Getting To Know You - Rodgers and Hammerstein

"Getting To Know You" is a song from the 1951 Broadway musical "The King and I," with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and music by Richard Rodgers and the 1956 film of the same name. Its well-known lyrics describe a teacher's feelings about her new pupils at the start of a school year.

The song is of great musical interest because of the motivic nature of its composition. It has an unusual structure: it is a 32-bar with four 8-measure sections all of which begin with the same melodic motive, and has not the typical AABA or ABAC form. In fact, the whole composition is written around a single motivic phrase: a three-note scalar rising eighth note triplet and a rising skip to a longer note. Depending on how strictly one defines the motive, there are fifteen uses of it in this song. Compare this to "Siempre En Mi Corazón (Always In My Heart)" https://www.irealb.com/forums/showth...ado-Kim-Gannon for another such example.

There are a number of performances of this song available. The standard is by Marni Nixon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlx6gQWfjp0 from the film sound track. Others are by Julie Andrews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbbYY-pAmlY,
James Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7E8dC2g_XA (a country version with some interesting harmonic changes), and, for nostalgia, a bouncy early 1950s performance by Betty White https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB49Meb6J18.

This song was popular when I was a boy and we sang it in class when I was in elementary school. It is another forgotten song of the 1950s that is well-received by my retirement-home audiences.

My chart pretty much follows the standard chord changes. A lead sheet for this song can be found in a number of books: The Ultimate Fake Book and The Ultimate Broadway Fake Book (both by Hal Leonard) and The Original Legal Musicians Fake Book (Hansen House). I play it as a "bounce," 120 bpm with the Jazz–Ballad Swing style. It does work with the Jazz–Swing Two/Four style as well, but I find that the cymbals in the percussion track detract from the light feeling of the tune.

I hope you enjoy playing this light-hearted, fun song as much as I do.

Getting To Know You - Rodgers and Hammerstein