Strauss Dance Music
Played by YOUR Musicians
LET'S HAVE A PARTY!
If you are a musician, or a party planner, or on the board of a regional
musical group, why not invite a few of your musical friends, or a subset
of your local or regional orchestra to join me in a dinner-dance evening
of Strauss waltzes and other ballroom dance music arranged and performed
in the way Johann Strauss might do today.
Together, we will select a number of your musicians.
I will bring my music, and perhaps a few of my experienced musicians (and vocalist, if desired). I will conduct the rehearsal(s), and conduct and play for the dinner-dance.
·APPROPRIATE - If you were to try to purchase or rent dance
arrangements for your orchestra, you would find that few are available.
Any contemporary selections - by Rogers and Hammerstein, for example - are
expensive; and to justify the expense, they are also too long for most ballroom
dancers. In an evening, perhaps forty are required. Simple multiplication
explains why these full orchestrations are not used in a dance-orchestra
context.
·ECONOMY - Transporting twenty or more musicians from New York, and
paying them at New York musicians' wages is usually prohibitive for fund-raising events, where the object is to raise money, not spend
it! By using as many musicians as possible from your area, there is minimal transportation cost.
· EASE -
I will work totally with you to determine your wishes
in creating the event which you envision. My principal orchestrations are
already written, corrected, and 'bowed'. I will write additional ones if
they are required.
·EXPERIENCE - Few orchestral conductors appreciate the special
expertise involved with leading a dance orchestra. Although it is probably
inappropriate for the dance orchestra to play continuously, there are times
when the room requires it, or an interlude of soft string orchestra music.
This will be an event which everyone enjoys - both musicians and dancers.
We will all experience the unique joy of participating in the synergy which
occurs between a dance orchestra and the dancers. And all of us musicians
will re-experience a new awareness of why we became musicians in the first
place
The selections I play are all my own orchestrations - even the Strauss.
They include all contemporary ballroom dance rhythms, and are about three
minutes in length, and I play them at the correct and steady ballroom dance
tempo for each dance. I include selections from Glenn Miller, Cole Porter,
and Broadway, which, due to copyright restrictions, are not for sale or
for rent.
·ELEGANCE - Your local symphonic orchestra can become an elegant Strauss-style orchestra-for-an-evening playing a mixture of traditional Strauss waltzes and polkas, inter-mixed with the best of today's ballroom dances - the samba, rumba, tango, fox-trot, merengue, cha-cha, and even some Motown. We will play special symphonic dance orchestrations of music by Glenn Miller, Xavier Cugat, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Franz Lehar, and others, according to the musical theme you request.
Depending on your situation, it may also be possible to have the musicians
donate their time. Further, the number of musicians required will not be
that of the full symphony orchestra only a minimum of eighteen.
In any event, eighteen musicians is about the upper limit of persons who
can see and hear the conductor at close range - a necessity, since I frequently
change the sequence of selections at the last moment, according to the requirements
of the dancers, and the synergy in the room and also, the strengths and
limitations of the musicians.
Even if your bandstand and the finance committee could accommodate an orchestra
large enough to play the published Strauss orchestral music, the existing
(concert) Strauss orchestrations must be heavily edited to remove the many
undanceable portions, fermatas, and confusing DS's,. And the Glenn Miller
and Artie Shaw-with-strings orchestrations are simply not available. I have
already re-orchestrated all of these.
I will join you in selecting the musicians, and I will conduct the rehearsal(s).
I will conduct the orchestra for the dance, and I will select the particular
orchestrations to be played, to maximize the best sounds of your particular
group of musicians.
As the number and quality of musicians throughout the nation grows,
this unique concept, of combining my orchestrations and my dance-band leading
experience with your musicians, is an idea whose time has come. This unique concept will provide an elegant, professional, unique, and cost-effective event.
...CONTACT BOB . . .-->
http://www.bobjanuary.com