The Table of Contents on the Reed 2 book lists piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor sax, and baritone sax, but the actual music is what is listed above.
Regarding Reed 2: For whatever reason, several of the doubles were eliminated for the London version. Off the top of my head, there was at least tenor sax and maybe a little bassoon. All the tenor sax stuff is now on bari with no consideration at all for effective and practical range. Fortunately, it is clear what the passages were and I just rewrote them out for tenor. I contacted the orchestrator about this (Chris Jahnke) and he said he wasn’t aware of the changes nor would he ever write bari parts that high.
There are definitely some bari altissimo extremes in this show! I’ve played a few other excellent orchestrations by Chris Jahnke, and it’s clear from his other stuff that he knows what how to write for woodwinds and that these poor editorial decisions were not his. The full score we had when I played this actually showed the Reed 2 line with the parts for piccolo, bass clarinet, and tenor sax intact (even though they were transposed in the actual book), so it’s possible to grab them out of the score and play them instead of all the really high bari/flute stuff.
Also, there are notes that go off the instrument ranges in both reed books (low “A”s for alto sax, low “D”s for clarinet, low “G#”s for bari). MTI indicates at the top of the pages when a song has been transposed down, but apparently they didn’t take instrument ranges into consideration before printing. There are also some “remains” from the original production, such as bassoon and clarinet cues from the old Reed 3 book. I feel like the books for this show would benefit from some tidying up!
You are correct. I met Chris Jahnke a couple years ago and he said he did not do any of the reductions. Sadly, MTI doesn’t have anything to do with the transpositions or orchestrations–they just print what the authors provided for licensing, which was the London materials since that was the latest revision of the show. They don’t want to spend the money to clean it up.
Note: Reed 2 in #15, bars 15-16 are written wrong. It looks like they are in concert pitch instead of transposed to clarinet Bars 15-16 should be the same as bars 11-12.
Also, the notes above about the reed 2 score reductions are spot on and the parts are very annoying. The really high bari and flute parts can be read down an octave but the low G# on bari will catch you by surprise.
Updated per information received from Sabrina Kumar
Updated per information received from Claudia Zornow
Updated per information received from Jerome Holmes
The Table of Contents on the Reed 2 book lists piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor sax, and baritone sax, but the actual music is what is listed above.
Of note, the London version of the show is what MTI licenses.
Regarding Reed 2: For whatever reason, several of the doubles were eliminated for the London version. Off the top of my head, there was at least tenor sax and maybe a little bassoon. All the tenor sax stuff is now on bari with no consideration at all for effective and practical range. Fortunately, it is clear what the passages were and I just rewrote them out for tenor. I contacted the orchestrator about this (Chris Jahnke) and he said he wasn’t aware of the changes nor would he ever write bari parts that high.
There are definitely some bari altissimo extremes in this show! I’ve played a few other excellent orchestrations by Chris Jahnke, and it’s clear from his other stuff that he knows what how to write for woodwinds and that these poor editorial decisions were not his. The full score we had when I played this actually showed the Reed 2 line with the parts for piccolo, bass clarinet, and tenor sax intact (even though they were transposed in the actual book), so it’s possible to grab them out of the score and play them instead of all the really high bari/flute stuff.
Also, there are notes that go off the instrument ranges in both reed books (low “A”s for alto sax, low “D”s for clarinet, low “G#”s for bari). MTI indicates at the top of the pages when a song has been transposed down, but apparently they didn’t take instrument ranges into consideration before printing. There are also some “remains” from the original production, such as bassoon and clarinet cues from the old Reed 3 book. I feel like the books for this show would benefit from some tidying up!
You are correct. I met Chris Jahnke a couple years ago and he said he did not do any of the reductions. Sadly, MTI doesn’t have anything to do with the transpositions or orchestrations–they just print what the authors provided for licensing, which was the London materials since that was the latest revision of the show. They don’t want to spend the money to clean it up.
Note: Reed 2 in #15, bars 15-16 are written wrong. It looks like they are in concert pitch instead of transposed to clarinet Bars 15-16 should be the same as bars 11-12.
Also, the notes above about the reed 2 score reductions are spot on and the parts are very annoying. The really high bari and flute parts can be read down an octave but the low G# on bari will catch you by surprise.