AMERICAN SONGWRITERS by DAVID EWEN 371 SONDHEIM Simon told the Times, "has been to sit with a gui- tar and write a song, finish it, go into the studio, book the musicians, lay out the song and the chords, and then try to make a track. With these [South African] musicans, I was doing it the oth- er way around. The tracks preceded the songs. We worked improvisationally. While a group was playing in the studio I would sing melodies and words, [most of them made up on the spur of the moment]—anything that fit the scale they were playing in." The album's principal cuts are "The Boy in the Bubble," about the "mystical connections between primitive magic and mod- ern technology," and "Graceland," which Hold- en described as the transformation of "Elvis Presley's [hometown] shrine [into] a metaphor of salvation for 'poor boys and pilgrims with fami- lies,' as well as a personal symbol of healing for the songwriter's romantic wounds. Two hymn- like songs about the search for spiritual fulfill- ment are "Homeless" and "Under African Skies," whereas "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" takes a sardonic look at the neuroses of contem- porary, urban life. ABOUT: Cohen, M. S. Simon and Garfunkel: A Biogra- phy In Words and Pictures, 1977; Denisoff, R. S. Sing a Song of Social Significance, 1972; Humphries, P. Bookends: The Simon and Garfunkel Story, 1982; Leigh, S. Paul Simon: Now and Then, 1973; Marsh D. Paul Simon, 1978; Mathews-Walker, R. Simon and Garfunkel, 1982. Periodicals— High Fidelity May 1982; New Yorker May 4, 1968; New York Times Jan- uary 21, 1968, February 27, 1972, February 28, 1982, August 24, 1986; New York Times Magazine October 13,1968; Rolling Stone October 23, 1986; Saturday Re- view June 12, 1976. SISSLE, NOBLE. See BLAKE, EUBIE and SISSLE, NOBLE /SONDHEIM, 1930=—Y. STEPHEN^? and Harm Roofers March 22, ammerstein, no one has advanced the musical play or alteredits destiny more than the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheirn. He has brought to Broadway a re- markable~talent as a lyricist, a field in which his mastery is virtually unrivalled. A consummate musician, he has met the demands of the most complex texts, as he did in Sunday in rAe Park with George, which broke with the whole history of the Broadway musical and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama Beyond his contributions to Broadway, as the artistic partner to unorthodox, formula-shattering texts, Sondheim is one of the leading innovators in contemporary American music. STEPHEN SONDHEIM Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born into up- per-middle-class comfort in New York City. His father, Herbert Sondheim, was a dress manufac- turer, and his mother, Janet (Fox) Sondheim, a dress designer and, later, an interior .decorator. Precocious, Sondheim took an interest in the pi- ano when he was four and, at five, began two years of piano study with a local teacher. His early education was at the Ethical Culture School, where he started reading The New York Times in the first grade^ When he was ten his parents divorced, and his mother enrolled him in the New York Military Academy, which he loved for its "rules and order" and because "the school had a large organ with lots of buttons." Two years later, mother and son settled on a farm in Pennsylvania, a few- miles from the Doylestown summer residence of Oscar Hammerstein II, whose intimate friend- ship with the family brought young Sondheim into personal contact with the celebrated libret- tist-lyricist. When Sondheim composed words and music for By George, a production mounted at the George School in Newton, Pennsylvania, the 15-year-old brought his work to Hammer- stein for objective criticism. "It's the worst thing I ever read," Hammerstein told him, then pro- ceeded to deliver a point-by-point explanation of what was wrong. "We went on for a whole af- ternoon about it," Sondheim recalled. "I guess I learned most of the things about writing lyrics in that afternoon: 25 years of experience crammed into three hours. I gobbled it up." Sondheim continued to consult Hammerstein, who was to bequeath his legacy to the younger man. As Sondheim has said, "He got me into the