Something of a prodigy (a concert piece, "Paeans," was performed when he was 17, conducted by Bernard Herrmann), Jerome Morross was as happy writing for the musical theatre as for the concert stage. Perhaps best known for his film and TV scores - you may remember him as the composer of the score for the film, The Big Country, or TV's Wagon Train - Morross's Broadway career was one of varying success.
His most successful show, The Golden Apple, with book and lyrics by John Latouche, did not set any box office records but has retained a kind of cult status to this day, perhaps because of the complex density of its score. Although the term did not come into use until much later on, Morross and his collaborators were among the first musical theatre writers to experiment in a form now referred to as "sung-through." Speaking about his earlier show, Ballet Ballads in a later interview, he said that "the idea was to so mix the singing and dancing that you didn't know where the singers began or where the dancers ended."
Created under the auspices of his daughter, Susanna Morross Tarjan, The Official Jerome Morross Web Site provides a clear, concise introduction to the composer and his works through a brief biography, discography, and listing of his major works.
Far more ambitious is pianist/conductor/composer John Jansson's site devoted to composer Marc Blitzstein. Part biography, part musical analysis, all reference and reverential, this site is a informative source for musicologist and fan, or just the curious. Having dealt with what he believed to be a shamefully inadequate lack of research material on his subject, Jansson set about remedying the situation, partially through this site. Here you'll find a biography, an extensive listing of his known works, commentary by his friends and peers, and a thorough bibliography and discography.
For his work from The Cradle Will Rock through Juno he was known as "the conscience of American music." Blitzstein's life and career were full of wild swings, up and down and from right to left (literally!). At first a musical intellectual snob, vociferous in his condemnation of those who chose to pander to the tastes of the masses, he later became an outspoken socialist and champion of the rights of the common man. And although his stage work usually met with a lot of attention and critical success, his only major financial success came through his translation and adaptation of the work of others (his early 1950's production of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill's A Threepenny Opera). Somewhat forgotten after his beating death in 1964, Blitzstein's work seems to have been undergoing
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