FinishMySong Blog

I give a few singing classes in primary schools around the Bradford area and I recently took up a post teaching singing to children and young adults at the Northern Academy of Performing Arts (in Otley, Skipton and Yeadon). Because of the nature of (mainly) this latter role and because many of the kids who attend this school are interested in musical theatre, I've been looking much more closely at scores of West End / Broadway shows. Close enough, in fact to notice that in the most part these mass-produced manuscripts are absolutely littered with errors!

And it's not just subtle mistakes that these arrangers are making, such as a dubious interpretation of the way Michael Ball (or whoever) enunciates a given phrase, but rather huge gaping blunders with the most basic of musical elements. One of the most common of these seems to be the reduction of a full piano score to basic chords (that either a keyboard or guitar player could interpret) that are printed about the staves. Not only do the people who write these things tend to miss out suspensions and added notes to chords, but often seem to totally mistake one basic chord for another. For example, I saw one today that was marked F (indicating an F Major chord) even though the piano and vocal parts clearly had the notes A, C and E in them (giving an A Minor tonality). This isn't an isolated case - it seems like every score I pick up has at least a couple of these kinds of blunders and it makes me wonder if these are just typos or if the arrangers simply have no clue what they're doing... given the frequency of the mistakes I sadly conclude that the latter case is so.