Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
The original cast recording of West Side Story
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Summary
As historical documents, Broadway cast recordings preserve the performances of the original singers fresh from the stage, but as record albums they were conceived to be satisfying in purely aural terms. So, while a cast recording may be known to a far larger audience than ever experienced the show in the theatre, what listeners actually hear is, in the vast majority of cases, a paradoxical kind of authenticity: the original cast performing an abridged version of the music, with little or no dialogue, and with numbers sometimes presented in a different order (in the days of long-playing records, a strong ending to side one and beginning to side two were further conditioning factors). Since it is usually the cast album that provides the most lasting and most widely known documentation of a show in its ‘original’ form, it is worth considering the musical alterations made to transform it into a successful recording, and the case of West Side Story provides an unusually well documented ‘personal take’ on a famous example of the genre. Composers of shows are almost always present at recording sessions, but in this case Leonard Bernstein had to be away in Israel, and the happy consequence for later historians is that Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics, provided him with an unusually detailed report of the sessions. Goddard Lieberson – the producer of the album – also wrote to Bernstein, giving his first reactions to the musical before its Broadway opening.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 181 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009