“While rap aficionados and theater nerds have exhaustively catalogued the rich referential web of [Lin Manuel] Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ score, little attention has been paid to the show’s engagement with the music that Alexander Hamilton would have known in his lifetime,” writes William Robin in Friday’s (8/11) New York Times. “If the show’s creators had decided to ‘go there’ to 1776, they might first have looked to the music of the American maverick composer William Billings. A clear parallel to the partisan braggadocio of Hamilton’s indelible Act I number ‘My Shot’ is Billings’s hymn ‘Chester,’ first published in 1770 [which] became an unofficial anthem of the Revolution, and is still frequently performed by choirs.… European sound was exactly what the real-life Hamilton would have appreciated. ‘Music in the early United States was almost entirely borrowed from British and Italian musical styles,’ [musicologist Elissa] Harbert said…. Thomas Jefferson was a proficient violinist who described music as ‘the favorite passion of my soul.’ … But Jefferson-as-violinist didn’t necessarily suit the purposes of ‘Hamilton.’ ‘The way Jefferson is in our show, the way he’s represented, he’s got a little bit of a killer instinct to him,’ ” said Alex Lacamoire, the musical’s orchestrator.
Posted August 14, 2017
