Michael Withers asked: > >I've often wondered if there was any *convention* to the way this style of >pit band was notated. For example, if you were trying to perform with only >three players is it generally better to take the top lines of A, B and C, >or to play the A part with divisi plus the top line of B. With 'violins 1 >and 2' it would be easy.
This past summer we did "Guys & Dolls," and the violin books were "Violin A and C" and "Violin B and D." In conventional terms, it was Violin 1 (with divisi) and Violin 2 (with divisi). The orchestrator probably wrote the fiddle parts as block chords, and then split A-C and B-D to avoid having to copy (and read) a lot of 2nds, sort of like having horns 1-2 and horns 3-4 as high-low pairs. I suspect that this use of letters rather than numbers goes way back to before Lawrence Welk, maybe to when my father was playing for fraternity dances to work his way through college, and it's just a different tradition from the classical one. Remember that Local 802, AFofM, told the Broadway producers exactly what the minimum number of musicians had to be for these shows. I think for "King and I" it comes to 23 or 26. Then it's up to the composer and/or orchestrator to get the most desireable sounds out of that minimum number of people. Make one person a harpist, and you add a new dimension to the score. If you want saxes AND woodwinds, write for doublers. Write 5 violin parts for 5 violinists and you get a certain sound that is NOT the sound of a symphony orchestra. (And sound amplification was NOT used in Broadway theaters when these shows were first produced!) Which means that you really shouldn't try to cover 4 or 5 violin parts with only three players. Musically, there will be something missing, if perhaps not obvious to the audience. But it does kind of change the orchestral mindset that you need a big section. That's the movie sound; the Broadway sound is clearly different. John John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
