The Boys That Make the Noise

Broadway was busy last week with show business and applause. But there was little applause, because there was little recognition, for four of the busiest, most accomplished men on Broadway.

According to legend, the composers of Broadway's musical shows are one-finger pianists who can read music barely, if at all. The legend is exaggerated. If they had a mind to, composers like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern could turn out a musical score complete from piccolo to glockenspiel. In the more leisurely days of Victor Herbert, they would have. But today, the writing of musical comedies, like the manufacture of automobiles, is a production-line job. The composer thinks up the tunes, outlines the continuity, sometimes even writes out a more or less complete piano score. But the finished orchestral score, the music as it is heard in the theater, is written by specialists.

In the past 20 years three hard-working men have written 90% of all the musical comedy orchestrations that have hit Broad way. They are Kansas City-born Robert Russell Bennett, Vienna-born Hans Spialek, New Jersey-born Don Walker. To these three has recently been added Oklahoma-born Ted Royal, who specializes in hot jazz arrangements. These four do most of their work in the offices of one of Tin Pan Al ley's biggest song publishers, Chappell & Co. Their average job of musicomedy tailoring takes about two weeks.

300,000 Notes. The job often starts while the show is in rehearsal and the cast is already learning its lines and tunes. The orchestrators study the composer's sketches, watch the numbers being built up in rehearsal, make their musical plans accordingly. For example, a singer like Ethel Waters can stand Wagnerian power house orchestration; not so the average soprano soubrette. For final choruses, Bennett, Spialek, Walker and Royal provide what they call a Paramount-Public-Fox finish. But while they are on the job, living on coffee, sleeping only four or five hours a night, producing some 300,000 notes costing around $6,000, they also contrive many skillful orchestral delicacies.

Walker and Royal have the popular, tuneful touch. Bennett and Spialek, both composers of long classical training, specialize on choruses and symphonic build ups. But sometimes one of the men does an entire score. Of current Broadway shows Richard Rodgers' Oklahoma! is entirely Bennett's. Fats Waller's Early to Bed is entirely Walker's. Cole Porter generally insists on using all four. Few musical-show composers will have anyone else.

Fitting Finish. Outwardly the orchestrators are reverent toward the composers whose work they are hired to pull into shape. But sometimes it takes a lot of pulling. Fats Waller, for example, gave Walker little more than some snatches of melody jotted on the backs of a couple of envelopes. But sometimes apparent trouble is easy to solve. While working on George Abbott's Best Foot Forward, Walker was approached by Gene Kelly, who staged the dances for the show. Kelly had definite ideas. Roared he: "The orchestra should go de-bump-bump-bump, wha-ah, crash, zip, bang, de-bump, de-bump, bzzzz, wham!" It's got to be terrific, an earthquake, a tidal wave, the end of the world!" Walker nodded quietly, went back to his office and came up with the Paramount-Public-Fox finish. Kelly was beside himself with delight.

Until recently musical circles considered it disgraceful for a composer to hire an orchestrator. In 1933, when Sigmund Romberg took some of the numbers Spialek had orchestrated for his Rose of France to Paris, Romberg copied off Spialek's orchestrations in his own handwriting for fear he would lose face with the French producers. But in show business, as elsewhere, there is a premium on speed and efficiency. And specialists not only orchestrate faster but better than most musicomedy composers. In the U.S. today only German-born Kurt Weill (The Beggar's Opera, Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark) does every note of his own orchestrating himself.

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