To the musicals world

Ok, so why did I arrange those demos of Merrily? Mostly because I was bored: this isn't a sitting week for Parliament. -

Plus it's unlikely I'll ever get to use an ensemble that big for my stuff, so I thought that it might be fun to put my money where my mouth was about how the full brass band and wind choir would soften the sound. Merrily with Follies-type orchestrations. I guess mine sound more operatic, and that's the classical orchestration that I took with Ken Young, which then continued on when he conducted Portrait of a Knight and proofread the score.

When I was a teenager, I was playing 3rd trombone in concert band, big band and orchestra, so I had a few years of doing that. I don't want to be Frank or Charlie, but if you take my original shows as a sign of the kind of vocal coaching that I'm able to do, then I'd say that I can probably improve the tone of the singers.

My guess is that they're doing the film to clicks with a rehearsal piano and they haven't done the full call for the orchestra. But I also read Jonathan Tunick in Playbill talking about how they're doing a symphonic version of A Little Night Music, so it's likely that people could do Merrily that way in the future.

Opera houses have larger orchestras, so that's part of the translation process. Starobin's expanded orchestrations for Sunday were interesting, but it sounded a wee bit mushy. Doublings aren't always necessary in Sondheim, as the textures are quite stark.

As I said yesterday, orchestration is a process. So is counterpoint. So is composition. That's why classical training tends to make more freaky prodigies: the processes are centuries old.