If the career of David Shire is any indication, for the retirement-age film composer there really is (or can be) life after Hollywood. Indeed, at the current age of 87, Shire seems to be more publicly visible and more musically adventurous than ever. Although it's been now several years since the film world called on him to score anything for the screen, in the past year alone four other film-related folks, two musical theater entrepreneurs, and one international classical concert promoter are all preparing Shire-related projects and bringing newfound attention to him.
Perhaps the biggest splash will be made by the new book from Oxford University Press chronicling Shire's sixty-four-year collaboration with lyricist and stage director Richard Maltby, Jr. in their extensive work together for Broadway-bound (and way, way off-Broadway during college) theater shows. It's called Closer Than Ever, a reference both to their ongoing teamwork and to their 1990 musical of the same name. One song in that show actually references the autobiographical roots of both Shire and Maltby in the form of a tribute to their mutually musical fathers. It's called "If I Sing" and presents an ascending, nearly-operatic vocal line that both men worked on; the lyric being a fond remembrance ("My father's pride was in his hands, the piano was his soul... If I sing, you are the music; if I fly, you're why I'm good...") For Shire's part it was, after all, as a song writer and show-maker prior to becoming an Oscar-winning scorer of movies where his original ambitions lay. Mr. Irving Shire had been a bandleader and pop piano teacher around their native Buffalo, New York – lessons meted out not only to the neighborhood kids but to his son who took to music from an early age out of sheer imitation.
The pop music of those post-war years was what has come down to us as the 'Great American Songbook': the well-constructed tunes of Rodgers, Kern, Arlen, Gershwin – and Shire absorbed it all as did his future classmate at Yale, Richard Maltby Jr. as this new book tells us. Shire's major was English with a music minor and to support his income and his ambitions he took a few local gigs on piano as part of a jazz quintet. Soon, together with budding lyricist Maltby, he started to imagine stand-alone stage songs and started creating some of his own. It wasn't very far, then, from stand-alone songs to this new team concocting a full musical score such as Broadway might recognize.
Their fledgling stage show was in the form of a song revue rather than (yet) a consolidated musical with a book and a storyline. Starting Here, Starting Now from 1977 featured three singers and a small pit band and a very abstract set in front of which some twenty original character-sketching, mood-setting, dramatically alive songs played-out: "I Hear Bells", "I Think I May Want to Remember Today", "Just Across the River", "A New Life Coming". A couple of art-house ballads called "Autumn" and "The Song of Me" chilled the stage though they were never intended to broaden toward any kind of plot. Of that revue format, Shire has said "Richard who directed did such a wonderful job of directing it to give it all a feel of a coherent evening with a spine to it (so that it wasn't) just a collection of numbers". Critics were impressed.
As early as 1961, the Shire/Maltby team had been trying to gain attention like this. Sap of Life was one experimental show; another was about Queen Victoria, Love Match, which an amused Shire later called a "desperate and demented" idea for a show. It wasn't until the up-and-coming Barbra Streisand noticed and recorded a couple of Shire/Maltby songs for her albums – "Autumn" and "What About Today?" – that the team found an inside track to the real music business. Broadway's own Stephen Sondheim likewise heard about the team and became a lifelong supporter and well-wisher. Then followed increasingly sophisticated musical shows – bigger casts, bigger bands, composed-through scores sometimes approaching the ambitions of a Sondheim show: solid narrative songs like "Life Story" or "Fathers of Fathers" or "I Wouldn't Go Back" from Closer Than Ever and show-stopper songs like "The Story Goes On" and "What If We Had Loved Like That?" from Baby. A musical version of the hit film Big followed; then Take Flight; even now there's a planned musical set in 1930s Bangkok and Tokyo called Waterfall.
Obviously, all of that is a far cry from those early song revues which, by now, can seem like mere dinner-theater displays. The new book stresses that, just as Shire holds a sure hand around a solid melody and original chord structures, Maltby as lyricist has always kept in mind the three needs of the show-song: to illuminate the character who's singing, to advance or cap the plot points, and somehow to be verbally smart and sincere on its own accord. Oh, and to fit perfectly on top of the rolling musical line. The best songs are a mutual accomplishment like that, hand-and-glove. This new book in honor of this particularly productive partnership, while overdue, is most welcome.
But that's only the start of this unofficial Shire year. At the same time now comes a ten-page cover story in the 2024 Winter issue of Score Magazine by Ron Sadoff called "A Diverse and Enduring Life in Music" covering the composer's biography, methods, and current work. As we've said, this is all a lot of attention for someone who is technically supposed to be discharged and resting in a hammock. But there's more.
In amongst all that history of Shire's vocal music origins covered by the book and the magazine, by the late 1960s Shire began expanding his interests into thinking orchestrally, scoring films and TV. As evidence of that career transition, now comes another new product in this Shire-centric year: the release of several CDs of Shire's very early screen music including TV scores such as Runaway and The Final War of Olly Winter...and the first Shire music that this writer ever heard, a TV play called Appalachian Autumn. Caldera Records is presenting a number of these early soundtracks for review now. And there's still more this year: a posthumous album from jazz singer John Minnock issued as a tribute to Shire's music and to Minnock's unique career as a song stylist – and yet another university press book due out in 2025 where Shire will be featured both on the cover and in a lengthy interview within: "Overhearing Film Music: Conversations with Screen Composers".
Again, we call this a lot of attention for any artist, but especially for one supposedly retired from the spotlight of Hollywood. And yet, in some ways, the most ambitious of all these projects this year comes from even farther afield: Shire's selection by an international committee to receive a commission from the Abrahamic Society of Abu Dhabi whose annual festival of arts and culture was seeking contributors for a massive choral and orchestral work to be called "Symphony of Three" – new music prepared by three composers, one representing Judaism, one Islam, one Christianity – for a concert in recognition of the creation of a new three-sanctuary interfaith worship center there in Abu Dhabi dedicated to the ecumenical spirit. The symphony would feature along with the full Beethoven Academy Orchestra of Krakow, vocal soloists, and a roster of international choirs. For this major event, composer Iban Darwish would prepare a 12-minute introductory piece called "Earth" setting the scene of this planet where we humans of any faith find ourselves (along with unbelievers) and are urged to co-exist. Its six quick sections are labelled Intro, Creation, The Arrival, The Lost Soul, Conflicting Man, and Father of the Three (referring to Abraham, one divine patriarch on whom all three religions agree). David Shire's thirty-minute vocal/symphonic contribution called "Peace" follows, leading to the symphony's central movement from New York composer John Debney titled simply "Love" climaxing, then, with a finale, again by Darwish, called "Tolerance" -- a final plea for mutuality and understanding among all nations and religions.
Shire's half hour, representing the Jewish tradition, was originally built around vocal solos by US tenor Brenton Ryan set against a choral/orchestra roadmap. Subsequent performances can boast any lyric tenor. He has said that his inspirations for the shape and nature of this piece were, on the one hand, the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten (which had used the World War One poetry of Wilfred Owen as its texts) and his own consultations with the rabbinic scholar and mentor Dr. William Cutter. Eventually, Shire settled on a grouping of eight source-verses and one instrumental interlude that make up his movement and that take as their subject a plea for peace, both political and personal.
Shire has called his work here a cantata and it eventually features nine soloists and five international choirs, along with full orchestra. It opens with brass declarations and proceeds through some of the composer's most sensitive, assured, and heartfelt music. Some of his chosen texts were Biblical ("They shall beat their swords into ploughshares..."), some were found-poetry ("My child has the scent of peace... and all grownups were children once..."); one is a traditional prayer ("How good it is for all humanity to dwell together in peace and unity...") and one an original verse by Shire himself ("Must the light of peace be like the sun, only shining on any part of the world a part of the time?"). The symphony's third composer, John Debney, has summarized the three guest composers' ultimate goal and purpose in participating in this project: "We were not trying to preach. We're just trying to give impressions and a sense of feeling to the listener to allow them to go through their own journey with the music."
As fate would have it, the planned concert event to premiere this grand symphony came at the start of the worldwide covid pandemic making any hopes of producing a "live" music event, let alone staging any adequate rehearsals, impossible. Instead, then, determined entrepreneurs and skillful technicians devised a way in which the many performers and many sections of the symphony could be recorded separately and safely, then brought together digitally in an elaborate video montage, rather like a patchwork quilt made of swatches but seeming whole. Even now, the only accessible version of the symphony so far is this video edit bringing together choruses and singers from many different countries in a virtual electronic blend – a seamlessly flowing presentation, nonetheless made of those collated bits, viewable through providers like YouTube.
Musically, Shire's voice in this kind of music, away from Hollywood, away from Broadway, is still distinctive, and his orchestral writing individualistic and recognizable. It's good that he was given this chance to work within an extended format new to him, urging him to build a structural flow, to work at writing a long-form piece in support of a singular topic of importance – instead of his usual task wanting to tie separate stage songs together into a cohesive show or coaxing fragmented film music cues into a single solid score. Shire's peace movement here does succeed as a single solid statement, a compact homily, even as the whole Symphony of Three does convince of its overall message of peace, love, tolerance. (Reportedly, the symphony in its current "paste-up" format was streamed more than a million times in its first week of availability online.)
Again, all of this attention in so many different genres has been a new experience for David Shire and it is hardly the typical behavior of a retiree to go seeking it all. But once the film studios stop calling and the song-writing takes a pause, a composer as resourceful and accomplished as Shire still needs an outlet; can still feel inspired. That never ends. It's just possible that the most visible and inspired years for this octogenarian lie ahead.
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