
Along with a greater appreciation for the intricacies of musical theater, Rob Kapilow’s Listening for America has something to teach about our need for each other.
Review by Leah Libresco Sargeant
Musical theater is the most American form of art. Rob Kapilow’s Listening for America is a tour through the history of American musical theater, and he is as attentive to the particular, individual genius of composers as to the collaborations and cultural ferment that are only possible in a nation of immigrants.
The beginnings of musical theater are Jewish composers reworking Black music for other audiences. No one did it better than Irving Berlin, né Israel Beilin, who was delightfully profligate in his commercial ambitions. Berlin penned a song for every possible market, from “Yiddisha Eyes” and “Oh, How That German Could Love” to stranger stews of “Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Ragtime” and “Sweet Marie, Make a Rag-a-Time-a-Dance with Me.”
Kapilow, a composer himself, has an eye for the details.
“Details are everything. The difference between a good song and a great one is both enormous and infinitesimal. It’s hundreds of small, inspired choices made by a songwriter and lyricist, note by note, word by word, rhythm by rhythm, chord by chord.”
Each chapter of his book is focused on a single song (Berlin gets two chapters—one for “Cheek to Cheek” and one for “I Got the Sun in the Morning”), which he rounds out with biographical notes on the composer, the history of the production, and where the work fits into the evolving story of musical theater.
I can recognize the shape of an explanation or a proof, and individual steps strike me with a sudden, piercing beauty.
Simply as a work of musical history, the book would be a delight. But Kapilow offers more. He runs a series of programs for NPR and PBS titled “What Makes it Great?” where he demystifies classical music for casual listeners. Listening for America is written in the same explanatory spirit, and it comes with homework. The text is studded with musical notation, so that the reader can bring the book over to a piano to plunk out passages (or, in my case, listen to the YouTube playlists he’s put together).
I’m no casual listener—my family tackled long car trips by singing through original cast albums. I’ve tracked down a production of Sondheim’s semi-cursed musical Road Show (and, post-pandemic, would love any tips on productions of Anyone Can Whistle). And I made everyone at my birthday party watch a double-header of Company and Passion as preparation for a symposium on love.
But I’ve still felt shut out from a full appreciation of the shows I love. My music theory background is weak, so I find myself turning to a friend to ask, “What is it that makes the final chord in “Color and Light” so good?”
To help me out, my friend Ivan Plis sent me a 750-word commentary on fifty seconds worth of music, tackling the key changes, suspended chords, and other choices Sondheim makes, until we land at the end of the song in no specific key:
“But our journey to greater connection is one that delights in unknowing: instead of a conclusive ‘landing,’ we continue in the same vein as ever. It’s ostensibly G major, but could just as easily be E minor, or A minor, or something else—concluding with an even wider crash than the one underscoring George and Dot’s outburst. We don’t need to be in the key of anything in particular; give me more expansion, more potential, more color, more light.”
I follow his explanation in the way I sometimes followed proofs in my vector calculus class. I can recognize the shape of an explanation or a proof, and individual steps strike me with a sudden, piercing beauty. But I know I don’t understand it in the truest sense—I couldn’t explain it to somebody else.
The single chord shimmers because of how it exists in relationship with everything that has gone before.
Reading Kapilow took me one step further into appreciation. He has a gift for worked examples and teaches by rewriting the songs he’s showcasing. He changes just one small detail at a time to show how it supports the song. He might remove a bluesy swing, a shift up the octave, a chromatic note, to come up with a more pedestrian variant he calls the “Kapilow version.” None of his rewrites have a wrong note, but they lack inventiveness.
Playing his rewrites side by side with the originals, you can hear how the expected version might sound good enough, but the real version is sublime.
What I’ve gleaned from his apophatic approach is what Ivan was trying to tell me the whole time. The single chord shimmers because of how it exists in relationship with everything that has gone before.
The composers build up their songs layer by layer, so that each small choice is marked by how it harmonizes with what has come before. I can’t capture the chord by having a friend guide my fingers to ring out those final measures in isolation.
Our institutions and connections to each other are similarly built piece by piece. Here, my mistake of trying to play just the finale looks a little different. We try to remix or excerpt the cultural traditions that have sustained us, pulling out the single element that seems necessary. But, cut from the full tapestry, it unravels in our hands.
When I struggled in my voice lessons, my teacher told me she understood my mistake. I was trying to sing the resolution note too soon, “But Sondheim isn’t giving it to you yet.” I had to live in the tension a little longer, reaching for the notes that didn’t suit my design, if I wanted to be a channel of that chill-inducing beauty.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. She runs two substacks, one a Tiny Book Club, the other a place to discuss alternative feminisms.
Listening for America was a finalist for The Marfield Prize. It was published by Liveright on November 5, 2019. You can buy a copy on their website here.
