Word: melodist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Except possibly those mornings the reviews for his shows come out. With the apparent end of Andrew Lloyd Webber's string of hits, Wildhorn has taken over as the middlebrow melodist critics love to hate. His soaring ballads are dismissed as bland pop geared for easy-listening radio; his shows are scorned as cut-rate imitations of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. ("The man writes galumphing, dunderheaded musicals that make...everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says...
...untouched by Joplin's influence. Stride piano, boogie-woogie, Dixieland, Big Band swing, blues, soul and rock 'n' roll -- to some degree, all these forms were adumbrated in Joplin's works. But Joplin's achievement transcends pop music; indeed, the soft-spoken, neatly dressed whorehouse pianist was a master melodist who would rightly be called an American Schubert...
...from the library, and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Walsh was classical-music critic for the San Francisco Examiner before joining TIME in 1981. His passionate, sharply reasoned reviews have been informed by his eclectic musical tastes, which range from '60s rock to Broadway melodist Andrew Lloyd Webber, about whom he wrote a 1988 TIME cover story as well as a book, Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life & Works (Abrams). "Classical music suffers from an image of snobbism," says Walsh. "I've always tried to make it approachable -- to present it to the reader...