Jonathan Tunick: Star Orchestrator

Darryn King, The EGOT Winner Behind Sondheim’s Signature Sound, NYTimes, Jan. 10, 2023.

I enjoyed this article, though I’m not very familiar with Tunick’s work, which is mostly for Broadway musicals. He’s obviously very good, for he’s won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards (hence EGOT) for it.

“But what does he do?” you ask. “He orchestrates.” “Orchestrates?” “Orchestrates.”

A composer passes along a set of lyrics “along with some form of accompaniment. That accompaniment can be a basic chord sheet, a fully realized piano part or anything in between.” It’s the orchestrator’s job to come up with a set of parts for an orchestra to perform; that job includes determining the exact instrumental composition of the orchestra. Are we dealing with a more or less full symphonic complement or a somewhat reduced (and therefore cheaper, though the article says nothing about cost) complement? In the world of big jazz bands we’d say he’s an arranger. Given the radically different timbres of the instruments, whether in a full orchestra or a reduced one, and the possibilities inherent in coming up with accompanying figures and counter melodies, the orchestrator plays a major role in determining the sound of a musical.

Thus:

More than merely making the music sound pretty or palatable, a great orchestrator “is also a playwright, telling the story and reflecting character in orchestral sound,” said Michael Starobin, who orchestrated Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Assassins.”

As the “Being Alive” example above demonstrates, orchestration “can hint at unspoken secrets,” Tunick said. “Things that the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”

And THAT’s why I’m writing a blog post about Tunick. He’s a collaborator. Along with the lyricist and the composer, he determines the musical substance to be performed in a musical, a substance realized by the musicians. Beyond that we’ve got set designers, costume designers, lighting, and whatever else is required for the complete theatrical presentation. Theatre is a collaborative art and, as such, is not well-served by an intellectual regime that remains dominated by the idea of individual genius. I suppose that’s one reason Leonard Bernstein is such an important figure, for he combined the roles of composer (responsible for the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic structure of the music) and orchestrator (everything else). As such musicals he’s worked on are more easily assimilated to the genius model.

I could go on and on about this tension, between the aesthetics of lone genius and the practical reality of collaborative art, but I won’t. But I won’t. Theater of any kind is collaborative and so are movies. We call know that, and in one way or another that collaborative nature is accommodated by critics, but they don’t like it and don’t know quite how to deal with it.

I won’t attempt to summarize King’s article. As the title indicates, it focuses on Tunick’s work with Sondheim, but mentions his work with others as well. But I will quote some bits about his background:

ONE PIECE OF MUSIC made a big impression on the young Jonathan Tunick: “Tubby the Tuba,” the 1945 children’s song, centers on a forlorn tuba who longs to play the melody instead of just the bass line. Much like “Peter and the Wolf,” the song highlighted the distinct characters of the individual instruments of the orchestra. “This idea penetrated my growing brain,” he said. “It developed into a lifelong obsession.”

“Tubby the Tuba” made a big impression on me as well, though I must confess that, at this point in my life, I only remember that I listened to the recording, but cannot recall the recording itself (the way I recall the sound of Burl Ives singing “Fiddle-De-Dee”).

And then:

While a student at what is now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, he started his own band and played in the school orchestra as well as in the All City High School Orchestra. He started writing music, majoring in composition at Bard College, before paying his way through Juilliard by performing with the school’s orchestra.

He was considerably more interested in what was happening at Birdland than on Broadway. “Musicals at the time were a little stodgy,” he said. “It was disposable popular entertainment. You’d throw it out like a used Kleenex. I was a little hipper than that.”

While in college, a girlfriend introduced him to Frank Sinatra — and the possibilities of orchestral arrangement. He was struck by the way Nelson Riddle’s arrangements on Sinatra’s breakup album “In the Wee Small Hours” provided commentary, color and context. “He was tone painting,” Tunick said.

And so he was influenced by the world of (big-band) jazz.

There’s more at the link.

Women's rights in Yiddish theatre

Terry Gross interviews pianist, conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas. The interview is interesting in various ways – getting advice from Leonard Bernstein, backstage with James Brown for a couple of days, and so forth – but I was particularly interested in his remarks on Yiddish theater. His grandfather and grandmother, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, had been important in Yiddish theater in New York City. Here he's talking about how women's right was important in Yiddish theatre.

GROSS: What did she tell you about women's rights and the disparities facing women when she was young?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory in Baltimore and then suddenly finding herself on stage as a star, pretty quickly. But she went beyond that. She wanted to know everything about the structure of the theater, and she became a very effective producer and manager and someone who paid far more attention to the whole business and organization aspect of the theater than my grandfather did, who was the kind of big dreamer and partier. And that was so unusual for a woman of those days.

I have some correspondence of hers where she's writing to some people who put into an ad in some big paper that she was going to be a part of some season they were doing. And she writes to them saying that she absolutely has not agreed to do this, and these are the conditions which they must immediately fulfill in order for this to happen. It's really very tough and straight talk. And there's a lot of stuff about her I didn't have room for in the show, remarkable things, like when she was arrested by Theodore Roosevelt.

This happened in this way - in New York, there were blue laws at the time, meaning that performances were forbidden on Sunday. But of course, in the Yiddish theater, Sunday was a very big day because Saturday was the Sabbath. So they played on Sunday. And at one point, when T.R. was police commissioner of New York, he and some of his men raided one of the Thomashefsky theaters. And he came in and he saw Bessie, who was very young and who looked much younger than she was always. And he said, look out, little girl. And she said, Little girl, my ass; I'm the star here. If anybody's being taken in, it's me.

GROSS: (Laughter) That's so funny. So she got arrested.

TILSON THOMAS: She did. That's exactly the way she told me the story, little...

GROSS: Like she insisted on getting arrested (laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: Yeah, she was going to be in the center of it. And I mean, women's rights, feminism was a very big part of the Yiddish theater, but along with a lot of other social issues. The Yiddish theater plays even the so-called shunts, sort of low, everyday plays, were about issues like women's rights, like about labor, capital and labor, child labor, about degrees of religious observance, about the whole issue of assimilation, about reproductive rights of women and also a lot about the language. Are we going to speak Yiddish? Are we going to speak English? What language at home? What language in the rest of the world?

And what about the much larger issue, which is how can it be that somebody who was such a big shot in the old country became a nobody in America, and some little schlemiel from nowhere in a tiny village has suddenly, in the United States, become such a macher, such a big shot? And what does an immigrant pool of people do to understand where now is honor? Where is tradition?

Some advice:

GROSS: So you mentioned some advice in your show that your grandmother gave you about - when you're on stage, you have to remember that the people in the uppermost balcony are the people who paid the least but are enjoying it the most, and you have to - even if you're whispering, you have to make sure that those people can hear you. How has that affected you as a conductor?

TILSON THOMAS: My way of expressing what she said to me is, what is it like for people beyond the sixth row?

(LAUGHTER)

TILSON THOMAS: That we play in such big halls sometimes in classical music, and they're halls designed to be very rich, which is on the one hand, very nice, the gorgeous sound that's there. But to get the sound to be distinct is difficult. And I sometimes tell my students that playing classical music is like making an announcement in an airport, that you hear someone say, passengers on Flight 391, the (unintelligible)..

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: ...Immediately, please.

(LAUGHTER)

TILSON THOMAS: So you're trying to make every single moment completely distinct. Another way Bessie had of saying that - she said, listen - when you're doing an accent, you've got to watch out for the ninth word. It's the ninth word that's dangerous because you're saying, I was going to the park one day, and I noticed - the most beautiful...

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: And suddenly, you know, around that - you'll suddenly drop the accent. You'll drop it. You've got to keep the contour of it all the way going through. Same thing in music.

Intimacy directors for film and stage

Did you ever wonder how actors worked things out when they had to play intimate scenes, nuder or seminude? Well, neither did I, not really. But it's an issue, isn't it. Here's a fascinating article by Laura Collins-Hughes in last month's NYTimes about Audra McDonald and Michale Shannon in "Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune". The production hired Claire Warden as the show's intimacy director:

For approximately ever, expecting performers to improvise was a widely accepted practice. It’s only in the last couple of years that helping them through it has become the work of intimacy directors.

One of the first things Ms. Warden does on a show is talk privately, one-on-one, with the actors, to learn what they’re uncomfortable with or anxious about. (“It’s kind of like going to confession,” Mr. Shannon said.) If there’s a place where they don’t want to be touched, or a part of their body that they don’t want to be seen, she will defend that boundary for them.

As she creates a choreography that achieves what the director needs for the production while ensuring it can be done safely, she includes nothing that fails to get the actors’ “enthusiastic consent.” Any response short of that she considers a no, and respects as such.

I found this particularly interesting:

So she has actors “tap in” and “tap out” of scenes in rehearsal, to formally separate art from life.

“Intimacy directors, I think,” Ms. McDonald said, “are going to be able to save many relationships and marriages down the road in theater and in film.”

Mr. Shannon, though, thinks that kind of safeguard might be more applicable to younger people.

“The irony of Audra and I doing this play,” he said, “is we’re both married with children, domesticated. Our kind of crazy days are behind us.”

Which doesn’t mean he can’t see the value of an intimacy director.

“I really did appreciate being able to have Claire, just to talk to,” he said. “But I’m not going to lie. Most of what I said to Claire was ‘I just want Audra to be comfortable.’ ”

That tap-in tap-out, that's about marking modal shifts, in the sense of behavioral mode as I've used it here.