Norman Lloyd, music arranger for the Fireside books -- Garbo

Two different men named Norman Lloyd have IMDb listings. One is an actor famous for a career that lasted most of a century. That's not the guy this post is about. 

The other Norman Lloyd was a composer and music educator, and is in the movie database because he wrote the scores for many experimental films and documentaries. But Lloyd is the subject of today's post because of his contributions to a 1950 songbook called The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs. 

In this previous post I focused on some of the songs included in the book. The Fireside Book series, for which Norman Lloyd did the music arrangements, was meant for group singing, in the classroom and in people's homes. The songs needed to be arranged for voice and piano. Norman Lloyd was more than qualified to do the job.

 One of Lloyd's specialty areas was writing music for choreographers' works. Doesn't sound very interesting, does it? But check out this short excerpt from Jose Limon's dance piece "La Malinche," for which Norman Lloyd wrote the music. ("La Malinche" is a Mexican term that literally means strands of grass twisted together, as a metaphor for betrayal and mistrust.)

I know little about modern dance, but I do know someone could easily write not just a blog post but an entire book about the work of Jose Limon, who designed the dance above. For today, I'll just post this dramatic photo of Limon. 

Back to the actual subject of today's post. Norman Lloyd, whose grandfather was a Welsh coal miner and whose father worked in a steel mill and also played minor-league baseball, became a music professional at the age of eleven. His first gig was playing piano to accompany silent movies.

 

 

He got his bachelor's and master's degrees in music and studied with Aaron Copeland.

 

 

During the 1930s,Lloyd taught at the New York University School of Education and also was an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

 

Beginning in the mid-1940s, Lloyd began to teach at The Juilliard School in New York, where he established curriculums based on his concepts of music theory. He also influenced systems of music education, broadening them to make them more accessible.

He worked with famed choreographer Martha Graham and other luminaries at summer programs for Bennington College.

 

 

One of the pieces Lloyd wrote music for was Martha Graham's "Panorama," which featured thirty-three different dance segments. Dancers still perform the 1935 work, and here's some rehearsal footage of modern dancers learning the moves for "Panorama." Again, worth watching as it really is more interesting than it sounds.

 

Besides for Martha Graham, Norman Lloyd worked with other dance groups including the amazing Humphrey-Weidman Dancers

In 1963, Lloyd accepted a position at Oberlin College, famous for its music conservatory, where he served as Dean.

From there, Norman Lloyd moved to the Rockefeller Foundation, where the arts programs were being restructured. It was a huge job to decide what should be funded, and why. From the Rockefeller Foundation website: "In September 1964 the RF established a new Arts Division separate from the Humanities,  Lloyd was primarily responsible for cultural development in the United States; under his direction the Division supported playwrights, composers (including a separate grant for African American composers), symphony orchestras, music conservatories, and college theaters."

 You'd think all of the above would have been enough to do in one career, but Norman Lloyd wrote or co-authored these influential and still-used music education books: 

 

Norman Lloyd's musical compositions were admired in his lifetime by his peers, and he got commissions to write them.  But it's not easy to find examples for listening. I did locate a high school band playing Lloyd's "A Walt Whitman Overture," which has a similar title to a piece by Gustov Holst.

 And of course, Norman Lloyd somehow found time to do the arrangements for both the The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs and The Fireside Book of Folk Songs.  

 

 

Lloyd and his wife Ruth (who met at NYU) were political and social influencers. Ruth Dorothy Rohrbacher, whom he married in 1933, was also a piano accopmpanist. The couple collaborated on books and musical projects for many years. Columbia University's library has the transcript of a 1979 interview with the Lloyds about their life and work, and I think it's possible that within the next year, I may be able to visit and read the transcript, which I think would be fascinating.

 

In my opinion, Norman Lloyd's biggest cultural influence may have been his urging of his pianist/arranger peer Vera Brodsky Lawrence to complete a collection of Scott Joplin's piano music. Interest in Joplin's work had waned from the Depression onward, and Lloyd knew that talented pianist Lawrence was just the person to edit the Joplin volume and revive interest in the composer. 

 

 

The book, called The Collected Works of Scott Joplin, sold very well and inspired the use of Joplin's songs in Hollywood. This included "The Entertainer," which was not only part of the soundtrack for "The Sting," but also became, in 1974, a Top 40 radio hit for pianist Marvin Hamlisch. 

 

 

To conclude today's blog post,  here's dancer choreographer Jose Limon doing a classic dance back-bend. Kinda looks like a 80s hip-hop move, doesn't it?