BWW Exclusive: Conversations and Music with Michael Feinstein- The Music Library!

Hi, welcome to Conversations in Music with Michael Feinstein

This is the Gershwin Gallery in my home here in Los Angeles

and behind every door is something, because I have, over the 20-some years I've been in this house

collected a lot of things. One of the things that I never imagined would come into my life

when I was much younger and playing and singing piano and voice

in different restaurants and piano bars was to amass a collection of orchestrations

Now, orchestrations are very precious to me because we live in a time where I often see them destroyed

and thrown away or undervalued. Even archives and institutions don't wish to keep them

because they take up so much space. and they're just reams and reams of paper

Well, orchestrations, it's true, aren't worth much unless they're performed. And that is why I helped to create the Great American Songbook Foundation

where we have an amazing collection of orchestral arrangements. And it is my ambition to try and get those things performed

by working with students, by making the charts available to orchestras, to getting them out there

because we're talking about American musical history that is equally important to the achievements of the songwriters

like Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller and Duke Ellington

and the later writers Marvin Handlisch, Cy Coleman, Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lloyd Webber

whoever you name, whoever your favorite writers are, they all depend on somebody to do orchestrations of their works for theater or for commercial recordings or for films or for whatever

And so orchestrations are very important. Now orchestrations are usually done on a computer. They're done virtually and exist in PDFs. And so the physical music is not as important. But when one considers all of the music that has been thrown away, it's amazing to think that so much is lost. We have so much and yet so much is lost

And I can attest to the volume of music that builds up for any person who is in the performing arts

if they are singers who use orchestrations like me, the collection just grows

So I'm going to show you my personal music library. These are, for the most part, just my orchestrations that I use in my performances

And even though if you've been watching these videos, you've seen me play at the piano

but I regularly work with symphonies. I work with big bands. I work with different jazz combos and different combinations of instruments

and each one of those requires a different orchestration of different instrumentation

different sizes for different combinations of instruments. And so it gets into all kinds of arcane technical stuff that I hope not to bore you with but all of these are precious to me and I in the process of digitizing them but of course I trying to digitize all of this material And all of these things will eventually end up at the Great American Songbook Foundation

And so, anyway, let's see what's behind this drawer. So, in here we have reams of music

The ones in these tall yellow envelopes are the scores from which a conductor will conduct the music

These are full scores. So a full score. I'm trying to find one

Oh, gosh, where did that come from? Number 10 in the living. I'm trying to find a score to show to you

I'll find one that will give you a sense of. Oh, here's one

Okay. This is one that has been typeset freshly from Johnny Mandel's manuscript

This is an arrangement that Johnny did in 1956 for Dick Hames of It Might as Well Be Spring

So it's been newly typeset, which makes it much more readable. But this is something that has not been heard since it was recorded by Dick Hames in 1956

and I'm going to be performing it hopefully later this year. So that's an example of a score

But because my library started back in the 1980s, late 1980s, before there was any such thing as computer engraving

a lot of this material is manuscript material, and because of that, it needs to be digitized

Like this is my symphonic arrangement of Swonderful, which I first performed symphonically in 1987 with the San Francisco Symphony

and then I revised the ending in August of 1984, necessitating copying a new set of parts

And so you have to have parts for every single member of the orchestra, of course

and you will often find all sorts of notations that the players will add to these scores

sometimes making a comment if they're not happy about something, or sometimes making a drawing of something

or more often just making notes that the conductor gives them about how they want the music to be played

This is played in four. This is in two. We go into two there

The first part, this flutist has a notation that the strings are playing

The voice starts at measure 14. These are all notes that the musicians make so they can follow along and not lose their place in the midst of a performance

So this room has filled up with music because there is so much

Because about eight years ago I started conducting orchestras as well So I not only have my vocal music but I also have the instrumental music that I conduct with the Pasadena Pops or the Kravis Center Pops Orchestra or sometimes with other orchestras

And it's great fun to be able to revive and play arrangements by such Hollywood greats as David Rex and Herbert Spencer and David Rose and Andre Previn

And often I find these arrangements either in an archive or a garage or in somebody's basement or call the relative of somebody who worked in Hollywood and ask if they still have their relative's music

So sometimes I'm lucky and the music is saved and I can revive it and play it

In the case of Andy Williams, after Andy Williams passed away, his son, Bobby, generously gave me his music library with the caveat that I helped to keep it alive and helped to get it played

And of course, I have been doing that. And that consists of 150 boxes of his arrangements, which are in Carmel, Indiana

and it's like the most amazing treasure chest of arrangements that not only chronicle Andy Williams' career so beautifully

because he saved a large amount of his library, but also chronicle popular music because he was performing in the early 1950s

So there's pop arrangements from the 50s and there's symphonic arrangements when he later did symphony shows

and there's arrangements for his phonograph records and then there's from all of his television shows

So there's all kinds of material. And so I have incrementally been digitizing a lot of the Andy Williams music

And this, for example, is the original Johnny Mandel manuscript score of Hello, Young Lovers

which Andy originally performed on his television show, and that's in Johnny Mandel's hand

and I have revived this and have been performing it, and it's really a fantastic arrangement

and these charts truly are timeless, especially Andy Williams' Christmas arrangements, which are perennials that are played by many people every year

and so I'll put that back later, I think. and then there are these books you see when one performs they have to have a book with the music

in place these are the books for my broadway show all about me which you can see they did

these beautiful volumes and i'm glad to have them glad to be able to preserve the music we had a

12-piece band in that show and some great arrangements by everyone from John Otto to Dick Lieb

And so that's this material here. Then if we go over here like Love just around the corner there are more boxes of these arrangements and I sometimes will purchase a collection

of music if it isn't donated to the foundation and I want to preserve it or somebody, for

whatever reason, for legal situations, sometimes has to sell something for an estate. I've

been able to acquire certain things. I have a set of Gershwin arrangements done for a

DECA records, three record set in 1960 called The Gershwin Years, and it's a whole set of

symphonic charts on just about every major Gershwin song for symphony orchestra, for

big band, and for vocal chorus, and these are the choir parts. These are combo arrangements

for when I perform at the piano with a small group. So that's what these are

So these are all for smaller instrumentation. And the parts pretty much look like other parts

but you can see these are older ones because they are hand-copied

and they have become yellowed with age. Now this is a trio arrangement for that

So depending on what instrumentation I'm going to be using, I have to pull out different charts

Now let's see if I can put this back where I found it. I think I will do that later as well

So that's to give you an idea of what is involved as a performer, that one has to take care of all this material

And it's such a big job. It's a full-time job for someone. And I have had a full-time archivist working with me for many years to help keep all of this stuff in order

Because often when an orchestra will use these charts, they will come back

and we have to go through every book for every instrument and make sure that all the parts have come back to us

that they are playable, so they'll be ready to go the next time they're used. Because what has often happened in collections that we've gotten for the foundation

there are things that are missing, or sometimes the scores are missing, because the conductor would keep the scores

and they were the musical director for, let's say, Andy Williams. And so some of the Andy Williams charts have the parts

but the scores stayed with the conductor, and Lord knows where those went

even though there have been situations where the scores have miraculously turned up again

This is another Andy Williams chart from which we did a photocopy, a scan

so we wouldn't send out the original charts, but this is a rather famous holiday arrangement

Happy Holiday, the Holiday Season, arranged for The Andy Williams Show by Eddie Caron

with whom I worked many years later. And all of this gibberish translates into beautiful orchestral music

So that is a glimpse of a music library, and I'll see you later

Thank you