"Unlimited, the Future is Unlimited": Re-imagining Expansion with Musical Theater

Brian Jarvis, University of Texas at El Paso and John Peterson, James Madison University

A revived enthusiasm for issues of form in classical music by scholars such as William Caplin (1998), James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy (2006), and Janet Schmalfeldt (1992, 2011), has stimulated a burgeoning interest in popular music's forms. Musical theater, however, has received comparatively little attention. Although it engages with formal strategies from both classical and popular music, musical theater's formal idiosyncrasies confront us with analytical challenges that other repertoires present less obviously. While studies of musical theater often mention form within a broader analytical enterprise, one issue that has not been thoroughly addressed is the frequent occurrence and varied manifestations of formal expansions. In this talk we begin by presenting touchstone examples of phrase expansion in musical theater. Next, we reimagine the concept of expansion-which is typically restricted to single phrases-to allow for its application at larger levels. We find two common situations: breakthroughs and key-changing elisions. We conclude by applying these concepts in an analysis of a recurring expansion in three numbers from Wicked ("The Wizard and I," "Defying Gravity," and "For Good") that is inadequately described using existing tools.

The way we reimagine expansion in this paper-as a concept that applies at levels larger than the phrase-is significant not only for the understanding and analysis of musical theater, but also for the many challenges presented in other kinds of classical and popular music.