Word: kay
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kay should know. Such distinguished Broadway musicals as On the Town and Candide owe their instrumentation to him, and other arrangements of his are heard repeatedly on television and in the movies. Along with such men as the veteran Robert Russell Bennett (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Camelot), Don Walker (Carousel, Me and Juliet), and the team of Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin (West Side Story), Kay is a master arranger in the pop field-a kind of musical midwife whose job it is to take an embryonic hit and nurse it to lusty life...
Sexy or Sad? Arranger Kay generally starts crawling with anything from a whistled melody to a piano sketch of the show's principal tunes, provided by the composer. Then he finds out how the composer or director wants them done-schmalzy, light or heavy, jolly or sad. It is his responsibility to determine the orchestra composition, which may number from 18 to 35 instruments. For Leonard Bernstein's rowdy On the Town, he accentuated brass and percussion; for last winter's The Happiest Girl in the World, he relied heavily on strings and woodwinds...
...Kay cannot really get down to work until the show goes into rehearsal. In all musicals since the Oklahoma! revolution, songs have been so tightly interwoven with the plot that each production change in rehearsal can mean a revised orchestration. Once song and dance have been set on stage, giving Kay some idea of their order and length, he begins to make tentative notes for instrumentation. About two weeks before the out-of-town opening, he gets down to serious work, sometimes assisted by as many as four other arrangers (his partner in his Milk and Honey assignment is Jazz...
Classical Trend. Hershey Kay, 41, got into his present work largely to escape playing the cello. The son of a Philadelphia printer, he studied cello at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, played in various pit orchestras, began getting his first arranging commissions in the early '40s, by 1944 was working on Broadway productions. Although he thinks the trend is toward "classical orchestration," Kay does not necessarily follow the trend. "When I did Cakewalk," he says, "I became an expert on Negro music; with Western Symphony, an expert on cowboy music; and with Stars and Stripes a march-music king...
Best Reading The Way to Colonos, by Kay Cicellis. A young Greek writer has borrowed characters and situations loosely from Sophocles, and the result is a trio of remarkably good short stories, touched by tragedy...