Andrew Lloyd Webber

 

Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22 in 1948 in a family of William and Jean Lloyd Webber. The family was very musical – his father was a professor of theory and composition at the Royal College of Music in England and his mother was a singer and violinist at the same school. The home was filled with music and no wonder young Andrew showed, from an early age, an extraordinary natural talent for it. When Andrew was three years old, he started to play the violin. When he was six he composed his own songs and at the age of nine he had a piece of music published in the magazine Music Teacher. His younger brother, Julian, was an equally gifted musician so anyone can imagine the noise that filled the Webber’s small flat – Julian playing cello and trumpet and Andrew banging away at the piano all day. Fortunately they has a very tolerate neighbour downstairs – that was Basil Rathborn and the only time he ever complained about the noise was when Julian emptied a whole bag of bricks on the floor!

Andrew had also great interest in inspecting ancient monuments around Engand. It and history were what many thought he would choose to do for a career. However, his aunt Vi turned him on the theatre and especially musical theatre. She took Andrew to the big musicals like My Fair Lady, and to the films like Gigi and South Pacific. Soon after, he built a small theatre at home and wrote musicals for it.

He studied first at Westminster, but after winning a scholarship he was transferred to Oxford, but dropped out after his first year. College life didn’t suit the quiet, shy young man – he wanted to compose!

On the 21 April 1965 Andrew got a letter: “Dear Andrew, I’ve been told you’re looking for a “with it” writer of lyrics for your songs, and as I’ve been writing pop songs for a while and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wonder if you consider it worth your while meeting me. Tim Rice”. These two – Andrew 17 and Tim 21 years old started to cooperate and their first musical became short little piece titled “The likes of US”. It was performed to a very little audience and was considered to be a failure.

After they had done a few unsuccessful songs together, they didn’t know what to do. Rice wanted to write pop songs while Lloyd Webber wanted to write another musical. It was then they got a call from Alan Doggett, head of music at Colet Court, a small preparatory school in west London. Alan and Andrew had known each other a long time and now Alan wanted something for an end term concert, something religious. Andrew and Tim opened the Bible and found the story about Jacob and his son Joseph. After two months they had a fifteen-minute rock’n’roll version of the biblical story of Joseph – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Now the musical is about two hours when it shows on stage. The world sat up and took notice.

It was an instant success and followed by a rapid string of hits – Jesus Christ Superstar (1971, album; 1973, stage version), Evita (1977, album; 1978, stage version; 1979, Broadway). Everything this pair breathed life into seemed golden – blessed to win every award they were nominated for. If an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical was up for awards – forget the competition! Andrew and Tim had become millionaires at the ripe old ages of 21 and 25 with the release of Jesus Christ Superstar. But trouble was brewing.

In 1980, while in the early production stages of Cats, the duo had a falling out. As a young boy Andrew had read the book “Old possum’s book of practical cats” by T.S.Eliot. this time all the lyrics were already written. But there wasn’t any story in the songs and Andrew thought of making a concert on television. At the beginning of the summer of 1980 he performed some of the songs at this Sydmonton festival. After the performance Valery Eliot gave him some unpublished poems about an unhappy cat called Grizabella. This was the story that he needed. Andrew wrote the music but he needed help with the lyrics. Both Tim Rice and Trevor Nunn, a director who had helped him with his other musicals, gave him a proposal. Tim stayed up all night and wrote lyrics to Memory but – in the end – they weren’t used. The two had been growing apart for some time now and the relationship was too strained to go on any longer. Tim was having an affair with Elaine Page (the original London Eva Peron, and Grisabelle in Cats) and some sources say that Andrew loved her too, and that was the main cause of the team’s breakup. Either way, Tim left to pursue other projects and Andrew finished Cats. Charles Hart became his new lyricist with Richard Stilgoe sometimes helping out.

During Cats, which opened in 1981, Andrew met a 21-year-old dancer/singer named Sarah Brightman. She had blue hair at the time having just left her stint as the lead singer in a punk rock band, but there was something that drew him to her. Problem is, he was already married – To a girl he had known for years, also named Sarah, and they had two children. Sarah № 2 (which he called her) landed a minor role in Cats. Their relationship grew from there. Eventually, Andrew divorced Sarah № 1 and married Sarah Brightman. He had already begun to work on his latest musical which was soon to become one of the best loved of all time – The Plantom Of The Opera. The role of Christine was modeled for his new, young bride.

The Phantom Of The Opera opened at Her Majesty’s Theater in 1986. It swept the Tony awards the following year but – strangely enough – the 24-year-old Sarah № 2 was overlooked for Best Actress in a Musical. When Andrew accepted his award for Best Musical, he said: “This is for Sarah”. Andrew and Sarah № 2 divorced a few years later and he is currently married to his third wife – a non-sarah.

In 1989, to follow his last monstrous hit, Andrew premiered his latest project Aspects of Love. It’s his favourite out of all his works, but the show didn’t create the fevor Phantom of the Opera did. Still, its star – Michael Ball as Alex – has gone on to a highly successful career. Being cast in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals virtually guarentees future success.

In 1992, Andrew’s musical Sunset Boulevard premiered in the West End. After a few years of blah-musicals on Broadway, Sunset was welcomed with open arms and swept the 1994 Tony Awards.

In 1997, the Queen honored Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice by knighting them. The former duo also seems to have put aside their differences, for, in 1996, a S40 million movie version of Evita was realeased staring Madonna, Johnathon Price and Antonio Banderas. It won several Golden Globe Awards including: Best Musical or Comedy, Best Actress, and Best Original Song (You Must Love Me). Tim Rice was on hand to accept that award and included “If Andrew were here, I’m sure he’d say…” in his speech. When You Must Love Me won at the Oscars, though, both Andrew and Tim were on stage to accept their awards – marking the first time they had been on stage together since Evita won it’s 9 Tony awards in 1980.

His latest musical Whistle Down the Wind opened the 1^st of July 1998 on the Aldwysh thetre in London. Now Andrew Lloyd Webber is writing on a new musical called The Beautiful Game, a political musical about youths in Northen Irland.

Also in the works for future projects, are cartoon versions of Cats, and Starlight Express. There’s also talk of live versions of Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard since Evita did so well. Andrew Lloyd Webber has been spreading his musical magic throughout the world for over 29 years. If you think lyricists are reason his songs are remembered and beloved, listen to a symphonic recording of any show. Andrew Lloyd Webber is truly one of the musical titans of the 20^th century.

 

 

MUSIC IN ELT

 

PROS: Music is highly memorable and motivating. Its repetative patterning reinforces learning - music just ‘sticks in the head’, works for both short and long term memory. It is a common experience that students might forget nearly everything they learn in another language but for a few songs.

Musical materials and songs are readily available for the teacher. In practical terms, they are short, self-contained texts easy to handle in a lesson. For the teacher, working with songs can also be a tremendous leaning experience in which students actually teach the subject matter, while the teacher is a resource for the language.

CONS: It is a stated fact that just listening and singing songs will not make students communicate in another language. It is doubtful, whether one can possibly exploit the material usefully. It is hard to be natural without being too schoolish, so most teachers would kill the material with too much work. One more concern is that adolescents are already using music as a vehicle for group identity and self-discovery. They often reject dated music. Teachers would have to depend on their students’ choice or have immense extra workload of search and preparation, often unappreciated by the class.

 

TASK: 1) Prepare a list of what people do with songs or the topic of songs in everyday life / work / health-care/ commerce / etc.

2) Study the pros and cons for using songs in ELT and use it as a basis for group discusion, giving extra reasons for/against using music at the lesson. Say, whether refusal to deal with songs and music could be attributed to teachers’ inhibitions. What are they?

 

SONGS AND MUSIC: SPHERES OF APPLICATION

1) Songs and music are good for warm-up activities, tuning in to the particular tastes and personalities of your students;

2) background music is an integral part of suggestopaedia, a teaching method first developed by Dr. Losanov in Bulgaria. He claims background music produces hypermnesia - ‘excellent memory’. Besides, it engages the right hemisphere more, making the learning more holistic;

3) one should make use of the widespread availability of specialist magazines on artists and music industry;

4) it should be borne in mind that whatever you can do with a text, you can do with songs. That is, develop conventional skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening, teach vocabulary and grammar, or test your students;

5) using musical video clips, where students can be involved in predicting, describing, commenting and sharing perceptions;

6) activities designed for young children. There are collections of finger play songs, echo songs, refrain songs (Ten Green Bottles), question and answer songs (One, Two, Three, Four,Five; Sammy Thumb; Baa Baa Black Sheep), movement and physical training songs, ‘topic’ songs, jazz chants, lullabies and spirituals (Silent Night). Next here are TPR songs or total physical response songs (e.g. This is the Way, If You are Happy and You Know it). The idea is that if students can move and do what is said, matching words to their actions, language is learnt more deeply.

 

TASK: rate the innumerated spheres as to their value in ELT and according to their ‘popularity’ in Russian foreign language teaching.

 

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES FOR SONGS AND MUSIC

 

1. Warm-ups:

· Music questionnnaire: the aim is to provide oral and written practice in answering questions. Prepare a handout about listening habits, uses of music and preferences of your class. Ask your students to fill them in without putting ther names, take them in, shuffle them and hand them bach randomly. Students circulate and ask questions to find out whose paper it is (they continue to ask the same person until they get a negative response);

· Extreme opinions: prepare a list of extreme opinions on music and song. Tasks in your handout: 1) What kind of person would make each of these statements? 2) Are they ever true? 3) Change each sentence so that you can agree with it.

2. Suggestopaedia:

· Starting with music: keep a class journal and write in it a few minutes every day. Prepare a 3-5 minutes piece and while it is on, let your class write references in the journal, describing the music or saying what it makes them think of. The aim is to relax or excite students after the previous lesson;

· Musical reactions: the purpose is to develop imaginative skills and promote discussion. Sample handout: 1) If you turned on the radio and heard this piece, what would you do? 2) Imagine somebody who loves it/ hates it; describe the person. 3) If it were the background for an advertisement, what do you think the advertised product would be? 4) Where, in what kind of place would you hear this music?

· Five senses: Ask your students to describe twhat they saw, heard, smelt, felt and tasted while listening to some music piece;

· Film music: find some music relatively unknown to the students. Tell them this is to be a piece for a movie. Prepare a handout on the music (questions about associations, e.g. place, people, actions, name of the film);

· Advertising jingles: after listening to a short piece, students should describe what product will go with it, write a short commercial and read or sing it to the music.

3. Using journals and magazines:

· a magazine interview;

· a pop-group interview (a role play that would require a press-release and an individual biography);

· a group round table;

· working with quotations;

· grammar focus on song titles (how many have proper names, names of places, conditionals, imperatives, etc.) This serves to practice identifying grammatical categories and recognizing ambiguity;

4. Using texts of the songs:

· text completion and construction: cloze for low-level can include a glossary of the missing words; with intermediate you can omit rhyming words; you can delete every 5th, 7th or 9th word or insert an extra word here ahd there;

· pre-teaching words: give your students some words in a random order, e.g.:

river, water

smile, joy, face, light

bells, road

Let them predict what the song is about, using all the given words, and then let them listen to the song and compare it with their predictions;

· partial song dictation: dictate a few lines and ask the students to complete the rest of the verse;

· mass distance dictation: organize the class in pairs and prepare 3-4 sheets with songs; one should take a pencil and write things down; the other goes to a sheet of paper, memorizes as much as he can, then goes back and dictates it to his partner.

5. Using video-clips:

· freeze-frames: it is a good way to practice prediction, descriptions, using present tenses;

· predicting vocabulary list: prepare a list of action verbs that come up in a video and ask your students to reconstruct the story; then show the clip and compare it with predictions;

· guessing the music and song; prepare a list of questions, like:

n Is the song fast or slow?

n What kind of instruments voice it?

n What are the lyrics about?

Show sections of the video clip without the sound first.

6. Music with young children:

· A majic word: compose a long nonsense word that includes all the difficult letter-combinations, like Supercalifragilisticexpiallidocious; get your students pronounce segments first, then sing the word;

· Jazz chants: jazz chants consist of time stressed phrases of certain length that can be tapped out with foot, hand or pencil. You can target vocabulary and expressions to your particular students, e.g.:

Af ter din ner

I might go dan cing

See a film

Or talk to friends.

Jazz chants help to pactice syllable stress, enunciation, intonation and just to have fun.

 

TASK: choose an activity, establish the time alotted, aim and level, prepare a mini-lesson and peer-teach it to your fellow students.

 

 

[1] Китайский квартал в Нью-Йорке. – Примеч. пер.

[2] Plugger (англ.) – музыкант, чаще всего пианист, рекламирующий новые песни, проигрывая их перед публикой. – Примеч. пер.