What's In An Orchestra?

Although our name specifies "Musical Theatre" as our main repertoire, the make up of our orchestra allows us to perform practically all types of music. Our first concert did indeed focus on theatrical music however it should be noted that theatre makes use of all types/styles/genres of music. Gilbert & Sullivan shows are written in the classical tradition; the musical "Ragtime" speaks for itself; "42nd Street" essentially uses a 1940's big band in the pit and modern shows like "Rent" are pure rock and pop in style.

There are two key elements in creating a theatre orchestra that can play anything: the instruments available to the orchestrator and the musicians themselves. The former dictates the sounds you can make and the latter effects the styles the orchestra can play. While you always tend to have control over the instruments at hand, it is much more difficult to find the musicians who can switch from swing to rock to reggae in one bar of musical notation, as this skill in my opinion is instinctive rather than by dint of training. We are lucky in the Aberdeen area to have musicians who can switch styles appropriately.

In modern pit orchestras there has been a shift to electronic sound production. Often three keyboards replace the string and woodwind sections which I strongly disagree with. This is where AMTO sets a new standard because we play with real strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and rhythm section. Nothing is pre-recorded (yes, this happens in theatre land!) it is all LIVE!

We use modern keyboard programming techniques to provide the more modern synthesizer sounds, as they are integral to certain types of music, especially for rock and pop scores. The other main use of the keyboards is to enhance the sounds that are already there: pit orchestras always had a smaller string section than a symphony orchestra, mainly because they wouldn't fit under the stage! Sometimes however, you need a full string section sound, so adding keyboard strings sounds to the "real" string instruments gives you the full effect.

Our musicians are the best in the area, hand picked because of their skills and as we generally all know each other very well through playing in various bands and orchestras, the whole thing gels extremely well with minimal rehearsal. In fact, for our first concert the orchestra only had two rehearsal runs of the concert program, this time round we are going to have three rehearsals to give us a bit more "polishing" time.

Come hear the results at our next concert on October 5th - tickets available now!