With apologies for this day-late posting:
Before taking up the first subject of our new season of 2022-23, we have an interesting follow-up to my summer bonus post, Spaying the Fella. It comes from longtime friend and colleague Jon Alan Conrad, and concerns the splendid original orchestration for Most Happy Fella, by Don Walker. Jon is currently completing full-score critical editions of Sondheim’s Follies, for MUSA, and Weill’s One Touch of Venus, for the Kurt Weill Edition, both coming soon. And as Jon points out in his letter, not many musicals receive full-score treatment, to say nothing of critical editions, so the exceptions are worth some attention. (N. B.: Jonathan Tunick did Sondheim’s orchestrations, while Weill, a thoroughly developed “modern classical” composer, for the most part did his own, even on Broadway, though with occasional assistance—including, Jon tells us, the overture to One Touch of Venus, in a still-unidentified hand.) Jon knew Don Walker and talked with him at length on matters of orchestration. Here’s what he has to say:
“Despite Don Walker’s origins in jazz (he got his start creating arrangements for popular bands of the period), when he needed to score “legit” he completely knew how to do it, including the elimination of Broadway’s usual “rhythm section” (piano or guitar providing a steady beat) in favor of a more classical distribution of rhythmic elements among the other instruments. That’s a big part of why it works well, and balances correctly, even with expanded string sections in an opera house. The titles that best show his mastery are Carousel and The Most Happy Fella, both scored for relatively large combinations (around 40), with honorable mention for his smaller-scale operetta-style orchestration of She Loves Me.
“For those interested in studying full scores, Walker’s technique can be interestingly compared with that of another master orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, in the scrupulously edited critical edition of Kiss Me, Kate (ed. David Charles Abell & Seann Alderking, Alfred Music, 2015). Bennett orchestrated “So in Love” in Act 1, Walker its Act 2 reprise. Of course, the situations, characters, and original singers are different, and it’s not a matter of one being ‘better’ than the other. But their different approaches provide a great deal to think about and learn from.”
Jon also notes that in reprinting my 1991 New York Times article on The Most Happy Fella, I reproduced its erroneous reference to Walker’s first name, as “Dan.” At least I got it right later on in my post. Apologies, 31 years late, for that oversight, and my thanks to Jon for his expert commentary. With opera companies programming some of the more “legit” musicals with increasing frequency, and with the assignment of orchestrational duties to a second (or in some cases, third and fourth) musician constituting one of the defining differences between a musical and an opera, this scholarship assumes ever-greater relevance to performance practice. As Jon notes, the assembly of a musical is a tangled affair, differing from case to case. We may have occasion to return to it, especially as it relates to operatic practices.