Dept. of Unfinished Business: Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!

"The people all said, 'Sit down! Sit down, you're rocking the boat!"
[Watch this Tony Awards clip based on the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls (which includes a full-cast version of the song "Guys and Dolls") on YouTube.]


Walter Bobbie (Nicely-Nicely Johnson); from the 1992 Broadway Cast Recording, Edward Strauss, musical dir. RCA, recorded May 3, 1992

Stubby Kaye (Nicely-Nicely); Original Broadway Cast recording, Irving Actman, cond. American Decca, recorded Dec. 3, 1950

David Healy (Nicely-Nicely); National Theatre Cast Recording, Tony Britten, cond. EMI, recorded April 1982

"Stand, Old Ivy! Stand firm and strong!"
[Watch the this whole scene from the 2011 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, albeit in murky video and audio, via this YouTube clip. ("Grand Old Ivy" begins at 2:11.)]


Daniel Radcliffe (J. Pierrepont Finch), John Larroquette (J. B. Biggley); from the 2011 Broadway Cast Recording, David Chase, cond. Decca Broadway, recorded Apr. 10-12, 2011

Robert Morse (Finch), Rudy Vallee (Biggley); Original Broadway Cast Recording, Elliot Lawrence, musical dir. RCA, recorded Oct. 22, 1961

Robert Morse (Finch), Rudy Vallee (Biggley); film soundtrack recording, Nelson Riddle, music supervision. United Artists, recorded 1967

Matthew Broderick (Finch), Ronn Carroll (Biggley); 1995 Broadway Cast Recording, Ted Sperling, cond. RCA, recorded Apr. 2, 1995

by Ken

It's just a coincidence, I swear, more or less, even as I was thinking of a way into this unexpectedly fraught question of when to stand up and when to sit down I happened to be gradually working my way through Thomas L. Riis's 2008 Yale University Press study Frank Loesser (in a $2 thrift-shop purchase of a pristine hard-cover copy). After all, on any given subject it's likely that we can find toe-tapping wisdom from the master.


COULD WE TAKE A QUICK SECOND LOOK AT THESE VIDEO CLIPS?

Do you notice anything a little odd here?

Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, arr. Mason Jones

i. Prélude, at 0:00; ii. Fugue, at 3:35; iii. Menuet, at 6:30; iv. Rigaudon, at 10:34.  French Woodwind Quintet: Philippe Bernold, flute; Olivier Doise, oboe; Patrick Messina, clarinet; Julien Hardy, bassoon; Hervé Joulain, horn

Just the "Prélude," in the Jones arrangement

Quintette Les Cinq: Federico Dalprà, flute; Ian Barillas-McEntee, oboe; Letizia Elsa Maulà, clarinet; Georgie Powell, bassoon; Derrick Atkinson, horn (in the Jurriaanse Zaal, De Doelen, Rotterdam, Feb. 17, 2015)

The clips are from the July 1 post "'In modo di canzone': If it's singing we aim to talk about, how come we're listening to Le Tombeau de Couperin? (Part 2)," and at the time my head was so full of stuff I was trying to stuff into that post that I didn't even notice what popped out at me once the post was safely committed to history and I had a chance to look at it at leisure. Of course I had noticed that the French Woodwind Quintet players play with a good deal more confidence and flair (too much flair, I'm inclined to think, or at least an unhelpful form of it) than the Quintette Les Cinq team, which I'm inclined to think is mostly attributable to their being, well, more confident and better players. What I hadn't registered previously is that the FWQ team is sitting down, while the QLC team is standing.

As a matter of fact, at the wonderful Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert where I heard this woodwind-quintet version of Le Tombeau, the players also filed onto the stage and took standing positions for the duration, and it surprised and, I have to say, bothered me then. Standing is okay for the flutist and oboist and clarinetist, but it's a good deal less than okay, it seems to me, for the bassoon and horn players. Oh, it can be done, all right, but why is it being done?

I've been thinking about this since I stumbled across video clips of Bach Brandenburg Concertos being played -- on "authentic" instruments, of course -- by musicians standing up for no reason I could think of, except possibly in furtherance of the general mission of the Quainty-Dainty Movement to Turn All Pre-Classical [and, later, Classical and even Romantic as well] Music into an Arid Wasteland of Purposeless Toodling.

I don't have answers here. Just the question. Which continues to bug me. Eventually we're going to talk about this a little more, including the increasingly frantic gymnastics to which even seated musicians have become prone in recent decades in what seems like a desperate attempt to fill a growing gap of musical non-engagement.

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