My question for Ask BK Day is actually for DR Elmore.
Dear DR Elmore,
When you arrange a song, do you hear all the parts in your head at once? Or do you have to try them all out one at a time?
It's even more complicated than you could imagine, DR Laura; I sort of hear them as I see them written on the score paper. It's a very abstract way of working. At times I feel like a spiritualist doing "automatic writing," as though something takes over and say "this is what you hear," and at other times I wait for something to come along and say "you have to put down something." So you do, and hope it can be fixed in rehearsal.
Larry, is it a given that there will be an arranger in the loop between the composer and yourself? Is there much overlap between the arranging and the orchestrating? Or does it just all depend?
It all depends on the project, DR Jeanne. Sometimes the composer gives you a full piano copy to use and sometimes the composer gives you a rough sketch and his ideas for you to expand. On a lot of BK's albums, he and the musical director worked out the arrangements for me to work from. When I worked for the Men's Chorus, I did a choral arrangement and the accompaniment for rehearsal and two months later did an orchestration. On FINIAN'S RAINBOW, except for the last cue that I wrote with Joshie, everything was written by Rob Berman abd all I had to do was score it to sound as though Don Walker or Russell Bennett wrote it in 1947. Josh and I took Rob's original idea for the final cue, which sounded too unlike the rest of the score and improved it for him.
I did a theatre job over ten years years ago where I was given nothing but lead sheets, and I had no idea what the score should sound like because the writers were nice people but no help at all. I was out of town at the theatre for six weeks working on the production. I spent two days walking around rehearsals terrified to begin anything because I DID NOT KNOW WHAT THE SHOW SHOULD SOUND LIKE and no one was any help. I'd go to one rehearsal where they were coaching singers and the pianist played it like a rock song, and then I'd go to a dance rehearsal where the same lead sheet sounded like dum-de-dum-de-dum. After two days of hearing from the writers "we can't wait to hear what you do" I thought, okay, I have freeze this show and they're going to fire me after the first band rehearsal. I sat down and wrote all the arrangements as I orchestrated thinking, day after Thanksgiving they're gonna sack my ass. Well, at the sitzprobe, the day after Thanksgiving, the band read dwn the opening number, the ensemble sang it and the director burst into tears and said, "It's wonderful!" They owe me big.
