Musical Midwife

In a midtown Manhattan apartment, Arranger Hershey Kay and Pop Composer Jerry Herman were hard at work on a musical comedy. Milk and Honey, which will open on Broadway next month. Herman rippled a tune on the piano. "That's for Ruth's [Mimi Benzell] first meeting with Philip [Robert Weede]," he said. "Bright, but a little wistful." Kay thought a moment, concluded that the melody called for woodwinds.

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. It is a process, says Kay, that involves "crawling into a composer's mind."

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 Composer-Arranger Eddie Sauter). In the final, frenzied weeks before first night on Broadway, Kay must grind out not only the orchestrations for songs and dances, but the "bridges" between numbers, the entr'actes, and finally the overture, a chore Kay and associates sometimes finish scant hours before cur tain time. The job pays a top arranger anywhere from $10,000 to $16,000 a show.

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. I hate march music."

Many composers, including Victor Herbert and Kurt Weill, used to do their own orchestrations. But the pace has become so swift that even a musician of Leonard Bernstein's stature sometimes relies on Kay and his colleagues. One result has been an increase in the musical illiteracy rate: many a pop composer--in comparison with the Porters, the Rodgerses, the Kerns--not only is unable to orchestrate his work, but cannot even read music.

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