The recent controversy over the new musical Here Lies Love and its planned prerecorded accompaniment has been extremely divisive.   As has become customary in the 2020s, partisanship and a lack of perspective are clouding the issue.  It is not at all black-and-white, and like many other issues generating argument in our time, its understanding and resolution require both historical context and analysis of the intents and motivations of both “sides.”  (I realize that complexity is not in fashion; neither are research nor reading long articles.  I hope you will take the time to do both.)

[I have a dual bias here that I must confess: I am at once a devout union man who has spent a long career championing the cause of live music in the theatre and distrusting people who handle money, and also an avid user of musical technology, including the emulation of real instruments, which means that I am guilty of having replaced musicians with synthesizers—I know that many of you have, too—but not for profit.]

First off, the un-inclusion of live musicians in theatrical accompaniment is nothing new.  The great majority of discussions about determining the configuration of a band/orchestra for a musical theatre project revolve around the elimination of musicians and their replacement by synthesized or prerecorded music, and they have for quite some time.  (Just take a look at some of the social media feeds dedicated to theatre musicians and especially to music directors; you’ll see what I mean.)  From high schools to Broadway, there are many participants in theatrical undertakings who are eager to 1) save and earn money, 2) bypass the musical challenges of some theatre music, and 3) utilize the latest technology in their productions, whether it warrants doing so or not.

Let’s examine why.

The money part is simple.  Of course, producers want to make money.  That’s their job.  That’s the “biz” of “showbiz.”  Without making money, there wouldn’t be any jobs at all.  Musical theatre is a commercial art form, at least insofar as commercial productions go.  (There is a large part of the theatre world that still puts originality and fine art over profit, but that’s not the topic of this article.)  It certainly appears as if producers’ avarice has increased in recent years—in this regard, they are no different than other corporate heads of other industries.  Yes, it’s a grab-and-go world we live in, much to the dismay of many.

Academic institutions now routinely use synthesized parts and prerecorded tracks provided by the publishers and renters of theatre scores.  This mitigates some of the musical difficulties that many theatre scores present.  One can see why this is a rational choice for these productions, but it is easily argued that any show can be performed with an imaginative homemade orchestral reduction, or maybe just a small band based around a piano.  (Do people still use pianos?)  Evident here is that the indoctrination of young theatre musicians to modern technological options begins in school.

Modern sampling and recording techniques have made many synthesized theatre accompaniments virtually indiscernible from their acoustic counterparts.  Musicians spend countless hours in front of their computers creating tracks that are ultra-realistic, and emotionally powerful.  Even their reactivity to the various things that can go wrong during a performance has been addressed, in performance apps such as MainStage and Ableton Live.  Tempting, isn’t it?

Next, a little history.

Musicians have been tussling with producers over band sizes since I entered the business, which is before many of my loyal readers were born.  When I started out on Broadway, the minimum orchestra sizes assigned to each theatre were longstanding, hard-and-fast rules, that over time had become untenable an increasingly modernized and consumerist musical environment.  In two separate re-negotiations between the Musicians’ Union and the League of Producers and Theatre Owners, ten years apart, these minimums were eroded significantly, but many remain in place.  Over time, these minimums continued to ensure that the great majority of music on Broadway (which sets the standards for all other musical theatre production) used live musicians in their accompaniment.

To mitigate the disparity between changing musical styles and the union requirements, a compromise was agreed upon in the mid-1990s: the “Special Situations” clause.  Under this ruling, a production could argue that if it did not aesthetically require the contractual minimums, an exception would be made.  The panel that made these decisions was comprised of select “experts” on both fronts of the argument, and if an agreement was not reached among them, the matter would be decided by a neutral arbitrator.  This mechanism has not proven very reliable (see below), is extremely arcane, and has too easily succumbed to bias or misunderstanding of the conflict.

Let’s look at what I just referred to as “an increasingly modern and consumerist musical environment” and “changing musical styles.”

A lot of the new music we hear now on Broadway is, simply put, modern.  It involves click tracks, prerecorded beats and samples, synthesized sounds, and MIDI connections to other production elements (lighting, sound, and so on.)  Theatre music, including dance music, now refers more commonly to rock, rap, Hip-Hop, KPOP, The Song Machine, songs from the catalogs of well-known artists, and so on, than it does to the traditional theatrical songwriting styles and ballet and modern dance from the “Golden Age” of musicals that we recognize and treasure.  There are still revivals of shows with more traditional scores, and thankfully most of these revivals have retained much of their original orchestral forces.  But new musicals that use modern musical styles are not necessarily conceived orchestrally.  Some are in styles that simply use smaller accompaniment forces.  Others are composed electronically, using Ableton and Logic and other DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations).  To require these scores to use musicians that they do not need is not sensible, yet the protection of musicians’ employment opportunities is the priority of working musicians and the union.

The following examples are from my own experience; I welcome additional anecdotal information regarding other situations.

In 1993, I was the music director/supervisor for The Who’s Tommy on Broadway.  At the St. James Theatre, where the show was presented, there was a minimum of 24 musicians, corresponding to the large seating size of the theatre.  Our rock score needed no more than ten—if fact, everyone on the creative team agreed that the ideal orchestra size was ten.  Nonetheless, we had to meet the minimum.  We took the following measures: added a string quartet, a second French horn, and a percussionist (16), and hired two “understudies”—onsite subs that would be on call nightly to cover the very difficult keyboard and guitar chairs (18).  The conductor made 19.  The other six?  I hesitate to even conjecture as to the back-room dealings that led to my never knowing who our “walkers” were—talk about arcane—but rumor had it that one was a golf buddy of one of the producers.

A few years later, Disney, Elton John, Tim Rice, et al. brought Aida to the stage.  By this time the Special Situations committee was in effect—but the composer himself argued that the large string section be replaced by synthesized strings, which was his musical conception.  The reduction was permitted, and string players were furious.

In 1999, as the first American National Tour of The Lion King was about to be mounted, I as music supervisor met with producers and our L.A. music contingent to audition a new technology that we were told allowed an entire orchestration to be synthesized, and each synthesized part to be eliminated if a live musician was engaged to play that part live.  The technology crashed at that demonstration (and others I attended), and its instrumental emulation was anathema to any informed ear.  Still, the system was adopted for the tour.  It wasn’t surprising to me—Lion King was already pretty hard to load into a bunch of trucks, and the fewer traveling personnel, the better.  (You may remember this system was called the “Mapper;” thankfully it was scrapped shortly thereafter.  Instead, the pit size for all subsequent productions was re-orchestrated for 15 players—with much better synth programming—down from its original 24.)

A few years after that, here comes Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a big jukebox show with big hit songs from the 70s and 80s, many of which were originally recorded with rich orchestral backing.  A proposed reduced orchestra size for the enormous Palace Theatre was turned over to the the Special Situations committee.  In this case, they were given a presentation, a “live” taste of what the music would sound like in the theatre with real strings versus how it would sound with synthesized strings.  (Note: no sound design had yet been done.)  The choices were 1) a pickup string section, sightreading from charts-in-progress and mic-ed only for the occasion, and 2) prerecorded strings on a click track that had been mixed in a studio.  Which would you guess sounded better?  The minimum bit the dust.  (I must confess; I am guilty of having a music-gasm while subbing on the string synth chair and playing “I Will Survive.”)

Let’s jump ahead to the most iconic composer of our era, Lin-Manuel Miranda, a genuine modernist.  His first Broadway show, In The Heights, was mostly acoustic, but involved a good deal of electronica, in the form of click-tracking, sweetening, sound effects, and so on.  The show skirted the Richard Rodgers Theatre minimum by creating its ideal orchestration in an Off-Broadway production under the auspices of Local 802, and retaining it when transferred to Broadway; this was kosher under the union contract.  Hamilton went even further in its use of electronics, but cleverly satisfies the now-reduced Rodgers minimum by filling out the band with several electronically dedicated musicians, including something closer to a DJ than to a traditional pit musician, and again by developing the musical configuration through an Off-Broadway version.

Throughout this decades-long shift, the role of synthesizer programmers in the musical drama has grown exponentially.  So has the cruciality of their skill, as well as their dedication to the programming—certain Broadway shows are programmed with great care toward aesthetic quality, while others are clearly not.  Likewise, the sound designer is increasingly important to the musical accompaniment, because a delicate balance must be struck between the electronic and the acoustic, while still allowing audiences to hear the glorious voices and the words being sung onstage.

The upshot of this upheaval, sad for musicians, is that audiences seem rarely to know the difference, or care.  If they don’t care, why should a presenter?  If the audience feels that they’re getting their money’s worth, why should the person taking their money?  A wise producer will know what a producer motivated entirely by profit will not, or will not acknowledge:

Theatre is a live art form, and thrives when all the performances are live.  It is the adventure, the precariousness, the inconsistencies and discoveries of performing live, that make it a thrill to sit in a theatre and watch a musical, as well as to perform in it.

And I have a new perspective, which I must add to the mix before drawing any conclusions.  I’m now an active songwriter as much as an active music director.  In creating music for the theatre, I always have an ideal orchestra in mind, usually related to stylistic or storytelling needs.  But before I even consider how my scores might be handled in a commercial production, I now have to think about the smallest possible size of my “ideal” version, because I know that if I don’t, my show is less likely to be produced—or at least I will be badgered by potential producers about orchestra size reductions.  On the writing side, we have all been conditioned into thinking in these terms.

Returning to the controversy at hand, here are my “takeaways.”

• There’s no reason to point the finger at the composer(s) of the show.  (As a sidebar, why is David Byrne the target of the anti-Here Lies Love frenzy, and not Fatboy Slim?)  The composers wrote this show with a certain musical aesthetic in mind, as is their right to do.  The problem lies not in their writing, but in producing the show in a Broadway house that requires a minimum number of live musicians.  To refer the show to Special Situations is irrelevant, as the orchestra size isn’t the issue, it’s the employment of musicians in the first place.  Obvious solutions: 1) produce the show in a venue that does not have these requirements; there are lots of them.  2) Employ and pay non-playing musician “walkers” to satisfy the minimum.  3) Satisfy the minimum, or some portion thereof, by acknowledging that the electronic programming involves personnel, and that any prerecording of real or synthesized instruments involves personnel.  Employ those who synthesize and prerecord, and pay them as if they were performing live.

• It is inevitable that certain producers will continue to try to reduce or eliminate live music on Broadway.  Here are some ways to resist.  Composers: write music that needs live musicians to be performed properly.  Orchestrators: use your abilities to create acoustic-based orchestrations, or orchestrations that combine synthesis and live performance in an aesthetically responsible and theatrically effective way.  Keep in mind that the producers need to be able t make a profit.  Music directors; unite and stand your ground when necessary.  Producers: it’s not ALL about the money.

• We must acknowledge that the entertainment world is changing…has changed.  If we were used to the ways things used to be, we may have to find new and creative ways to remain current, and employed.

• Pity the day when AI takes over the playwriting and songwriting, when prerecording replaces live music, when holograms do the work of actors and singers, and we, the audience, watch it all on our own little electronic devices, in the comfort of our homes, at a very low cost.

Important addendum: having now familiarized myself with the music from Here Lies Love, I believe it can and absolutely SHOULD be performed with live musicians. It’s not just disco, folks.