PBS Interview

"New Syncopations:"

An Interview with Lynn Ahrens

by

Gerald Jonas

Anyone who knows "Schoolhouse Rock" knows the words and music of Lynn Ahrens. She wrote the songs for the popular educational feature that has piqued interest in the parts of speech for generations of viewers through a catchy little tune called "Interjections."

Despite her dual contribution to "Schoolhouse Rock," words come first to Ms. Ahrens. She laughingly refers to herself as an amateur composer in comparison to her conservatory-trained partner on "Ragtime: The Musical," Stephen Flaherty.

Ms. Ahrens, who graduated from the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse, met Flaherty at a musical theater workshop at BMI in 1983. It was mutual admiration at first sight. By the end of the year they were working together.

Their collaborations have since graced Broadway, Off-Broadway, and West End stages, with "Once On This Island" receiving eight Tony Award nominations in 1991 and winning the 1995 Oliver Award for Best Musical.

They also wrote the score for the 1992 musical adaptation of "My Favorite Year," the first original musical produced by Lincoln Center Theater.  More recently, they provided words and music for Twentieth Century Fox's first full-length animated film, "Anastasia".

Ms. Ahrens also collaborated with Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken on Madison Square Garden's annual holiday musical, an adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. As a television writer, songwriter and producer, she has received the Emmy Award and four Emmy nominations. Her future plans include developing programs to encourage young people interested in writing for the musical theater.

Q: When you and your partners sat down to write the musical version of Ragtime -- a modern American classic -- how did you go about deciding what to make into songs and where they go?

 A:The classic rule for a musical is that the songs come at the moments of highest emotion, and that's certainly true of "Ragtime." For instance, one moment I'm especially proud of in the show is Sarah's song "Your Daddy's Son" in Act One.

Q :That's when she sings to the baby she's buried in the ground?

"In the novel Sarah is basically mute, she never speaks. Doctorow tells us what she did and what she looked like, but we never hear what she herself is thinking. That's true of all the characters: there's very little talk about feelings in the book, it's all about actions. One of the things I felt very strongly was that onstage we had to know why sheburied her baby in the ground, because otherwise how could you possibly identify with this woman? So the song Stephen and I wrote for Sarah came out of something we felt was absolutely necessary for her to reveal at that point in the show: "Mama she was frightened/ Crazy from the fright/Tears without no comfort/ Screams without no sound/ Only darkness and pain/ The anger and pain/ The blood and the pain/ I buried my heart in the ground/ in the ground/ when I buried you in the ground."

Q: The incident was in the book but there were no specific lines you could use?

A: "The emotions in the novel are generally between the lines. I first read Ragtime when it came out in 1975 and I fell in love with it, so when this project came up I thought it was a stunning opportunity. Inpreparing to write the lyrics, I immersed myself in the world of ragtime, of turn-of-the-century New York -- the production staff had put together a great library of books and photographs -- and of course I re-read the novel."

Q:The character of Coalhouse Walker, the ragtime pianist turned revolutionary terrorist, is a major figure in the book.  Did you have any qualms about getting into the heart and head of a black man from that era?

"I believe you can empathize with anyone. What it took for me was a combination of reading Doctorow intensely and pulling out all the details that are on the page, and then trying to squeeze between the lines and see what the characters might be feeling. And we had Terrence McNally's wonderful 60-page treatment, and we worked with him to develop the characters even further. And specifically in terms of writing for African-American characters, we talked in depth with the black members of the cast. We were very concerned that their lines not come out as stereotypical, as musical theater cliché."

Q : Did anything from those conversations make it into the show?

A: One specific thing is Coalhouse's introduction, just before the "Getting' Ready Rag"  in Act One. The black principals and the black ensemble in that number felt it was important to make very clear that Coalhouse wasn't "just" a piano player without a history, and that the dancers in the club weren't "generic" dancers who spring to life when the curtain comes up. So we added a piece where they sing about him:

"His name was Coalhouse Walker/ Was a native of St. Louis, some years before./ When he heard the music of Scott Joplin in St. Louis/ Bought himself some piano lessons working as a stevedore./ Here was a musicthat truly inspired him/ Dancers required him, club owners hired him/The strivers of Harlem respected and admired him for turning Harlem into art/ But Coalhouse had a broken heart." So all of a sudden, in one little verse, we see that these are people with jobs, and with dreams,and it gives a sense of place, a sense of time, and a sense of individuality."

Q: People are always interested in how a composer and lyricist work together. The old chicken-or-the-egg question. Which comes first, the words or the music?

Stephen and I work both ways. An example of a music-first song is the opening sequence, "Ragtime," which has to set the time and place foreverything that follows. Stephen came up with this beautiful evocative ragtime motif that just characterized the era in a certain way -- very lilting and very light. So that became the opening number, and it led mein terms of lyrics to begin with the very light -- "The skies were blueand hazy/ Rarely a storm, barely a chill/ la la la la la / The afternoons were lazy/ Everyone warm, everything still."  That's the opening idyll in New Rochelle. And then the music develops into this rip-roaring ragtime, which leads into the lyric: "The sound of distant thunder/ Suddenly starting to climb/ It was the music/ of something beginning/ An era exploding, a century spinning/ In riches and rags and in rhythm and rhyme/ The people called it ragtime. . . !" All starting with the music. Of course, we worked together on it at length; the opening sequence probably took us longer than anything in the show to write, and went through more revisions."

Q: And an example of a words-first song?

A:"Back to Before," Mother's song in Act One. (sic).I woke up one morning and I said, "Mother needs a song, she doesn't have a song!" The character known as Mother goes through this incredible internal journey -- from agood Victorian housewife to a liberated woman of the 20th century -- and I felt this needed to be articulated. So I said, "I'm going to write her a song," and it just came out and I faxed it to Stephen, and he set it to music, and it's in the show, word for word, first draft. That is very unusual for me. I usually do endless rewriting. The lyric begins:

"There was a time our happiness seemed neverending/ I was so sure that where we were heading was right/ Life was a road, so certain and straight and unbending/ Our little road with never a crossroad in sight/ Back in the days when we spoke in civilized voices/ women in white andsturdy young men at the oar/ Back in the days when I let you make all my choices/ We can never go back to before."

Q: Were there any times when Doctorow's specific words got into a lyric?

There's a wonderful passage in the book at the end of Chapter 9, after Mother has taken Sarah and her baby into the house in New Rochelle.She's not sure that disturbing the tranquility of her family in this way is a good idea. She's looking out the window and this is how Doctorowdescribes what she sees, the daily arrival of servants to a middle-class suburb:

"Every morning these washwomen came up the hill from the trolley line on North Avenue and fanned into the houses. Traveling Italian gardeners kept the lawns trim. Icemen walked alongside their wagons,their horses straining in their traces to pull the creaking ice wagons up the hill." 

That's all it says, and that became a lyric that's one of my favorites in the show, in which Mother says, "Each day the maids trudge up the hill, the hired help arrives/ I never stopped to think they might have lives beyond our lives." Which goes one beat further than what's on the page.

Q:You talk about the need to rewrite. Do you mean tinkering with words or wholesale changes?

When something isn't going right, you never know how far you have to go to make it work. There's a scene in Act One where Mother's Younger Brother sings about the night he met Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist,in Union Square and how her rhetoric radicalized his heart. Goldman is one of the historical figures that Doctorow weaves into the book and who share the stage with the fictional characters in the show as well. In Act Two, Younger Brother, a fireworks expert, shows up at Coalhouse'shideout to volunteer his services in the struggle against injustice.

This is what Doctorow writes:

"What is it you want? Coalhouse said.Younger Brother had prepared himself for this question. He had composed an impassioned statement about justice, civilization and the right of every human being to a dignified life. He remembered none of it. I can make bombs, he said. I know how to blow things up."

So the challenge for us became, how do you articulate subtext?  I tried giving Younger Brother the words, but it wasn't working. Then suddenly we realized, just as he sings about Emma Goldman in the first act, to have her sing about him in the second act not only worked as a clever structural device, a sort of bookend for his character, but it also enabled us to say all the things he was thinking without having him say it. And that became the song "He Wanted to Say," where Emma Goldman sings: "He wanted to say, I am not who I appear to be/ He wanted to say,Do not blame me for my past/ We have different lives and faces, but our hearts have common places. . ."

Q:You are a composer as well as a lyricist. When you write a words-first song, do you think of it as a kind of poem or do you have any music in mind?

I generally have a tune in my head. I wish I didn't but I can't help it. Like with "Back to Before," I wrote the whole lyric, and I was humming along as I wrote it, and then when I gave it to Stephen, he heard something entirely different, and it was way better.  So I never, never tell him what I'm humming. That's his department."