Charles Strouse
speaker
86 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Charles Strouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, you know, before I just answer that, I have four kids and it's come back to haunt me because I have four telephone lines and it's still every second everybody's on the phone. Anyway, beside the point, my considerations were, first of all, that it was rock and of its sort.
It is rock music, though such an innocent sort that, you know, I don't like to listen to it and say I'm Mick Jagger or anybody like that. but it was rock and, and, and, uh, I paid attention very strongly to the guitar chords, you know, that all guitarists play on it. You know, a lot of rock music in those days particularly was very... There were certain patterns. It became patterned in a way.
And I did model it on that. But then I used a lot of... I used a lot of changes of time and a lot of interjections, which is into the exact rock beat. But I kept the beat going very much. And then I used just, you know... Lee and I sat and kind of carved it out together. Hi, and, you know, the things, did they really get pinned?
Well, oddly enough, she did. This woman was the great musician of our generation in many ways. And her greatness was that she was a master musician. analyst, not only of music, but a psychoanalyst in her own way. And she used to hear the music of her students, and she was able to isolate it. She was able to shine a spotlight on what was you and what was watered-down Stravinsky.
and I remember when I worked with her, she asked to hear everything I'd written, and I played her my sonata and my concerto, and she said, well, what else, what else, what else? And I said, well, that's it. She said, well, no, what about, you know, your student pieces? And I played her some of them, and then she, anything else?
And I said, well, I said, there was, my parents, who were never into serious music at all, though they were very proud of me, I used to come home from college and play them all these pieces that sounded like watered-down bar talk, really, but they were very serious kind of things. I was really, you know, into it.
But I remember writing a piece that I considered my party piece that I could play that they could show off to my aunt. I wrote this piece, and it was really, you know, I look back at it today, kind of saucy or something. It was very lighthearted. And they loved it. Everybody liked it. So it became my piece. And, uh...
I played that for her, which I very rarely... I didn't do that for anybody except, you know, a couple of relatives. And she said, ah. And she said, well, what else? And I said, well, I really... Oh, I said, well, when my brother, he had been in the Navy, and when he came home from his first tour of duty or his boot camp, whatever, I had written... I laugh because it was a funny moment in my life.
I said, I wrote this little song for him called Welcome Home, Able-Bodied Steven Strauss. And she said, may I hear that? Oh, I said, I could. Oh, she said, please. And so there this venerable woman, I played this silly song. She said, I see. She said, anything else? And I said... I, well, I said, I used, this makes me laugh. I said, I used to go out with a, uh, a girl. I really liked her.
Her name was Janet. And we lived on the Upper West Side of New York. And I wrote this song, but it was a joke, uh, called Moon Over 83rd Street. She said, play this for me. Here I am in Paris, you know, with an intimate of Stravinsky's and, uh, every American composer that you could think of having studied with this great woman. So I played Moon over 83rd Street. And she said, ah, good.
Now we go back to this whatever. So we went back to... Towards the end of my thing, she said to me something that nobody had ever said to me. She said, you have a great talent for light music.
Sure.
Wait a second. No, I can't sing that one. This is the funniest interview I've ever done. Moon over 83rd Street, with shrafts right below. Moon over 83rd Street, my heart's all aglow. You, Janet, in the lamplight, I hear something cold. I hear something dull. I'm yours, body and soul. I think that was the last one. It was meant partly as a jest. I mean, you know, but that was it.
There's a first performance for you.
That was her genius. That's why I can laugh at it. I can also laugh at it because I've had, you know, some successful shows. But her genius was really taking a young kid like me. I was quite young when I was there. I was around 18 or so. And I know from my own experience with my own children what it is to be searching for an identity. And she...
in her soft, brilliant way, was able to contribute to my identifying who I was.
Yes, it does. Well, there are a number of feelings I have about the song. The first one always had been and still stays with me. It's the one song in this show of a personal nature in the show that could not have been written in the 30s. And I could say the same perhaps for Hard Knock Life, but Hard Knock Life was a bit of dramatic music where I was kind of outside it in a way.
But here's a song of a girl during the Depression, and this song definitely could only have been written in the 70s, the harmonies and the kind of melodic. So I thought... If nothing else, I mean, I didn't think the show was going to be successful, but I certainly felt as though critics were going to say, now wait a second, how could they write this?
Everything else was, we'd like to thank you, Herbert Hoover, and I don't need anything but you. They were kind of pastiches using Harry Warren and Cole Porter and those kind of Gershwin composers as the filter, so to speak. But that song, no. And it was just out of another era completely. So that was my first thing about it.
The second thing about it was that nobody could sing it because it was so rangy. And the third thing about it, which is... It's just curious. I've worked with a number of collaborators... though I've worked mostly with Lee Adams, but, you know, I've done a show with Sammy Kahn, with Alan Jay Lerner, with Richard Maltby. I mean, there have just been a lot of them, Stephen Schwartz in my life.
Showing 41–60 of 86 · page 3 of 5
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