Had our first rehearsal last evening with the orchestra for the
revival version of "Kiss Me, Kate," and as assistant to the music
director I've been through every page of every book trying to
identify problems before we gave the books out.
First, I prayed that the music would be computer engraved, and it is,
quite beautifully. Anybody know who did the work? Someone on this
list, perhaps? It's definitely done in Finale; the giveaway is a
couple of real ugly slurs! And somebody was also smart enough NOT to
use Jazzfont, which surprises me. Somebody also finally realized
that paper is cheap and rehearsal time is expensive, and that you
break pages early for a good page turn!! It would have been done in
1999 or 2000 for the Broadway revival, reorchestrated very skillfully
by Don Sebesky. (sp?) Has engraved parts become usual on Broadway
these days? And since they were done in Finale, it would have been
trivial to produce a full score, so why don't they!???!
Almost all good, well planned page turns (I'm playing viola),
although that brings up one of my questions below. Some errors have
been caught and corrected, obviously on the master pages because they
are identical in identical books (i.e. the 3 violin books). A few,
but very few, remain. (a) The first bars of a number printed as if
they are cues, including the reduced size of the instrument
indication, but after a lot of thought I realized that they COULDN'T
be cues because the instrument indicated is the instrument in whose
book the passage is included. (Especially bad on No. 15, If I
remember correctly.) (b) Failure in a very few cases to indicate the
instrument to be played at the very beginning of a number, rather
important when each Reed book includes 3 to 6 separate instruments.
I was able to resolve most of these by comparing key signatures with
other books, but the rubrics should have been there.
OK, no problem with the indications "Segue" and "Segue as one" (the
latter meaning the same as "Attaca," which is not used). But one
rubric really has me puzzled. That is "No turn" or "V.S. no turn" at
the bottom of an odd numbered page when the music goes right on and
there MUST BE a page turn! Never seen it, can't figure out what it's
supposed to mean. Ideas?
At first I though it was a mistake to stick with the 4-bars-per-line
rule when typeset music can be more efficiently compressed. (Is that
a union rule?) Then we had our first rehearsal, and the 4-bars
really helped me when we'd made a page turn and I couldn't remember
how many bars rest were left on the previous page. OK, I'm convinced!
Typical of Broadway music, there are many instances where a number of
bars have been cut out, but atypical of the old manuscript parts,
they've simply been excised from the parts while keeping their
original bar numbers. But in every case an instruction like "[to
115]" is given, even though the next bar in the music is actually bar
115. That strikes me as a temporary expedient that I would have
removed when the intervening measures had been removed. Is there a
reason for leaving them in?
The string bowing is very well done, quite possibly by string
players, but still isn't what's needed in a Broadway pit when a small
number of strings is competing with a phalanx of wind players and a
rhythm section. We're going to be breaking a lot of slurs and ties,
just as we always do.
Andrew may have the answers to a couple of other questions, although
I'd appreciate hearing from others as well. (1) I was surprised to
find that the bass clarinet parts (the primary instrument out of 4 in
the Reed 4 book) is clearly written for a low C bass clarinet, and
the bottom three notes are used a LOT! Our bass clarinet player
discovered last night that most of those low notes are doubled by
cello, so he'll just take them up an octave, but my question is
whether low C bass clarinets have become as common as low A bari
saxes outside NYC? It's a cinch that nobody around here has one.
(2) He went kind of crazy asking for doubles. Writing mandolins into
the violin books makes some kind of sense, and i actually have 3 of
my 6 violins who double mandolin. Asking the violas to play violins
on 5 numbers, however, seems like a real stretch. Not that we
couldn't do it, but our pit is tight for space and I wouldn't want to
be juggling extra instruments and worrying about their getting
damaged, especially with 17 instruments (and in our case 8 or 9
players) called for in the 4 reed books. And they're real violin
parts, which need to be rescored for violas and dropped an octave in
some places. Is this common on Broadway scores these days? Also,
there are no ossiahs to make the English horn passages playable on
oboe, as there are in a lot of other Broadway scores. Has this
become common?
(3) The number of patches called for in the keyboard/synthesizer part
is pretty wild, and if there's any single keyboard that includes them
all there's probably only one, but he didn't specify one. (Which
does make sense, of course. I remember getting a kick out of the
specifications for an RMI keyboard complete with stop indications in
the score to "Annie," when I was the only person who actually
remembered and had worked with an RMI!!)
(4) For those who've actually worked in Broadway pits, are they
actually big enough to house a set of vibes along with the xylophone,
bells, timpani, and drum set as well as a ton of toys? We've never
been able to use vibes and never will, because we simply don't have
space for them.
(5) I panicked when I saw that the cello book was absolutely full of
treble clef. In fact, only 3 notes in tenor clef, and I'll bet they
were inherited from the old orchestration! But my first cellist
assures me that she is used to it and will enjoy the challenge. My
question is whether the use of treble in cello parts has become so
common as not to raise questions?
This is our 15th annual all-volunteer (including the creative staff
and orchestra) community summer musical, so we must be doing
something right! A lot of our wind and percussionists are from the
Community Band, and many of our strings from our Community String
Orchestra, other community orchestras, and a youth orchestra. My
bassoonist is a rising 9th grader, my 2nd cellist a rising 8th
grader, and my concertmaster a homeschooled 17-year-old, but with
some work it always comes out great. (And giving those youngsters
this kind of experience and responsibility is part of what it's all
about, as well.)
Now, to practice those [EMAIL PROTECTED]&*&[EMAIL PROTECTED] rhythms!
John
--
John Howell, Assistant Music Director
"Kiss Me, Kate," Summer 2006
"Another Openin', Another Show!"
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
VOX 231-8411; 953-1928
FAX 231-5034
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