Geoffrey Block

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Geoffrey Block
Born (1948-05-07) May 7, 1948 (age 75)
EducationPhD, Harvard University, 1979

AM, Harvard University, 1973

AB, University of California at Los Angeles, 1970
Occupation Musicologist

Geoffrey Block (born May 7, 1948) is an American musicologist and author. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music History and Humanities at the University of Puget Sound. He has written numerous books, essays, and journal articles on American musical theater and musical film, and books on Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Ives, Richard Rodgers, and Franz Schubert. He was the General Editor of Yale Broadway Masters and is the Series Editor of Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, two series of scholarly books accessible to general audiences.

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Career

Block received his B.A. from UCLA and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University, the latter in 1979. He began his teaching career at The Thacher School from 1977 to 1980 before moving to the University of Puget Sound where he taught from 1980 to 2018. [1] Block began his writing career with several articles based on his dissertation on the compositional process of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15 and No. 2 in B-Flat Major, Op. 19. His interest in Beethoven's compositional process combined with his interest in musical theater both as a scholar and a composer led him to explore the genesis and compositional process of Frank Loesser's sketchbooks for The Most Happy Fella in The Musical Quarterly (1989), the first musicological examination of a Broadway musical (other than Porgy and Bess) to appear in a mainstream music journal and according to one scholar, “provided one of the first moments of legitimacy to scholarship on the American musical [and] essential reading for anyone interested in the genre and its historiography.” [2]

His article on the Broadway canon in The Journal of Musicology (1993) broke new ground in the discussion of the genre. Several years later, in the absence of a textbook that seriously engaged the crucial role music played in the dramatic realization of a musical, Block wrote his own, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim (1997). [3] In the second edition (2009) Block expanded the title to include "and Lloyd Webber" and added two new chapters on musical film adaptations. Books on Richard Rodgers and numerous articles would follow (see the Selected Bibliography). One scholar has written that “Block is unquestionably the leading academic authority on the American musical.” [4] Stephen Sondheim described another Block essay as “virtually unique in its specificity and intelligence.” [5]

Since 2000, much of Block’s work on stage musicals pays close attention to their often maligned film musical adaptations. This work led to his most recent book, A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era (2023), in which Block explores the symbiotic relationship between a dozen Broadway musicals and their Hollywood studio film adaptations from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. [6]

In discussing the dramatic and musical consequences at play in the often differing artistic and commercial choices made by Broadway stage musicals and their Hollywood film adaptations, Block regularly challenges the conventional wisdom that critically favors stage musicals as invariably superior to their film offspring.

Perhaps Block’s longest-lasting contributions to the field of musical theater and film are the dozens of books on the Broadway musical he has commissioned and edited. From 2003 and 2010 he served as general editor for Yale Broadway Masters (Block’s Richard Rodgers was the first). Since 2010, he has been the series editor of Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, which includes volumes on composers, librettists, lyricists, directors, choreographers, and individual musicals.

Selected bibliography

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References

  1. "Geoffrey Block: Current: Faculty: University of Puget Sound, School of Music, Tacoma". University of Puget Sound. Retrieved 2023-03-25.
  2. Jim Lovensheimer, “South Pacific”: Paradise Rewritten. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.
  3. "Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber".
  4. Stephen Banfield, “In the Finest Tradition: New Books on Musical Theatre,” The Musical Times 145/1887 (Summer 2004): 83-92; quotation on 88.
  5. Personal communication to Geoffrey Block, July 15, 1998, in response to the review-essay of Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals by Stephen Banfield, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 121/1 (1996): 124-43.
  6. "A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era".