Klarinet Archive - Posting 000007.txt from 1994/03

From: James Langdell <James.Langdell@-----.COM>
Subj: Benefit of playing for Musicals
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 16:16:53 -0500

One thing that playing for musicals added to my experience
was my first opportunity to *perform* music many, many times
for different audiences. This can be an enlightening contrast
to most school performance situations where a concert or a recital
is worked on for weeks or months, and then performed only
once or twice.

I learned a lot during my senior year in college when I got
into the minimal pit band (flute, two clarinets, cello, piano,
drums) for the Eureka Theater's production of a Rogers and Hart
show, "The Boys from Syracuse." I played for about two months
of a 4-5 shows-a-week run. I realized I'd never played *any*
music for audiences anywhere near as many times as I had the
arrangement of that musical. There was the challange of looking
for ways to keep it fresh, and the constant opportunity to do so,
thanks to the changing audience every night.

The peculiarities of this staging contributed to the sense of
the band's close involvement with the sho. Obviously, with a six
piece band, nobody could slack off because each player's lines were
so exposed. Also, the band was placed on the stage, behind the
actors/singers, with little shielding from the audience's view of us
and our view of the performers and audience. The theater was a 99-seat
house, so night-to-night differences in the personalities in the audience
made the show come across differently.

After the show had extended its run past its second month, I left
it to return to school full time. The show moved to a bigger
theater in San Francisco and ran for about a year after that, with
a larger, more standard band and a more traditional front-of-the-stage
pit. I filled in a few times in that setting, which was a quite
different experience from the earlier "chamber" version of the show.

Anyway, back to the benefits of repetition... This experience left me
wanting to apply the benefits of repeated performance to chamber music.
I hoped to find an opportunity to have a chamber music group play
frequently (weekly, perhaps) at a cafe or coffee house. The performers
would be able to repeat music in front of different audiences to
explore all the different content each piece might hold. At the same
time, this would be a place where an audience member could hear
the same piece repeatedly, and hear something different in it each time.

I'll continue this thread (the dream of a chamber music coffee house)
another time. Meanwhile, can anyone speak of other experiences where
they found it enriching to perform music repeatedly?

--James Langdell jamesc@-----.com
Sun Microsystems Mountain View, Calif.

   
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