{"id":4603,"date":"2016-04-12T05:32:08","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T19:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emotemuse.com\/g\/?p=4603"},"modified":"2016-04-12T05:32:08","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T19:32:08","slug":"somewhere-over-the-rainbow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/?p=4603","title":{"rendered":"Somewhere Over the Rainbow"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, from The Wizard of Oz<\/span>, is now a classic, inspiring song, but its had to believe the beginnings were not so smooth:<\/p>\n

…it was decided that standard melodies of a popular accessible kind , without gimmicks, would best suit the story, and its star [Judy Garland].\u00a0 Harold Arlen and E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg were contracted to do the composing.\u00a0 They worked well together, but after completing 45 minutes of music for the film, they were still missing one vital thing – Dorothy’s solo, to be sung by Judy Garland.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inspiration was slow in coming.\u00a0 One day when Harold Arlen and his wife were out driving, he suddenly asked her to stop the car and there, outside a pharmacy, he took out a piece of manuscript paper and began writing a tune that would become Dorothy’s song.\u00a0 Now it needed lyrics.\u00a0 The song needed to show that Dorothy was a troubled little girl in Kansas and Yip Harburg considered her childhood was colourless; in Baum’s original novel, the word “grey” occurs nine times in three pages when referring to the drought in the state.\u00a0 He pictured her in a countryside which was dry, dusty and arid, with almost no flowers and although Baum’s book never mentioned it, he mused that one of the few coloured things Dorothy might ever have seen in nature was a rainbow.\u00a0 Harburg and Arlen began referring to the still non-existent song by a temporary title, “I Want to Get on the Other Side of the Rainbow”.<\/p>\n

Initially, Harburg found Arlen’s music for the song somewhat grand, with suggestions of religious hymns and Pachelbel’s “Canon”.\u00a0 He pointed out that character was a 12-year-old girl, not an opera singer, so Arlen reduced the dramatic accompaniment.\u00a0 Harburg was also concerned about the melody’s opening octave leap.\u00a0 How to fit that with the sound of a young character, and make it sound logical?\u00a0 But Harburg had written the word for “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”, and he understood poverty and the Depression.\u00a0 Over the next three weeks he found himself unable to escape from his initial rainbow image, but had difficulty fitting that to Arlen’s tune.\u00a0 Eventually he tried singing the melody with just open vowels.\u00a0 “Aa-aa” didn’t suggest anything: neither did “Ee-ee”.\u00a0 But when he got to “Oh-oh” “the other side” fell into place as “somewhere over”.\u00a0 The journey towards the complete song had begun.<\/p>\n

Source: Cryer, Max (2008) Love Me Tender<\/span>.\u00a0 Auckland: Exisle Publishing, p.52-53.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, from The Wizard of Oz, is now a classic, inspiring song, but its had to believe the beginnings were not so smooth: …it was decided that standard melodies of a popular accessible kind , without gimmicks, would best suit the story, and its star [Judy Garland].\u00a0 Harold Arlen and E. Y. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[701],"tags":[1120,1119,1121,1118],"class_list":["post-4603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-works","tag-e-y-harburg","tag-harold-arlen","tag-judy-garland","tag-somewhere-over-the-rainbow"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4604,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4603\/revisions\/4604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wedgebillmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}