(A series of articles about how new musicals come to pass.)
Preproduction: the period of time during when work is done on a show prior to the first rehearsal.
What are little copyists made of?
The copyist as artist. Not only is his penmanship beautiful, so is his style and ability to present a lot of complex material in a clear, incontrovertible and attractive way.
The copyist as musician. He knows music, how instruments transpose, all about notation and special notation, about chord symbols, about the instruments themselves.
The copyist as copy editor. Because of time pressures, an orchestrator will resort to a form of shorthand which players have rarely seen. It's up to the copyist to "translate this shorthand." And in his rush to get things done in the impossibly short amount of time, the orchestrator may, yes, make a mistake or two. Copyists will often uncover wrong notes, notes out of an instrument's range and a variety of other notational errors.
The copyist as civic engineer. When a musician has to take his hands away from his instrument to turn a page — surprise! — the music stops. It's up to the copyist to figure out a way to lay out the music on the page so that a period of rest occurs around a page turn. This sounds deceptively simple, but many times there will be insufficient or no rests in a number, so the copyist must figure out how to make the impossible possible.
The copyist as organizational master. Copyists must constantly be on top of thousands of details. Did the latest draft of the latest version of the fourth section of number 13 come in from the orchestrator? Did the last set of changes to the third horn part get added to the conductor's book? Who's copying the wind parts for the finale? Generally, the supervising copyist will maintain a list of all the numbers of the show with areas for each stage of the process:
- Score received from orchestratrator (date and by whom)
- Score duplicated
- Score distributed for copying of parts (date and to whom)
- Copying of parts completed (date and by whom)
- Parts reproduced
- Parts librarianed (see below for definition)
- Out of our hands (date and to whom)
- Score duplicated
With everything about the show in constant metamorphosis it's very important (and very difficult) to keep track of a show's twenty-five or fifty numbers and musical cues. (And bear in mind that many of the larger Broadway copying houses will do more than one project at a time. Sometimes a supervisor can get spread pretty thin.)
Librarianianianianing
Some parts of the music preparation process are considered "library
