Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Clark, Maribeth
Area of Concentration
Music
Abstract
Stephen Sondheim has crafted dozens of pieces for the musical theatre stage over his sixty-five-year career. Building on work which explores Sondheim’s musical vocabulary, this thesis focuses on how Sondheim uses pastiche as it relates to remembering the past. By focus on this use of pastiche, two sides appear: pastiche as nostalgia and pastiche as stereotype. I look at two of Sondheim’s musicals in order to demonstrate the opposing sides of pastiche. The first is Follies (1971), which uses a style of music from Broadway during the early decades of the twentieth century in order to elicit nostalgia in an audience. The other is Pacific Overtures (1976), which uses stereotypical musical styles in order to represent Western characters. In the process of the thesis, I argue that pastiche is more than just additional setting or novelty and instead can be something worth studying in the context of musical theatre.
Recommended Citation
Mack, Rose, "ARTIFACTS OF A BYGONE TIME: STEPHEN SONDHEIM AND PASTICHE" (2020). Theses & ETDs. 5965.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5965