An afternoon-long tutorial followed, teaching him, by Mr. Sondheim’s account, more about the craft than most songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a good play into a musical; adapt a flawed play into a musical; adapt a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your own original story. This the young Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put it, “that art is work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft.” Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim’s first…
