Arias, Ensembles, & Choruses An Excerpt Finder for Orchestras

Arias, Ensembles, & Choruses: An Excerpt Finder for Orchestras is the latest title in Scarecrow's new Music Finder series, modeled after David Daniels' Orchestral Music: A Handbook. Conductors John Yaffé and David Daniels have created a one-stop sourcebook for orchestras, opera companies, conductors, and librarians programming vocal excerpts (solos, ensembles, choruses, etc.) for concert performance. In this book, one finds detailed information on a vast repertoire of vocal excerpts commonly extracted from operas, operettas, musicals, and oratorios'¬ ;more than 1,500 excerpts from 400 parent works. Information includes basic historical details about the "parent work" as well as extract titles, subtitles, voice types, keys, durations, locations in the original work (with page numbers in both full scores and piano-vocal scores), and exact instrumentation. One especially valuable aspect of this book is the listing of "sources": the publishers that make available the orchestral materials for just the excerpt being programmed, independent of the full parent work. Until now, conductors and orchestra librarians commonly had to first leaf through full scores, searching for one elusive three-minute aria after another, only to then consult multiple publishers' catalogues to compile crucial, and often decisive, information on all the excerpts proposed for a concert or recording. This book provides a single source in which to find that information. In many cases, the individual entries also include valuable insider information on common performance practice, including start- and stop-points, transpositions, and conventional cuts. Searching for repertoire is made easy with the detailed "Title Index" and appendixes devoted to ensemble excerpts, categorized by personnel (e.g., duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, choruses) and by language (Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian). This book is the ideal tool for the working conductor and orchestral librarian, as well as music prog