Although Sondheim's dazzling accomplishments as a rhymester appear to be uncontested, it is sometimes said that his composing doesn't measure up to his lyric writing…. For my part, I find Sondheim as resourceful a composer as he is a lyricist. As a writer of sophisticated show tunes, he was schooled in a theatrical tradition that reached a peak with [Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein], and he has sought to advance that tradition in the face of its seeming decline. In "Company," he experimented with the genre in many provocative ways; in "Follies," he openly imitated earlier song-writers; in "A Little Night Music" (which contains his most successful song, "Send in the Clowns"), he attempted to impose stylistic unity on the score by using only three-quarter time and several of its variants. We have in Sondheim the classic figure of the innovative musician working within familiar forms, but he...