Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, the lyricist and composer for Ragtime, have been working together for 25 years- an unusually stable collaboration for modern musical theater. Gone are the days where “Rogers and Hammerstein” were spoken of in one breath for their entire careers.

But Ahrens and Flaherty have developed a stable and wonderfully productive partnership (which also spawned hits like Once On This Island and Suessical the Musical).

Here are two intriguing quotes I found from them talking about the role that a lyricist and a composer can play not just in setting mood or creating memorable tunes, but in actually deepening the audience (and sometimes the author’s) understanding of the character. First, Lynn Ahrens talks about the role a woman can play in the collaborative process:

Women bring a certain sensibility to a collaboration. In Ragtime, I wrote for Mother ‘Each day the maids trudge up the hill/the hired help arrives/ I never stopped to think they might have lives beyond our lives’. That’s not in Doctorow. I created ‘She was nothing to them, she was a woman, nothing and no one to them, so they beat her and beat her and beat her.’ Sections like that aren’t in the novel….I don’t think a man would have written those lyrics. – (Lynn Ahrens, Backstage Magazine, March 2000)

Now Stephen, describing the process of building music to support a pivotal moment in the growth of a character:

With Ragtime, I tried to use period vocal ranges. For the character of Evelyn Nesbit, I wrote in keys that were showgirl keys of that period, keys that chorus girls would not sing in today. My orchestrator, Bill Brohn would ask, ‘Why is she singing in that high key? This should be in the meaty part of her voice’ and I’d think, ‘But it wouldn’t have the quality that the character needed.’ As the character of Mother, who is the quintessential mother of that age, developed through the story and became a modern woman, the vocal range kept lowering and lowering. By the end of the show, she was belting, which is totally anachronistic for that period, but it was emotionally correct. -(Stephen Flaherty, The Dramatist, September/October 2000)

As a non-musician, I have to say it had never occurred to me how much research and rigor went in to ensuring that the music acheived on a metaphorical level what the book was acheiving on a literal or narrative level.

Fascinating….

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