“Young At Heart”

 

Growing Older Gracefully…And Singing About It.

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5 Minute VIDEO SAMPLER

In American Popular Music, love songs abound. Most are written from the standpoint of being young, in the early throes of intense romance, all of life lying ahead.

Question: were most of us clever enough to take full advantage of youth? Were those years really like those wonderful, romantic songs? One song laments “Youth is wasted on the young.” A kinder assessment is that things increase in value as supply diminishes: it´s true of diamonds and gold, it´s true of time, it´s true of Life and all its blessings, romantic passion included.

YOUNG AT HEART is for those of us past the point where most of our lives lie ahead. But this is NOT to bemoan the passage of time! On the contrary, we offer a musical & poetic celebration of life´s ups and downs expressed with the infinitely varied wisdom of our greatest composers and lyricists.

Aging has countless facets, at least as many as YOUNG AT HEART´s creative sources: Lerner & Loewe, Stephen Sondheim, Amanda McBroom, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, Sigmund Romberg, Yip Harburg, classic Victoriana, Stephen Schwartz, the Beatles, Noel Coward, Jerry Herman, Michel Legrand, Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Leslie Bricusse, Harold Rome, Gordon Jenkins, Carolyn Leigh, George & Ira Gershwin…

It´s a blessing to survive youth and grow older gracefully, and YOUNG AT HEART provides a musical road map, a look back, a look ahead, all of it a pleasure.


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.