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The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations
Broadway's top orchestrators - Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Philip J. Lang, Jonathan Tunick - are names well known to musical theatre fans, but few people understand precisely what the orchestrator does. The Sound of Broadway Music is the first book ever written about these unsung stars of the Broadway musical whose work is so vital to each show's success. The book examines the careers of Broadway's major orchestrators and follows the song as it travels from the composer's piano to the orchestra pit. Steven Suskin has meticulously tracked down thousands of original orchestral scores, piecing together enigmatic notes and notations with long-forgotten documents and current interviews with dozens of composers, producers, conductors and arrangers. The information is separated into three main a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and
conductors; a lively discussion of the art of orchestration, written for musical theatre enthusiasts (including those who do not read music); a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; and an impressive show-by-show listing of more than seven hundred musicals, in many cases including a song-by-song listing of precisely who orchestrated what along with relevant comments from people involved with the productions. Stocked with intriguing facts and juicy anecdotes, many of which have never before appeared in print, The Sound of Broadway Music brings fascinating and often surprising new insight into the world of musical theatre.
conductors; a lively discussion of the art of orchestration, written for musical theatre enthusiasts (including those who do not read music); a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; and an impressive show-by-show listing of more than seven hundred musicals, in many cases including a song-by-song listing of precisely who orchestrated what along with relevant comments from people involved with the productions. Stocked with intriguing facts and juicy anecdotes, many of which have never before appeared in print, The Sound of Broadway Music brings fascinating and often surprising new insight into the world of musical theatre.
- GenresNonfictionMusic
672 pages, Hardcover
First published December 17, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 3, 2022
I went to this book looking for information about great-aunt Genevieve Pitot, who I knew to be a "dance composer" for certain Broadway musicals, including some by Cole Porter (Can-Can, Kiss Me, Kate). Beyond that, though, I knew nothing. What does a Broadway dance composer do? How do they work?
Even though Suskin's focus is orchestrators, his book answers my questions and does so much more, and in such an gossipy, anecdote-rich way that I had to read the entire thing -- including the compendious A-Z listings (pp. 314-607) of musicals orchestrated by his dozen or so chief orchestrators from 1920 - 2002 -- just to be sure I didn't miss anything.
As to the answers to my questions: I grew up in the classical music tradition, in which composers orchestrated their own compositions, including operas and operettas. I played in music productions in school and in the community (e.g. Camelot, 1776, The Music Man), but always assumed -- if I ever thought about it -- that the "composer" of the musical -- let's say Richard Rodgers or Frederick Loewe or Meredith Willson -- also did the orchestrations.
That turns out to be wildly wrong. As Fiddler on the Roof "composer" Jerry Bock puts it in this book, "If the musical theatre is to be considered an art form -- unlike the poem or the painting or the novel, it must be the art of collaboration, where each and every member of this creative group makes a contribution. When it works, the sum is far greater than the individual." [p. 202]
It turns out that the person who writes the music for the songs turns to other musicians to help flesh out those songs into a full-blown musical. This is true even in the case of an actual classical-music composer like Leonard Bernstein. These other musicians would include possibly an arranger -- someone to turn the songs into accompaniments to get rehearsals started with the singers -- and then an orchestrator -- someone to render the (usually) piano music into parts for the pit orchestra. Those unknowns are the stars of this book. (Among them, though, there is one name -- Robert Russell Bennett -- that will be well-known to anyone who has played orchestral pop concerts.)
And sometimes it's not just one orchestrator: sometimes it's a stable. It's to Suskin's vast credit that he put in the gumshoe research to track down who should be credited with what, because they often (usually?) didn't sign their work, and the work (the manuscript scores and parts) in many cases is scattered in archives and warehouses, or is often missing entirely.
Amazingly enough (to me, anyway), sometimes the songwriters are not themselves literate musicians. There is the class of Broadway tunesmith informally referred to as "hummers," -- they can hum a tune but not put it down in music. In one example, a songwriter played his tunes on a toy xylophone over the telephone so his musically literate arranger could "get it down."
Since the Broadway musicals are song and dance extravaganzas, another level of collaboration has to do with the dancing. At some point the songwriter/composer has to get with a dance arranger and a choreographer to convey the basic material for the hoofing. Then the two of them get to work. Here's Suskin on that process:
"Some dance arrangements are merely interludes within vocal numbers, which can be relatively simple to devise. More complicated dances and production numbers are something else again. The choreographer and dance arranger often sketch these numbers thematically; work them in sections, with the dancers; and then, once the ideas formulate, assemble the pieces. Some dance arrangers improvise on the spot, using themes from the composer's tunes; others simply play the equivalent of 'dummy' tunes, accommodating the choreographer's tempos and the dancers' accented beats. They then go home, after hours, and jigsaw the songs from the show into preordained beats. … This is exacting work. A song might well have been composed in an hour or two; the vocal, as well, can be set in a one-hour session with singers. The corresponding dance arrangement, however, can take twelve or fifteen hours' worth of rehearsal time over the span of a week, during which the arranger/piano play sits there repeating that ol' five-six-seven-eight. It is no wonder that most composers -- even those who fret and fuss over just about every aspect of production -- rarely bother with dance arrangements." [p. 194]
So that was the work of great-aunt Pitot. As it happens she was at the center of one of the gossipy bits, this one to do with the "territoriality" of composer Arthur Schwartz, for whose By the Beautiful Sea she was called in to do dance arranging by choreographer Donald Saddler when the composer did not show for rehearsals. Saddler recalled, "There was a marvelous dance in the first act, a slow adagio. Peter Gennaro and Maria Karnilova were the lead dancers. At the orchestra reading in New Haven, all the musicians applauded Pitot. Arthur Schwartz was furious -- particularly because they had all cheered, 'Bravo, Pitot.' He complained to me, 'She has taken my music and changed it!' In all the revues he had done, they had just taken the songs and repeated them for the dances. Arthur was furious. 'By the time we get to New York," he told me, 'every note that woman has written will be out.'" [p. 195]
Were they taken out? In the alphabetical list of productions, Suskin says they were "uncredited." The kind of erasure that really matters, I guess.
Of the 24 productions listed that my great-aunt was involved in, there is a (to me anyway) surprising number of less-than-successful shows that never made it out of the Philadelphia/New Haven trials (Cool Off!) or that ran for a short time, like Saratoga, which had 80 performances on Brodadway, and which supplies another one of Suskin's juicy stories:
"With everything going wrong at the disastrous tryout, [book author Edna] Ferber encountered [producer Robert] Fryer standing down by the orchestra pit one evening. 'Why don't you go into the pit and play the harp tonight?' said Edna. 'You've already f***ed up everything else.'" [asterisks in Suskin, p. 528]
Even though Suskin's focus is orchestrators, his book answers my questions and does so much more, and in such an gossipy, anecdote-rich way that I had to read the entire thing -- including the compendious A-Z listings (pp. 314-607) of musicals orchestrated by his dozen or so chief orchestrators from 1920 - 2002 -- just to be sure I didn't miss anything.
As to the answers to my questions: I grew up in the classical music tradition, in which composers orchestrated their own compositions, including operas and operettas. I played in music productions in school and in the community (e.g. Camelot, 1776, The Music Man), but always assumed -- if I ever thought about it -- that the "composer" of the musical -- let's say Richard Rodgers or Frederick Loewe or Meredith Willson -- also did the orchestrations.
That turns out to be wildly wrong. As Fiddler on the Roof "composer" Jerry Bock puts it in this book, "If the musical theatre is to be considered an art form -- unlike the poem or the painting or the novel, it must be the art of collaboration, where each and every member of this creative group makes a contribution. When it works, the sum is far greater than the individual." [p. 202]
It turns out that the person who writes the music for the songs turns to other musicians to help flesh out those songs into a full-blown musical. This is true even in the case of an actual classical-music composer like Leonard Bernstein. These other musicians would include possibly an arranger -- someone to turn the songs into accompaniments to get rehearsals started with the singers -- and then an orchestrator -- someone to render the (usually) piano music into parts for the pit orchestra. Those unknowns are the stars of this book. (Among them, though, there is one name -- Robert Russell Bennett -- that will be well-known to anyone who has played orchestral pop concerts.)
And sometimes it's not just one orchestrator: sometimes it's a stable. It's to Suskin's vast credit that he put in the gumshoe research to track down who should be credited with what, because they often (usually?) didn't sign their work, and the work (the manuscript scores and parts) in many cases is scattered in archives and warehouses, or is often missing entirely.
Amazingly enough (to me, anyway), sometimes the songwriters are not themselves literate musicians. There is the class of Broadway tunesmith informally referred to as "hummers," -- they can hum a tune but not put it down in music. In one example, a songwriter played his tunes on a toy xylophone over the telephone so his musically literate arranger could "get it down."
Since the Broadway musicals are song and dance extravaganzas, another level of collaboration has to do with the dancing. At some point the songwriter/composer has to get with a dance arranger and a choreographer to convey the basic material for the hoofing. Then the two of them get to work. Here's Suskin on that process:
"Some dance arrangements are merely interludes within vocal numbers, which can be relatively simple to devise. More complicated dances and production numbers are something else again. The choreographer and dance arranger often sketch these numbers thematically; work them in sections, with the dancers; and then, once the ideas formulate, assemble the pieces. Some dance arrangers improvise on the spot, using themes from the composer's tunes; others simply play the equivalent of 'dummy' tunes, accommodating the choreographer's tempos and the dancers' accented beats. They then go home, after hours, and jigsaw the songs from the show into preordained beats. … This is exacting work. A song might well have been composed in an hour or two; the vocal, as well, can be set in a one-hour session with singers. The corresponding dance arrangement, however, can take twelve or fifteen hours' worth of rehearsal time over the span of a week, during which the arranger/piano play sits there repeating that ol' five-six-seven-eight. It is no wonder that most composers -- even those who fret and fuss over just about every aspect of production -- rarely bother with dance arrangements." [p. 194]
So that was the work of great-aunt Pitot. As it happens she was at the center of one of the gossipy bits, this one to do with the "territoriality" of composer Arthur Schwartz, for whose By the Beautiful Sea she was called in to do dance arranging by choreographer Donald Saddler when the composer did not show for rehearsals. Saddler recalled, "There was a marvelous dance in the first act, a slow adagio. Peter Gennaro and Maria Karnilova were the lead dancers. At the orchestra reading in New Haven, all the musicians applauded Pitot. Arthur Schwartz was furious -- particularly because they had all cheered, 'Bravo, Pitot.' He complained to me, 'She has taken my music and changed it!' In all the revues he had done, they had just taken the songs and repeated them for the dances. Arthur was furious. 'By the time we get to New York," he told me, 'every note that woman has written will be out.'" [p. 195]
Were they taken out? In the alphabetical list of productions, Suskin says they were "uncredited." The kind of erasure that really matters, I guess.
Of the 24 productions listed that my great-aunt was involved in, there is a (to me anyway) surprising number of less-than-successful shows that never made it out of the Philadelphia/New Haven trials (Cool Off!) or that ran for a short time, like Saratoga, which had 80 performances on Brodadway, and which supplies another one of Suskin's juicy stories:
"With everything going wrong at the disastrous tryout, [book author Edna] Ferber encountered [producer Robert] Fryer standing down by the orchestra pit one evening. 'Why don't you go into the pit and play the harp tonight?' said Edna. 'You've already f***ed up everything else.'" [asterisks in Suskin, p. 528]
April 6, 2021
This must have been a monumental amount of research. Fascinating personal anecdotes and overall super interesting.
October 24, 2011
Very good! An eye-opening look at how musicals used to be done. A little overwhelming when it got to specifics about each of the orchestrators, but fantastic as an overview. Although I understand why Suskin would be hesitant to talk about orchestrating musicals in the present, I wish he would have delved into it to see how the process has changed over the years with union rules, fewer (and sometimes longer-running) shows, and new technologies both for notating/copying and in the pits themselves.
February 25, 2015
I absolutely loved this book and know nothing more about music than whether I like it. It's a fun read. (Though I had to turn to Wikipedia for definitions of certain music terms.) Full of juicy gossip about the Golden Age, and a chapter I especially enjoyed about sitting in the pit--with Sondheim himself--for a "Sweeney" revival w / Bryan Stokes Mitchell. Fascinating.
April 14, 2014
This is a seemingly exhaustive book about the "Golden Age" orchestrators of American musicals. It has plenty of trivia and covers many aspects of the production of a Broadway musical. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews