playing ink
An old friend called me to play piano for the pit of a high school musical, something I don't usually do. I'll be the professional anchor for the group. Today was the first run-through.
Broadway scores are so weird: you're very rarely playing anything other than standard patterns of the various pop styles — but instead of just saying "G-minor salsa, 12 bars," they actually write out every note for you, and sometimes don't even put the chord symbols in. (I have yet to discover the guiding principle for including and excluding chord symbols in Broadway piano scores.) The result is a score that takes up huge amounts of manuscript real-estate, meaning that one song can be 30 or 40 pages, which you have to furiously flip and flip while playing with both hands.
On the other hand, you can treat it as a discipline, a way of forcing oneself to be a better reader of ink. "Ink" is a term that musicians often use in referring to notation, as opposed to simple charts or chord symbols or lead sheets. So, you'll find someone at a rehearsal asking the director something like, "Should we comp here or do you want us to play ink?" Depending on your background, playing ink may be a completely foreign concept, or it may be all you know. Classical players are regularly impressed (and somewhat mystified) by the ability of jazzers to spin florid minutes out of a few simple instructions; jazzers are regularly impressed (and somewhat mystified) by classical players' ability to sight-read through pages and pages of sixteenth-notes with barely a clam.
Of course, the fun thing is to be able to do both. While my abilities place me firmly on the side of the jazzers, I'm looking forward to the experience of spending a couple of weeks buried in ink.
Broadway scores are so weird: you're very rarely playing anything other than standard patterns of the various pop styles — but instead of just saying "G-minor salsa, 12 bars," they actually write out every note for you, and sometimes don't even put the chord symbols in. (I have yet to discover the guiding principle for including and excluding chord symbols in Broadway piano scores.) The result is a score that takes up huge amounts of manuscript real-estate, meaning that one song can be 30 or 40 pages, which you have to furiously flip and flip while playing with both hands.
On the other hand, you can treat it as a discipline, a way of forcing oneself to be a better reader of ink. "Ink" is a term that musicians often use in referring to notation, as opposed to simple charts or chord symbols or lead sheets. So, you'll find someone at a rehearsal asking the director something like, "Should we comp here or do you want us to play ink?" Depending on your background, playing ink may be a completely foreign concept, or it may be all you know. Classical players are regularly impressed (and somewhat mystified) by the ability of jazzers to spin florid minutes out of a few simple instructions; jazzers are regularly impressed (and somewhat mystified) by classical players' ability to sight-read through pages and pages of sixteenth-notes with barely a clam.
Of course, the fun thing is to be able to do both. While my abilities place me firmly on the side of the jazzers, I'm looking forward to the experience of spending a couple of weeks buried in ink.
Comments