On Jun 16, 2006, at 6:29 PM, John Howell wrote:
Had our first rehearsal last evening with the orchestra for the
revival version of "Kiss Me, Kate,"
And thank you for a very complete overview (for those of us who love
these details, that is!)
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?
No credit for music prep I can find right now. My wife saw it in NYC;
maybe she still has the program.
Has engraved parts become usual on Broadway these days?
Yes, from what I understand.
And since they were done in Finale, it would have been trivial to
produce a full score, so why don't they!???!
I have this argument every time I work on a show. Actually, even on
Bdway they often conduct from a copy of the orchestrator's pencil score
– NOT from the Finale-produced score! Question of accuracy, I would
think, urtext and all that.
(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.
Probably someone photocopied a page from another tune or version,
reducing it to 8.5 X 11, then cut and pasted. So the pasted part is
reduced in size. I see it (and do it! <blush>) all the time in shows
where changes are made.
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?
It means there is no proper page turn available, IOW no way to turn the
page without missing some notes. Kind of a warning, or a suggestion to
get a foldout page for that section?
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?
Laziness? Or rather, time that someone is being paid for, and they
don't want it to cost any more than the absolute minimum.
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.
Sebesky typically leaves bowings to the concert master, so they were
probably done by the original concert mistress, credited as Suzanne
Ornstein.
(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?
I see it quite a bit in the shows I have done or checked out. Kiss of
the Spider Woman, the Producers, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, all use
violin/viola doublers. I think they really try to squeeze as many
different colours out of the few players they have as is humanly
possible, and make a nice taste for the guys who are making doubling
money. There were only four string players in the Bdway pit - two
violins, one viola/violin, and one cello. I think they may have doubled
that number for the cast recording, which is easy enough to do. But
only two trumpets, one horn and one trombone? Sacrilege!
Remember, too, that these shows are not designed to be rented out, like
they were before, but designed to challenge top players 8 shows a week.
The post-run rentals are kind of an afterthought. I think this is a bad
idea, too, and companies that make show rentals more user-friendly are
rewarded by a bumper crop of sales, I am sure.
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.
Generally, the arranger specifies general sounds, and the patches are
chosen/programmed by a specialist. Modern keyboards with
sample-playback capability can use pretty much any sound they want, and
the patches are ordered so that the keyboardist can step through them
with a foot pedal in a blink. Once again, not the friendliest way to do
things for new keyboardists (or oboists!)
(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.
Yeah, those Bdway pits are an engineering marvel for space! Remember,
too, that the pits were designed for 26 or more musicians, but this
show opened with fifteen, which frees up some room.
(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 might be a New York thing, because Darcy mentioned it, too. In
Sebesky's book "the Definitive Arranger" he says "The cello ... is
scored in the bass clef except for the high register where the treble
clef is employed. In symphonic literature, the tenor clef is sometimes
used, but I find it unnecessary." This goes against what every cellist
I have ever talked to tells me. Maybe I don't have a such an
unreasoning fear of the C clefs because I studied classical trombone,
but this cello-treble clef thing seems to be catching on among
non-cellists.
Sebesky goes on to say some other things about strings that are just
plain wrong, so maybe he just has never had anyone tell him?
But he sure can make them sound nice!
Christopher
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