no more live music on broadway?

This op-ed from the New York Times has been going around the internet the last couple days.  It concerns the use of a synthesizer in place of half of the strings in the pit orchestra in the Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story:

Now, after 500 performances, our producers have told us and our union that in order to cut costs they will chop our string section in half, releasing five musicians and “replacing” them with a synthesizer piped in from another room. I don’t think Lenny would have approved.

The sweeping grandeur of Broadway’s classic scores would be impossible without master orchestrations. I would argue that the orchestrator’s crafty magic is perhaps best appreciated from the pit below the stage — by musicians who thrill (or despair, as the case may well be) to a given score night after night. To my ear, the orchestration of “West Side Story” towers above all others, a masterwork of complexity and beauty that still reveals marvels to my colleagues and me.

The score’s eye-popping instrumental forces, too long to list here, involve everything from bass saxophone to slide whistle to three piccolos. Bernstein crafted 11 independent string parts to render his sublime love songs: “Maria,” “Tonight,” “Somewhere” and “One Hand, One Heart.”

Soon, though, if all goes according to plan, these songs will be produced by a skeletal string section accompanied by an inert, artificial, electronic device, which an engineer will try to manipulate, hoping to deceive audiences into thinking it’s the real thing. (I must note that I will still be there, lest this sound merely self-serving.) The producers are doubtless betting audiences won’t notice the difference. But if you happen to be listening, as Lenny would have suggested you do, you will notice.

Producers cite cost-cutting as the reason for this move.  It makes me wonder what would happen if half the onstage cast were lip syncing to a recording.  Would the audience be blase about this as well? Ballet companies regularly replace entire orchestras with recorded ensembles, and audiences still come out in numbers for those performances.  But they would not if there were a live orchestra and a video projection of the ballet action, I would guess.  The difference, of course, is that the orchestra in these productions is the supporting player.  However, no composer that I know of is writing for a synthesizer.  They’re writing for a live orchestra of living, breathing musicians, who bring the intangible of live performance to every performance.  Ballet dancers uniformly say that they prefer dancing to the energy of a live orchestra or ensemble over a recording, despite or perhaps because of the variables that a live performance introduces into the experience.

Perhaps an audience revolt over the loss of live music in the pit is a worthwhile proposition.  Some companies, Oregon Ballet Theatre, for example, have had to cut the orchestra on a temporary basis to balance the budget in extreme circumstances, but have always stated their firm intention to provide a live orchestra whenever possible.  Others, however, are not so dedicated to keeping live musicians in their performance experience.

Summer is the time for tourists to visit New York and partake of the great Broadway shows – so ask at the ticket window if a live orchestra is being used, and let your conscience be your guide.