Spring Into Summer

 

Musical Landscapes For The Warm Months 

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Unlike most of the other Lectures-in-Song celebrating historical aspects and outsized personalities of American Popular Song, SPRING INTO SUMMER is not so much informative as it is a contemplative, pleasurable stroll through an art gallery or a beautiful natural setting, each song painting its own evocative image.

“April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom….” “Will you remember: springtime, lovetime, May?!” “It´s June in January because I´m in love…” “I´m as corny as Kansas in August, high as the flag on the Fourth of July…”

When is life sweeter than when the air is warm, the fields are green and the trees are in bloom?

Utilizing more than 50 highly “seasoned” song selections and a few precious fragments of poetry, SPRING INTO SUMMER answers those mysterious questions posed by the warm months as only the Great American Songs can: simply, sweetly, perfectly.


If you would like to engage Fred Miller for one of his Lectures-in-Song, please contact him directly at any time. For a full listing of all Lectures, click here.

Fred Miller’s Lectures-In-Song comprise a series of solo programs, each an historical, anecdotal and musical profile of some great personality or important aspect of American Popular Song. These Lectures are delivered by singer/pianist/narrator Miller at the piano, and each reflects his lifetime passion and appreciation for great music. He studied classical piano in his hometown of Albuquerque from ages 7-15 but early on gave up any notion of music as a profession. At that time, Fred assumed a musical career was either one devoted to the rigid discipline of classical music or being a freewheeling rock star, and he accurately decided he had no aptitude for either. However, at age 22, upon hearing Ella Fitzgerald sing Cole Porter, he found his calling and life’s mission.

Through the Seventies and Eighties, Miller studied and absorbed in minute detail the life and times and songs of nearly all the great American composers and lyricists who thrived during Broadway & Hollywood’s Golden Age between the two World Wars. In 1987, he founded Silver Dollar Productions in order to produce operettas, dramas, musicals and small cabarets. Silver Dollar Productions required ensemble casts, props, costumes and, most significantly, the challenges of publicity and selling tickets, and for a dozen busy years, the company presented an unbroken string of varied and highly lauded performances.

In 1999, Miller was simultaneously underwritten by both his local Hunterdon County Library and the Art Alliance of Philadelphia to present a series of six solo Lectures-In-Song, each devoted to one of the premiere Broadway/Hollywood songwriters: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen.

In presenting history, biography and psychology while sitting at a piano singing the superlative songs of his heroes, Miller has found a single performing medium that utilizes most of his intellectual and musical passions.The list of Lectures-In-Song that began with six in 1999 is now more than seventy(and growing!), a joyful tribute to the boundlessly rich field of American Popular Song.