(A video gallery of trailers and excerpts from some of the films and musicals featuring Mr. Hamlisch’s music is here.)
This is my music: Marvin Hamlisch
Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could often appear as the stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7, he was the youngest student to be accepted at the Juilliard School — but his appearance belied his intelligence and easy banter with the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. And his melodies were sure-footed and sometimes swashbuckling. “One,” from “A Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy lines, distills the essence of the Broadway showstopper. The show started as a series of taped workshops with Broadway dancers, then evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats."
In more recent years, Mr. Hamlisch also became an ambassador for music,
traveling around the country and performing and giving talks at schools.
He often criticized the cuts in arts education.
“I don’t think the American government gets it,” he said during an
interview at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana,
Calif. “I don’t think they understand it’s as important as math and
science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of
certain things. You don’t have to become the next great composer. It’s
just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things.
It’s part of being a human being.”
Despite all the awards he received over the years, Ms. Blair said Mr.
Hamlisch was always most focused, and most excited about, whatever
current project he had going. And, she said, he was always appreciative
of his gift: “He used to say, ‘It’s easy to write things that are so
self-conscious that they become pretentious, that have a lot of noise.
It’s very hard to write a simple melody.’ ”
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