Almost thirty years ago, Mark E. Horowitz, Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress, interviewed Stephen Sondheim. An addendum to the interview was a list solicited of Sondheim – Songs I Wish I Had Written. It's fascinating, and taken with a comment Horowitz made to me about Stephen Sondheim's huge record collection, that easily one third of the collection seemed to be of South American music flipped a switch in my mind. I wanted to know what was in that collection of thousands of records. This, in turn, became a thread binding together much of this 2025 season of Momentos Musicales.
Asked to further hightlight his list, Sondheim explained he had chosen “’Bambalele,’ which is a South American folk song, because of its joy.”
And it is a joy, sung here by Audra McDonald.
Latin America's presence in Sondheim's music is diffuse, yet by his own admission, it is everywhere:
“I always fall into South American rhythms,” Sondheim told Horowitz. “I don't know why. In every show, and quite often, whether the songs are relevant or not. Here, I just thought: What are South American rhythms doing in the middle of Victorian England? Actually, there's an influence. The chord structure is influenced by a South American lullaby I know. [Xavier] Montsalvatge's ‘Lullaby to a Negro Baby.’”
What a lovely song is this lullaby, often heard on recitals across the American continents, from Argentina to Canada and is an easy fit within our expanding Great Americas Songbook.
Sondheim's enthusiasm for Latin American music was fueled in part by his friendship with Cole Porter. The two of them both welcomed, intentional or unintentional, Latin American dance rhythms – think Porter's “Begin the Beguine” and “America,” Sondheim's lyrics from West Side Story. The two composers, both word craftsmen of the first order, would even get tickled when Sondheim once sat at the piano and sang for Porter, on the verge of spending his last 6 years in seclusion.
Wrote Sondheim of the experience:
“It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language, this from Sondheim's lyrics for Gypsy: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!”
In program notes Stephen Sondheim wrote for a Paul Weston recording of songs of Jerome Kern, is included this brief summary of Cole Porter.
The impressive feature of Porter’s songs, writes Sondheim, is their “sophistication”—the frequent use of Latin-American rhythms, the lush chromatic harmony, and the lengthy extensions of standard chorus forms (Think “Begin the Beguine” and “Night and Day” the two longest and most famous examples).
Cole Porter gives us a perfect overlap of the Great American Songbook and the Great Americas Songbook which we are assembling over the course of Hispanic Heritage Month. Listen for more Momentos Musicales every weekday afternoon at 2 through mid-October.
