When Will My Life Begin?
Alan Menken
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Browse piano sheets by Alan Menken on Zen Virtual Piano. Alan Menken was born on 22 July 1949 in New York City to Judy Menken, an aspiring actress and playwright, and Norman Menken, a boogie-woogie piano-playing dentist, and he grew up in New Rochelle, New York, in a home filled with music and theater, with his sisters Faye and Leah. His ambition from his earliest memories was to become a composer. A father who played boogie-woogie piano and a mother drawn to the stage give the ambition an early home. He enrolled at New York University as a pre-med student but graduated with a degree in music in 1971, then joined a theater workshop run by the Broadway conductor Lehman Engel, where he met Howard Ashman. He earned money performing in clubs, composing advertising jingles and accompanying ballerinas at practice, and a career break came when Ashman picked him to collaborate on the 1979 play God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. A pre-med path that ended in a music degree, followed by a workshop where he met Howard Ashman, puts the partnership near the start of his career. In 1982 the pair achieved significant critical and commercial acclaim with the Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, and they later adapted their score for the 1986 film; in 1987 they joined Disney to write songs for The Little Mermaid. The film won him his first two Oscars, for Best Song, “Under the Sea,” and Best Music, Original Score, and Beauty and the Beast earned him two more, for the title song and the score. A string of prizes for films shaped by songs shows how closely his work follows the stories it serves. The team was working on Aladdin when Ashman died in 1991, and Menken went on to collaborate with the lyricist Tim Rice on the Oscar-winning “A Whole New World,” taking home another Academy Award for the score; in 1996 he won his seventh and eighth Oscars for Pocahontas. A pairing of composer and lyricist runs through these films, and the awards continued after one of the pair was gone. With the lyricist Glenn Slater he composed for the stage musicals Sister Act (first performed in 2006) and Leap of Faith (2010), and he made stage adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (1994), The Little Mermaid (2008), Newsies (2012) and Aladdin (2014); Newsies earned him a Tony Award for best original score. Moving from films to the stage and back again suggests a composer at home wherever a story is sung. He has said, “Songs are a very familiar vocabulary to people and I’ve always believed that you should be able to understand not only the feeling, but the content of the song, by just hearing the music and not even the lyrics. What you’re trying to say should be that clear.” A composer who wants a song understood without its words is asking the music to carry the story by itself.
Browse piano sheets by Alan Menken on Zen Virtual Piano.
Alan Menken was born on 22 July 1949 in New York City to Judy Menken, an aspiring actress and playwright, and Norman Menken, a boogie-woogie piano-playing dentist, and he grew up in New Rochelle, New York, in a home filled with music and theater, with his sisters Faye and Leah. His ambition from his earliest memories was to become a composer. A father who played boogie-woogie piano and a mother drawn to the stage give the ambition an early home.
He enrolled at New York University as a pre-med student but graduated with a degree in music in 1971, then joined a theater workshop run by the Broadway conductor Lehman Engel, where he met Howard Ashman. He earned money performing in clubs, composing advertising jingles and accompanying ballerinas at practice, and a career break came when Ashman picked him to collaborate on the 1979 play God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. A pre-med path that ended in a music degree, followed by a workshop where he met Howard Ashman, puts the partnership near the start of his career.
In 1982 the pair achieved significant critical and commercial acclaim with the Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, and they later adapted their score for the 1986 film; in 1987 they joined Disney to write songs for The Little Mermaid. The film won him his first two Oscars, for Best Song, “Under the Sea,” and Best Music, Original Score, and Beauty and the Beast earned him two more, for the title song and the score. A string of prizes for films shaped by songs shows how closely his work follows the stories it serves. The team was working on Aladdin when Ashman died in 1991, and Menken went on to collaborate with the lyricist Tim Rice on the Oscar-winning “A Whole New World,” taking home another Academy Award for the score; in 1996 he won his seventh and eighth Oscars for Pocahontas. A pairing of composer and lyricist runs through these films, and the awards continued after one of the pair was gone.
With the lyricist Glenn Slater he composed for the stage musicals Sister Act (first performed in 2006) and Leap of Faith (2010), and he made stage adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (1994), The Little Mermaid (2008), Newsies (2012) and Aladdin (2014); Newsies earned him a Tony Award for best original score. Moving from films to the stage and back again suggests a composer at home wherever a story is sung. He has said, “Songs are a very familiar vocabulary to people and I’ve always believed that you should be able to understand not only the feeling, but the content of the song, by just hearing the music and not even the lyrics. What you’re trying to say should be that clear.” A composer who wants a song understood without its words is asking the music to carry the story by itself.
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Common questions
Eight, including two for The Little Mermaid, two for Beauty and the Beast, an award for the score of Aladdin, and his seventh and eighth for Pocahontas in 1996.
The playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman, whom he met in a theater workshop run by Lehman Engel and with whom he wrote God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Little Shop of Horrors, and then songs for Disney.
“When Will My Life Begin?”, the film’s “I Want” song, sung by Mandy Moore as Rapunzel, with music by Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater.