The Art of the Overture

Tonight I went to a fascinating talk with Laurence Maslon, Ted Chapin, Kurt Deutsch, and Thomas Shepard about the Cast Album, and how its position in the process of musical theatre has changed over time.

Listening to them discuss the various difficulties that came with LP's vs CD's vs the current streaming era got me thinking about how the very structure of a musical had changed, and by extension, what gets put on a recording. In particular, I can't get the lack of modern overtures out of my mind.

I'm not sure how I've not noticed this before, but on the recordings available, an overture is not present for the musicals to win Best Musical at the Tonys since Spamalot in 2005, other than The Bands Visit.A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder has the Overture/Prologue, but I'm not counting something less than 20 seconds as a proper overture.

I have distinct memories of hearing the overtures of R&H, Irving Berlin, Jerry Herman, and Leonard Bernstein as a young child, and being absolutely transfixed by the power of the orchestra before the voices came in to tell the story. I used to pick through my grandparents records trying to find everything referenced in the overture in the later songs. When properly orchestrated, regardless of genre, a good overture can immediately pull me into the world of the show, get me engaged, and eagerly focused as the action begins. Seeing their clear omission from the current crop of newly composed shows breaks my heart.

I've referenced my collection, so I very much might be missing some shows as outliers in my data here, but from what I can tell the overture started disappearing in the mid 1960's around the time of Hair, but it didn't completely fade out of composition trends until the RENT craze of the 1990's. They were pretty heavily revived between those periods by the British Mega Musical (Andrew Lloyd Webber particularly favors them) but the overture slowly but surely began to disappear in favor of sharply thrusting the audience into the world of the show instead of the slow immersion provided by an overture.

Of course, I did not have the ability to see every show in my collection in person in the theatre, so it is possible that overtures existed for these productions that were not committed to recording - if that is true please let me know so I can update accordingly.

Why do you think the overture has so firmly fallen out of favor with today's composers? Why do "rock" or "pop" musicals so thoroughly eschew the convention? (The only rock musical I could find with an overture was Next to Normal with a <30 intro synthesizer moment marked as an overture). Even in "classically composed" shows such as Bridges of Madison County, overtures are now omitted. Do you think it is, in this day and age, better or worse to have an overture?

StardustsChild wrote:

"Why do you think the overture has so firmly fallen out of favor with today's composers?"

Perhaps they don't want to let audiences in on what they're in for.

In the good old days, audiences listening to the overtures to South Pacific, Gypsy, or Funny Girl would be put in a highly anticipatory mood, thinking to themselves, "Wow, that sounds great."

Now, if today's audiences were to hear a compilation of non-tunes before the show began, they would think "Really, this is what awaits?? " Not the sort of sentiment to put an audience in a good mood.

Wow, who sponsored/where was the talk? I'd really like to hear Laurence Maslon and Kurt Deutsch talk about cast recordings. I know some ATW talks get made available on audio or video, maybe some others as well.

For the revival of "South Pacific" the audience was rapt during the overture, just letting all this beautiful music wash over them. Of course Michener's introduction was being projected on the curtain, so they also had that to read.

StardustsChild said: "It was the NYU Skirball program! I took an audio recording of my own for my own reference, but I can send it over to you if a professional one is not released."

Thanks, if you wouldn't mind, I'd really appreciate it. I looked online, and it doesn't look like they release recordings of the talks. I will send you a PM with my info.

Sondheim has said that the purpose of an overture is to begin getting the melodies into the patrons' heads. A song feels more familiar and hummable with repetition. So a song will be better appreciated if the audience has already heard bits of it in the overture.

The opening moments of an overture have been known to make me ugly cry, just from the excitement of what's coming. Unfortunately, as others have said, folks today tend to not realize it's part of the show. They think it's like 'warning' music to tell them to finish their conversations and begin to settle in. You can't really sush people either. They just look at you like you're nuts...or so I'm told.

Bringing the lights down helps a lot, since music on its own doesn't register as "the show" unless it's accompanied by some kind of staging. People are very casual about listening to music, particularly orchestral or instrumental, so it's easy to see why the overture is talked over or ignored. Here I am in the audience, there's a thousand people aroudn me chatting, nobody's onstage yet, I haven't been hooked by any plot or character elements, the lights are still up, and the orchestra is playing some nice music that I don't recognize or have any attachment to - nothing about this says "listen!"

I'd love to see a return of the overture, though. It surves a variety of purposes - prepping your ear with melodies, creating a buffer between the outside world and the play, giving the orchestra a moment to shine. I can easily imagine Fun Home having a little quintet (?) overture.