Dr Elmore - are you editing the parts, fixing the parts, re-orchestrating, or restoring? Enquiring minds want to know
About five years ago, I mentioned to Susanna Moross Tarjan, the composer's daughter that the last engraved vocal score she paid to have done had some errors. Early in 2003, she called me and asked me to edit a new one. I went through her father's ms piano-vocal, had it entered into computer, checked the lyrics against the published libretto and the recording, and went through the new score, perhaps too quickly, with the original conductor's score. Now that I'm finally correcting the orchestra parts at Tams-Witmark, I'm finding a million errors I let slip past me, so this venture next month will guarantee as much of a corrected piano-conductor score as possible without having erome Moross around to answer several big questions, like why the score they lease has a musical number in a different key from the band parts!
The orchestra parts leased by Tams-Witmark were made from the uncorrected Broadway parts, in some case, so I'm constantly checking each note against my new piano-conductor score and the original parts with correections - on file at Tams-Witmark. The librarian who prepared trhe materials in the mid-1950s had neither the penmanship nor the editorial skills of his replacement, Tams-Witmark's librarian emeritus Dale Kugel, whose work is a model for us all, so his recopied masters have his own errors. The show doesn't make enough income to warrant the cost of copying new band parts, so the new masters I'm providing will be correct as far as possible but often still lousy to read. I'm copying new pages, tidying what I can, but I'm primarily trying to reconcile everything.
In 1977, Moross wrote a new version of "My Love Is On the Way": same tune and harmony but with a 9/8 bar replacing the fourth 6/8 bar in a phrase, most likely to get rid of the dum-de-dum feeling and give Penelope an occasional breath. That and the original finale "We've Just Begun" are the only changes in the score. However, they were handed out as inserts, so they are finally in the new band parts where they belong. The Broadway ending "Going Home Together" was turned into the Curtain Call by Moross. We did find in the original Broadway parts Exit Music and Entr'Acte, and I've put them into the new vocal score as appendices.
This score is so fantastic. I'm living for the orchestra rehearsals just to hear how the whole score fits together. Each musical sequence seems to be composed along the lines of theme and variations.
