Alan & Marilyn Bergman – HuffPost 12.23.13
Mike Ragogna: Considering the incredible careers you’ve had, what advice do you have for new artists?
Marilyn Bergman: Do you mean writers or singers?
MR: If you want to cover both, that’s cool.
Al Bergman: Well, for one thing I would say know the literature of popular music. Go back and listen to the great songs. There’s a reason why songs like Irving Berlin’s are still played and sung. Especially listen to Stephen Sondheim.
MB: For writing for the theater.
AB: For writing anything.
MB: That’s true.
AB: He wrote two books that are really primers for people who want to write. They’re wonderful books. And listen to all those great writers: Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Rodgers & Hart, those are the people who have written songs that you call “gems”!
MB: One talks to aspiring filmmakers and they can tell you every frame of a classic movie that goes back before they were born. They know Eisenstein’s films as well as early Frank Capra and Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Those are like the classic songs that we studied, right? If you talk to architects, they know every famous building.
AB: Going back to The Forum!
MB: But I don’t know that aspiring or sometimes even very successful songwriters know what came before them!
MR: That’s a very good point. It’s not emphasized. Maybe there’s a confusion because there has always traditionally been a separation, when teaching music, between classical or jazz and then teaching what would be popular music. I think popular music always gets the raw end on that deal.
MB: If one really is serious about wanting to write songs that are original, that really speak to people, you have to feel like you created something that wasn’t there before–which is the ultimate accomplishment, isn’t it? And to make something that wasn’t there before, you have to know what came before you.
MR: I think so too. You have to have a foundation.
MB: I would think!
MR: And a language. A language everyone can speak before having “the conversation.”
AB: And there’s a rich literature of this music.