“The Sound of the Show”: An Interview with Alex Lacamoire

Alex Lacamoire (b. 1975, Los Angeles, CA) is an arranger, orchestrator, music director, keyboardist, and music producer. He has worked on Broadway musicals including Wicked (2003), In the Heights (2008), 9 to 5 (2009), Hamilton: An American Musical (2015), and Dear Evan Hansen (2016), as well as on film and television projects, including The Greatest Showman (2017), the Fosse/Verdon mini-series (2019), and the film adaptation of In the Heights (2021).¹ He has won Tony, Emmy, Grammy, and Olivier Awards, and he is a joint recipient, along with writer and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, and director Thomas Kail, of a 2019 Kennedy Center Honors award for Hamilton.

Lacamoire grew up in Los Angeles, California and Miami, Florida, where he completed high school at the New World School of the Arts. He went to the Berklee College of Music, earning a bachelor of music degree in 1995, then spent a few more years in Boston before moving to New York City in 1998. There he became the go-to keyboard substitute and rehearsal and audition pianist for The Lion King (1997). He had his “breakout” with the 2001 off-Broadway production of Bat Boy: The Musical, for which he was the music director and co-orchestrator.² In 2008, with co-orchestrator Bill Sherman, he won his first of multiple Tony Awards for Best Orchestration for his work on In the Heights.

Lacamoire’s parents, who met in the United States, both immigrated from Cuba, and Lacamoire grew up hearing Latin music. He has drawn upon this aspect of his musical background for stage and film musicals including In the Heights; Carmen la Cubana (Havana, Cuba, 2014), a Cuban retelling of the 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II Broadway musical Carmen Jones, which was itself based on the famed Georges Bizet opera; and Vivo (2021).³ His Cuban heritage finds its way into other projects as well, like a “sense of ‘clave’” underpinning some of his songs for Sesame Street.⁴

Lacamoire’s groundbreaking career in music developed in spite of—or perhaps partially because of—hearing loss diagnosed at a young age and for which he wears hearing aids. He has trouble hearing higher frequencies in particular. In one conversation, he shared a story about recording the record for In the Heights and asking the mixer to turn up the triangle several times before realizing that if they “turned up the triangle any more, it would be a … triangle concerto.”⁵ He has learned to rely on collaborators in those kinds of situations. He describes the feelings he has had around his hearing loss over his life as “complicated,” with their share of self-consciousness, discomfort, and even shame, but also a heightened awareness of the importance of compassion.⁶ He also wonders “if [his] handicap is actually an asset.” It “makes me listen a little harder,” he explains. “It allows me to live in my own bubble. I can really focus in on music and tune out the world around me.”⁷

Lacamoire is best known for his contributions to musical theater, which he has long loved for the opportunity it provides to create art collaboratively, but “pop and rock are the genres… closest to [his] heart.”⁸ He has brought this sensibility to his choice of projects and treatment of them, as he demonstrates in his discussions of Dear Evan Hansen and The Wrong Man (Off Broadway, 2019) in the present interview. When Lacamoire started working with Lin-Manuel Miranda, beginning with their collaboration on In the Heights, he also developed a deeper engagement with hip-hop. With In the Heights, Bring It On: The Musical (2012), and Hamilton, he and Miranda have forged a style that uses hip-hop—in many ways an unlikely fit for musical theater—to tell stories on the Broadway stage.⁹

In bringing hip-hop to Broadway and, correspondingly, his innovative use of the latest technologies in combination with acoustic instruments, Lacamoire has helped shape the soundscape of twenty-first century musical theater. Developments in digital music technologies over the past several decades, including synthesizers, digital audio workstations like Ableton, and virtual orchestras, have presented new possibilities for theatrical music-making while simultaneously spurring anxieties about aesthetics, liveness, and labor issues.¹⁰ Two of the Broadway orchestrators Lacamoire cites as mentors, William David Brohn and Michael Starobin, are known for using the synthesizer in intentional and judicious ways.¹¹ As he discusses below, Lacamoire similarly embraces new digital technologies while calling for an “honest” approach that uses those technologies to support an artistic vision and achieve a particular sound that cannot be created by humans alone rather than simply as a stand-in for acoustic instruments.

Lacamoire’s significant impact on musical theater spans the overlapping realms of text and performance. As orchestrator and arranger, it is Lacamoire’s task to commit musical ideas to the page in detailed ways that instruct the performers who will realize the notated score—as actors realize a theatrical script—long after his shows close on Broadway.¹² As music director, performer, and music producer, frequently conducting and playing the shows he has arranged on Broadway and integrally involved in cast albums and video recordings, Lacamoire contributes to performances and their recorded artifacts—like the tremendously popular filmed live stage performance of Hamilton released on Disney+ in 2020—that also shape the ways audiences and artists now and in the future will hear and (re)interpret these shows.

In the interview below, conducted on September 27, 2019 and augmented with a follow-up conversation on March 22, 2021, Lacamoire discusses the roles of the arranger, orchestrator, and other music personnel in the musical theater world; the collaborative process; and the arrangers and orchestrators who have influenced him. Using score examples from Dear Evan Hansen and Hamilton, Lacamoire explains for readers what arrangement is within the realm of musical theater with a nitty-gritty specificity or “nerdiness,” to borrow Lacamoire’s term. These discussions also illuminate his musical style and values and his approach to creating “the sound of the show.”

While arranger/orchestrators have helped shape the music of musical theater since the genre’s inception, for decades their contributions have been largely in the shadows. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, this has started to change. “Orchestrators Are Tired of Playing Second Fiddle,” a New York Times article declared in 1990.¹³ While the Drama Desk instituted an award for Outstanding Orchestrations in 1983, it took the Tony Awards until 1997 to follow suit, long after categories honoring other members of the creative team, like choreographers and costume, lighting, and scenic designers, were established. The UK’s Olivier Awards started paying more heed to arrangers and orchestrators in the 2010s.¹⁴ Growing interest in how the music of musicals is created and the people creating it is both evidenced and spurred along by digital and “new media” coverage: fans and audience members can read features on arranger/orchestrators and other musicians on websites like BroadwayWorld.com and Playbill.com, see posts about or by them on social media, and enjoy a proliferation of podcasts and online videos. Scholarship on arrangement/orchestration has also started to expand in recent decades, though it still remains relatively sparse.¹⁵

A kerfuffle in 2012 showed both the precariousness of orchestrators’ positions in the theater industry and the shifting tide of public opinion: in 2012, the Drama Desk announced that they were dropping the award for Outstanding Orchestrations but reinstated it only three days later “after members of the theatre community spoke out.”¹⁶ Michael Starobin was among them: “It baffles me that the Drama Desk would stop recognizing a creative contribution that stays with the identity of a show for many years after the original physical designs are no longer used,” he wrote. “We still use Sid Ramin’s orchestrations for West Side Story a half century after the original production. We may experiment with new orchestrations for a production, but we will always return to [Jonathan] Tunick’s orchestration of Sweeney Todd. …. [T]he orchestrations for those masterpieces will always be part of their identity.”¹⁷

Lacamoire’s career coincides with this shift in musical theater arranger/orchestrators’ status and recognition, and he has become somewhat of a star in his own right. One interviewer calls him “the first celebrity orchestrator I have ever heard of.”¹⁸ He is touted as the “secret weapon” behind the musicals he works on and as “the man behind the world’s biggest musicals.”¹⁹ For the very biggest of them, Hamilton, he was there and visible from the get-go—in the first performance of a number from the nascent project at the Obama White House in 2009, we see just two people on the stage: Miranda, rapping into a microphone, and Lacamoire at the piano.²⁰

The interview below, conducted by a musicologist, builds upon media coverage while speaking to a specific readership of students and scholars of music and musical theater. It brings oral history methods to bear on arrangement studies and, more specifically, our understanding of the music of musical theater. The conversations were conducted via online platforms, but the chapter capitalizes on certain advantages of the print medium: first, the ability to show and discuss the written score and notation choices, and second, the ability to edit, combine, and condense for readability. Questions posed by me appear in italic font and responses by Lacamoire appear in roman font.

Oral history has long been valued for helping to bring into the historical record voices at the margins of, or excluded from, traditional scholarship—“the voices of the historiographically—if not the historically—silent,” as Linda Shopes puts it.²¹ Oral history can also help us note how things are voiced, in interviews, by arranger/orchestrators and music personnel often eclipsed by composers, giving us a glimpse into their approaches and perspectives as well as their creative decisions. In these ways, oral history shares methodological aims with arrangement studies, which, as the contributions to this volume both argue and demonstrate, can likewise be a means of disrupting traditional, hierarchical modes of studying music. When we look at an arrangement, we pay attention not only to what is voiced but how. Tending to arrangement as a practice separate from composition, and often undertaken by different people with contrasting skill sets, allows us to better understand music-making as a collaborative enterprise and to examine process as well as product. Especially for a genre as collaborative as musical theater, oral history and arrangement studies approaches reveal a fuller picture than what we would learn from authorial credits, written documents, and even recordings alone.²²

Interviews also offer a historical snapshot of a given moment, or, in this case, two. The interviews capture Lacamoire in the heyday of his career and also a musical theater industry in the midst of a sea change, for which Lacamoire has been in the vanguard, as digital music technologies become more prevalent on Broadway. For our conversation in September 2019, he spoke with me by Skype from the theater where he was in rehearsals for the off-Broadway production of a new musical called The Wrong Man, with music, lyrics, and book by singer-songwriter Ross Golan, and he drew several examples from his work on this show.

A few months after this initial interview, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, unleashing a devastating and unprecedented impact on the performing arts. Broadway went dark in March 2020, and at the time of this writing, it is not scheduled to begin fully reopening until September 2021.²³ The eighteen months in between my first and second conversation with Lacamoire were also turbulent in other ways. In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota set off nationwide protests, even in the midst of the pandemic, and brought more fervent attention to the racial inequities affecting all realms of American society and business. In October 2020, a new organization called Musicians United for Social Equity (MUSE) was launched, with Lacamoire as a founding member. In our follow-up conversation, Lacamoire addressed his work with MUSE as well as his work in film, which was his primary focus while live theater was at a standstill.

Your name is listed in theater programs under so many different descriptions: as an orchestrator, as an arranger or specifically for dance arrangements, sometimes as musical supervisor, music director, conductor. How do you describe these different roles, and since this volume is about arrangement studies, what especially is the role of the musical theater arranger?

To me, the music supervisor or the music director—when we’re talking about theater specifically and depending on the project—does the global overseeing of things. A music supervisor means something different for theater than it does for TV and film, but regardless, someone needs to be at the top for creative decisions—you know, just as businesses have CEOs or presidents. And then arrangers or orchestrators tend to refer to the music director and/or the composer as their point person. The music director is in charge of it all—whether it’s teaching vocals, having creative input, liaising between the actors and the sound department, conducting the band, interfacing with the music contractor who chooses the musicians, that kind of stuff. I find music direction to be both creative and managerial—being a leader and having to be a collaborator at the same time—so it takes a lot of different skills, I think, to be able to do the job well.

And then arranging and orchestrating, those are different facets. Arranging is big picture, creative input. I find composers don’t always think about … you know, they’re just trying to birth the song, right? It doesn’t always have to be their problem to figure out the key that suits that actor best or a key change that will help get from X to Y. And they won’t always be concerned about the best intro or the best ending for a song. Sometimes arrangers are really good at contributing that and thinking about other ways to put “breaks” in the song that will highlight lyrics in a certain way. They might suggest, “Wouldn’t it be great if we harmonized this chord?” Or, “We’ve heard this chorus three times, maybe on the third time we try this instrumentation instead, or perhaps try this chord change instead?” Arranging can help with big picture things like setting grooves and tempos, adding vocal harmonies, creating entire dance breaks, and really just the way the song sounds.

I think about how many YouTube covers of songs there are out there in the world; those covers are really arrangements of songs that we know and love. I often cite—I don’t know if this makes me sound old, but when you take the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” and you hear Joe Cocker’s version of the same song, Joe Cocker made an arrangement of the song, and that shows how vastly different two arrangements can be. You can decide that the tempo is different. You can decide that the time signature is different. You can say, “Hey, I want one to feel more like a rock gospel thing.” Or you want one to feel more like an up-tempo music hall song. Arrangers set the tone for what something can be. With “A Little Help from My Friends” and other covers, someone arranged that version of that song. Whether it was the group as a whole, whether it was the composer, whether it was George Martin as producer, whether it was Joe Cocker as the singer. So that’s how effective, and how important, and how seismic a change an arranger can make.²⁴

And the orchestrator may arrange, but they will get more specific. They will be the ones actually notating and saying, “Okay, the strings enter now, and this is the register they’re in, and these are the exact notes that they play. And I want them to play pizzicato here instead of arco.” It’s about actually taking pencil to paper, or MIDI keyboard to screen, or whatever the case may be, but actually writing something down and getting really specific about it.

I feel like arrangers can work in broad terms and explain things, and yes, arrangers can also notate. But arrangers don’t necessarily have to go further than just writing on a sketch staff or writing out, for instance, five notes worth of horns all into one staff.²⁵ You can do that much and still be the arranger. I know some people just use the word “arrangements” and mean “orchestrations,” but in theater I’ve learned that the two terms are pretty different, so I use the two terms in that context.²⁶

One of the things you mentioned was collaboration—how much does the process of how you work with all the different players vary from show to show?

It depends who you’re working with, I suppose. What doesn’t vary for me is the way I like to run my department. I try to be inclusive. I try to be open and receptive. I try to be organized. I’ll try to treat my players well, and try to not be overly demanding nor ask for stuff that’s beyond scope. But I guess the variation between show to show tends to be about the composer you’re working with and how hands-on they are, the director you’re working with and how hands-on they are, and how much time you have for the process. Do we have four weeks to do this, or do we have one? Is it off-Broadway or is it on-? I think the difference between those is just the amount of time you have and, frankly, the expectation of what you can accomplish with the time and resources that you have.

I remember working on Wicked and feeling like, wow, we have—I might be misremembering this, but I feel like we had, like, four weeks of tech [technical rehearsals]. Which is fantastic—you need all that time to figure out how you’re going to get the green witch to float at the end of “Defying Gravity,” versus here we are off-Broadway [working on The Wrong Man], and we teched, I think, for four days, and then we’re in front of an audience.²⁷ Like I said, it’s all about resources; there’s a certain budget, and there are certain things you have. The sound package that you have for a 250-seat theater is going to be different than what you have for a 2,000-seat theater, so you’ll make assessments and give notes accordingly. And okay, this is the kind of note I can give in this kind of space, and this is how I work around that room. Things I might be able to get away with in a Broadway house where the sound could be more focused are different than in the show I’m working on, where the walls are made out of concrete and everything bounces off in a certain way. Then it’s incumbent on me to make the orchestrations that much more spare and that much more clean so you’ll be able to hear the lyrics.

In a past interview, you described the orchestrator’s job as being to decide what “the sound of the show” is.²⁸  When you get the songs, the material, from a composer, how do you start to envision and then create that sound world?

It’s a few things. The score itself kind of tells you. The songs will have a certain vibe and energy about them that you’ll want to listen to. And then you find conceptual theories, or maxims, or just senses to try to latch onto. Case in point, The Wrong Man, which I’m working on right now—the songs in and of themselves have a contemporary feel to them, and it’s an eclectic group of songs. But at the same time, the story takes place in Reno, Nevada, so there’s a sense of country to it, there’s a sense of: oh, it’s okay for this to sound kind of like you’re in the desert. It’s okay for this to sound Western. You think to yourself, “Okay, great! What are sounds that evoke that language?” And we’ll have electric guitar with tremolo. We’ll have the drums sometimes play, like, a swampy kind of groove. Or we’ll have the guitar play things that make it sound like it’s a slide guitar instead. The location of the story informed what I wanted the sound of the show to be.

For Hamilton, when I knew that the show and score were going to be so contemporary and so modern, I thought, “You know what? I want the rhythm section to be electric, and to balance that I want an acoustic string section.” It was a conscious choice to have no electric violins. It was a conscious choice to not have the strings be doubled by a synthesizer. It was like, okay, we’ve got everything—here’s the rhythm section, where you play things made with electrodes, and here is the string section, where sounds are made out of wood via direct contact. That, again, was a concept driving a feeling. And not only that, the strings to me were instruments that were around in the late eighteenth century, so that felt like it kept one foot in that era, while everything else in the band had a contemporary bent to it.

Those shows, and several of your scores, are more contemporary, but there’s still a huge range of musical styles—from the epic, almost filmlike scenes in Wicked to rock, from Latin musical styles to hip-hop. How have you acquired that kind of musical breadth? Do these tend to be things that you felt comfortable in already, or do you go on a research spree?

It’s a little bit of both. A big part of it is music that I’ve grown up listening to and that being part of my DNA. Particularly rock music—that’s always been what lights me up. I didn’t really grow up listening to classical, and funny enough, I didn’t grow up listening to show tunes either. I was always a really big rock guy, and so the shows I’ve been drawn to are those that have a contemporary rock feel to them. I often tell people that shows from 1970 onward are my bag and classics before then, I’m not really the most excellent connoisseur.

I absolutely, for In the Heights, had to learn how to notate Latin music. I had grown up hearing salsa music, but I’d never studied it; I’d never had to notate it. So I bought a book [Rebeca Mauleón’s The Salsa Guidebook] that explained what these rhythms do and how to notate them, and that was a big part of me notating music for In the Heights.²⁹ For Bring It On , I made a point of listening to a lot of Katy Perry and a lot of Britney Spears and Maroon 5 and trying to get a feel for how to make music sound contemporary and some of the “tricks” that you use in producing those kinds of songs, and I tried to incorporate that into the score. So yeah, I think you study a little bit, for sure.

And across these different styles, are there things that differentiate your work from other arrangers and orchestrators? Are there things that you could hear and say, “Oh, that’s a Lacamoirian score,” or there’s a Lacamoirian stamp on it?

It’s very funny that you ask that. I’ve had friends who say, “Oh yeah, I hear you in that score” and who tell me that I have a stamp, which I’m very honored by, but I don’t know that I can tell you specifically what it is.

Of course, someone else would give you their own example, but I’d like to think that my scores—I try to make them clean; I try to make them thoughtful; I try to not overcrowd them, when I can. I try to fill holes a lot. I like to have the music make statements in the spaces left behind by the vocals. I’m tickled by having instruments make monumental contributions to the sound.

I’m very influenced by the rock band Yes. For being a five-piece band, each instrument has such a distinct pattern. Things intersect. They don’t always double each other, but they create this really cool tapestry where if you take out any one element, it would not sound the same. The bands for the theater shows that I do tend to be smaller, such that they’re really exposed. I like to think that in my charts, if you take out any one instrument, you lose a piece of that tapestry. There’s not a lot of room to hide. But that makes the players feel good, because then they know that the part they play is featured and always really audible.

I tend to be exacting in how I notate things. I’m very specific about voicings. I’m specific about guitar. Sometimes I even go so far as to write fretboard diagrams above my chords, because I have a specific voicing in mind, and I like to make use of open strings, and I like to, maybe, find different tunings, if that’s going to help get a voicing across in a certain way.

It’s tricky—because my charts tend to be very detailed, sometimes it becomes a challenge to find players who can read them and play them in a way that makes it sound like they’re not reading music. That makes it feel like they’re actually playing, and making music, and not feeling hindered by having to read notes on a page. It takes a certain caliber of player, I think, to be able to discern what it is I mean from all the notes I have on the page, because I tend to write a lot.

Here’s a page of “Requiem” [from Evan Hansen, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul] where you can see I have fretboard diagrams for bar 48G and 48H [see Example 1]. I’ve got bowing articulations for the strings at 48C, 48E. My guitar notation tends to be really specific, like all the “let ring” instructions, and I have a chord for the concert key and then there are capoed chords above it as well. My piano parts are specifically written out. Again, and this is back to your question about what my style is, my hope is that all these notes on the page will sound like the band is jamming and feel like they’re just playing a pop song.

Let me give them tons of detail so it feels improvised.

Exactly. I would love to think that at the end of the day, you would think that the band was just given slashes, and yet something this articulate and this specific came out of it.³⁰ I guess I’d like to think my stuff is like chamber rock music. Again, using the band Yes as an example, the parts are very specific, yet it’s written for a rock band where, by nature, things tend to sound improvised. So maybe progressive rock Broadway. [Laughter]

In many ways you’re doing stuff on Broadway, like Hamilton, that’s so new, but are there other arrangers and orchestrators that had a big influence on you and your approach?

You know, it’s funny, I never really sat down and studied and pored over orchestral theater scores in that way. I’ve got to say, the real inspirations for me have been the orchestrators that I’ve directly collaborated with. Working with Bill [William David] Brohn on Wicked was a huge lesson on how to use orchestral instruments in a pop context, how to take things away from the piano and open my ears up to things outside of the eighty-eight keys that I was so accustomed to.³¹ I come from the world of being a pianist, of being the person leading the trio from the piano and therefore having to carry the weight and do so much work to make the sound of the show, so here was Bill Brohn basically showing me that you can get away from the piano. His big quote was: “If you have piano playing everything, it sounds like you’re in a rehearsal,” and I carry that with me all the time.

Michael Starobin [whom Lacamoire worked with on The People in the Picture (2011) and a Broadway revival of Annie (2012)] is really fantastic. He was super generous with letting the music team see him work through the process, and then he would invite us to his Dropbox [cloud storage account], and we would be able to see him working on a chart and see what it would look like on day one, and then day two, and so on. We’d be able to see the journey of a chart. He was also very kind to let me sit by him while we orchestrated a chart together, and to let me orchestrate a chart and give me pointers on it. So I learned by seeing how other people would do it. By knowing what this piano chart was and then seeing, “Oh wow, these are the choices they made to get from the page to an orchestra.” That was always really helpful and significant for me.

Same thing with Rob Mathes [with whom Lacamoire worked on the film The Greatest Showman and the In the Heights film], who’s a wonderful orchestrator as well. Being able to see his string charts up close for the stuff he did for Greatest Showman was an absolute dream. He’s a legend.³²

It seems like along with the styles of Broadway, the very processes of composition and arranging are changing as we have new technologies. I know Lin-Manuel Miranda has used Logic Pro for some of his work.³³  Of course, composers and arrangers have always used the tools at hand—I think of the transposing pianos of early twentieth-century composers George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin. What kinds of tools and technologies do you like to use?

Logic is “it” for me as well; I just find it to be very user friendly. You have to learn to use it, obviously, like any sequencing software, but I love that all the sounds are built in, that you just type in the name of the instrument you’re looking for, and it’s usually there. I have used Pro Tools when I’m scoring, when I scored stuff for Vivo [for which Lacamoire is executive music producer and score composer], so that was a new software for me to learn. Finale is my go-to for notation. Really, the big two for me are Logic and Finale.

I’ve learned to get around Ableton, but I’ve forgotten it all. That was monumental in Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, so now I see the value of having Ableton, and I just want it on all my shows. I love how the click [track] keeps the band, the tempos, consistent from night to night. I love how it gives you opportunities to sync up to the lights, to have MIDI trigger lighting cues. I love that it allows you to bring in cool sound effects—we just added one today in The Wrong Man. I love having that flexibility and readiness to be able to input things and try them out in the moment. I’ve been integrating that stuff into my shows, and I’m very thankful for it.

Could you talk about an example of a number that combines digital and acoustic sounds?

Sure. In “Satisfied” [from Hamilton, with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda], you can see at bar 35 [see Example 2] it says “Loops/Effects” [“Loops/SFX”], and it says there “SYN STATIC”—that’s the digital loop acting as a hi-hat, playing 16th notes. And you notice the drums are not playing hi-hat at all—either the drums or percussion—because the “hi-hat” is being provided by the synth[esizer] static on loops. To me, that’s integrating what it is the synths do with the live instruments.³⁴

And in this number, the rewind part was using Ableton?

Exactly. That was all prerecorded and a soundscape created by [sound designer] Nevin Steinberg and [Ableton programmer] Scott Wasserman.³⁵

“Cabinet Battle” [from Hamilton] is another one that might be fun [see Example 3]. This is pretty nerdy again. What’s good about it is that you can see the nomenclature. You see [bar] A, keyboard two, you have all these different keys that trigger certain scratches. Key B4 is scratch sample number one, key C#5 is scratch sample number three, blah, blah, blah. And you can see on bar D, they’re playing a high B, which is going to trigger scratch sample number one.

So the notes are written into the score, and then whatever that note is triggers the sound?

Exactly. Then you look at percussion. You see how the first bar tells you pad four is closed synth hi-hat number one, pad five is closed synth hi-hat number two, pad six is open synth hi-hat. And then you look at his pattern at bar one, and you see I write numbers letting him know what it is: so pad number four is the third space above the staff, pad number five is the fourth space, and pad number six—so they’re basically playing by numbers: four, four, five, four, five, four, four, five, four, five, four, four, five, four, six, five, or whatever that is.³⁶ [Laughter]

Were there examples of people working with scores in this way, or were you kind of inventing it as you—

I don’t want to say I invented it, but I definitely came up with that for myself. This seemed the clearest to me, in terms of how to let the player know what to play. You can see on the Loops/SFX staff “Nas Piano_Lac” [“NAS PNO_LAC”]: that’s a sound inspired by Nas, with the piano sample I manipulated to create a desired effect; that’s where that came from. [The “Lac” is for Lacamoire.]³⁷

This leads into a question about the tension between embracing technology but not using technology to replace people, which is something that you’ve talked about as well.³⁸  How involved are you in decisions about the general size and makeup of the pit orchestra and how that works in relation to the union rules or negotiations? And how do you deal with that as a musician?

I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve worked on shows where the producers ask me, “What do you think this show needs?” And I give an answer, and they say, “Okay, great.” There’s only been one instance where I suggested a slightly larger size, and the producer came back and said, “Hey listen, I think for this out-of-town tryout we’d like to reduce the size by one, and if you feel after this out-of-town that we still need that one missing element, let’s talk about it and revisit.” And I was like, “Great, no problem,” because that felt to me like a great way to honor the fact that our resources are slightly limited. And also, that open door, that they said, “If you feel like we made a mistake, let’s discuss, and we can go back”—I loved that, because that allowed me to try it and to arrive at the idea that, you know what? This is actually the perfect size. And it was through that slight—I’m not going to say limitation, it was a request, really. And I didn’t feel any pressure to do so. So again, I’ve felt really fortunate that people will ask my opinion, and I’ll give it to them, and they’ll heed what I suggested.

In terms of how you deal with those decisions with union rules and stuff, you have an artistic vision, and you try to make a case for it. You try to be logical about it, you try not to pull one over, and you make sure that your intentions are clear. As I mentioned before, I wanted the strings in Hamilton not to be doubled; I wanted them to be pure, and I wanted, when they played, for them to have a reason to exist. The use of digital elements wasn’t about me trying to make the band sound larger than it was, but it was about trying to incorporate digital elements into the fabric. In those cases that I showed you, both of those loops are playing something that is not really replicable by humans, because to get that synth static to be exactly digitally perfect and play exactly perfectly quantized 16th notes every time, only a computer can do that, you know? A human being will have variation; a human being will have fluctuation. There’s no way to get as consistent a sound. So there was just a certain kind of quality that I was looking for.

Same thing with “Cabinet Battle,” to have a piano play that keyboard part, and have it come exactly at just the right beats so that it triggers the delay and keeps it sounding in time, without variation, it needs to sound like a sample. It needs to sound exactly the same every two bars. That’s how you make hip-hop.

To me, computers are part of modern music today, so we shouldn’t shy away from using them. It’s just a matter of making sure that we use them in a way that’s sensible and, you know, not putting an orchestra full of fake strings to play five minutes’ worth of your songs. You have to make sure your choices are founded in honesty.

What changes and developments do you see in the future for musical theater arranging? Where are you hoping your career will lead?

I think people will continue to incorporate digital music elements into shows. I’m always drawn to that—what is the way to integrate that kind of style into live theater to make it sound organic and necessary? I’m excited for people to continue to push the boundaries in that way.

I also think about how theater catches up to music, in a way. I often tell people that it took Lin-Manuel being born when he was born for Hamilton to happen when it happened—for hip-hop to have been around long enough that it really got into its groove and to influence what was a young Puerto Rican teenager growing up in Manhattan—to have that music become part of his DNA and for him to soak it up such that he was able to write in that style fluently and fluidly. That couldn’t have happened ten years prior. No one would have been able to have that music be such a part of their psyche that they could just spit it out and have it sound so effortless and organic. At some point there could be an EDM [electronic dance music] musical. At some point someone will have that music be a part of their upbringing in such a way that their storytelling in that style of music is fluid. We’ll see where stuff like that leads.

In terms of where I want to go, I hope to always be involved with projects that I think are interesting and fun and where I enjoy collaborating with the people who are around me. I also—I know this sounds self-deprecating—but I also know that there’s a certain kind of thing that I do, and at a certain point in time, I’m no longer going to be hip. I am going to outdate myself, because I won’t know how to keep up with what is happening around me. I would hope to stay as with-it and as current as I can and to still be doing fun stuff well into my old age, but I do also acknowledge that there will be a time to pass the torch and let the new generation take over and show me a thing or two. I hope to one day mentor people in that way, to still feel relevant and still feel like people will want to associate with me. But I’m definitely enjoying being where I am right now in continuing to stretch and create.

We started this project before a major pandemic, and I would love to add in a bit about what this last year has brought for you. What has the past year looked like for you, work-wise, during this pandemic? I can tell from interviews and articles that you’ve still stayed busy.

I’ve been very, very fortunate, yeah. Despite live theater not actually happening regularly, I’ve been working on enough film projects that I’ve stayed relatively busy. The Heights movie [for which he and Bill Sherman were executive music producers] still made it to the finish line. Vivo, I scored an entire movie—that’s a very new thing for me. The Dear Evan Hansen movie filmed, and I was able to attend that remotely. Tick, Tick … Boom! filmed, and did its thing, so yeah, things are still moving forward. And I know that’s not the case for everybody, so I do not take that for granted in the least. I’m grateful that I’ve gotten the opportunity to remain creative and still make music.

What’s the big difference between arranging in theater and film for you?

A few things. I think the biggest one is the subtlety that you have to exercise in film. I’m used to being big and grandiose in Broadway, making bold moves, and things are very—the more obvious the better. I find movies to be much more about subtlety: how much more behind the scenes can you be? How much more transparently can you work your way into music? How nondescript—how to not pull focus, and how to let the visual really do the work. I feel like in theater the music does a lot of the work for you, and it’s easy to ride this wave that music creates, and for singers to be on top of the music and do that. I feel like with film, music has to be subliminal, and I find that to be a challenge. But I do like that with films. In movies, you have to get it right once, and then you’re good, whereas in the theater you have to get it right multiple times, night after night. It’s a trickier thing. So I have enjoyed the fact that when you do a movie, once you mix it, once you package it, once you release it, you don’t have to do anything else, versus, when you’re fortunate, as I am, to have a show that continues running, there’s maintenance that has to be done. There are changeovers, there’s quality control, all that stuff. You have to continually tend to it. It’s an ongoing thing, and who knows when it will end. But with the movies, you can be like, “Hey, it’s done.” You hang it on the wall, and you go on to the next thing.

In the past year, there’s also been a reckoning of the industry and every part of our society with race in the wake of George Floyd. I saw your work with MUSE, Musicians United for Social Equity. Why is it important to have diversity in that realm, and what are your hopes with this organization and with your work?

I think for me with the reckoning—and that’s a great choice of words—I think what that did is make us look at how we were populating our teams, how we were staffing our support groups, and it’s now time to take a closer look at the people we’ve been surrounding ourselves with and what this should look like. Is it diverse enough? Is it inclusive enough?

I love that MUSE is building a database of musicians that can be found if people are looking to diversify their groups, looking to create mentorship, looking to create fellowships—to be able to pass along education and allow people access if they might not have been given access before. I think that’s really important.

One of our founding members, [composer, orchestrator and arranger, and programmer] Zane Mark, has been saying this great thing as of late—obviously, as music directors, or as directors, etc., you tend to hire your friends. You tend to hire people that you have relationships with. So what we have to do now is to get new friends.³⁹ (Laughter). We need to surround ourself with people that we haven’t necessarily worked with before and take chances on newfound talent, and mentor people, and widen our circle and challenge ourselves to be more diverse and inclusive in all things.

Right now, MUSE is trying to populate our database with as many people as we can. We’re in the beginnings of trying to develop a mentorship program. We don’t know yet what that looks like, especially because we can’t be in the same rooms [because of the pandemic]. That’s very difficult. Also, it’s been hard to really get things going because there really is not much live theater happening at the moment. There are no workshops. There’s no production. So just trying to get momentum behind that has been a little difficult—we’re not in full flow just yet. We’re trying to build structures so that when things do move, we’re ready to meet that. As of now it’s been masterclasses; it’s been Q&As, and mixers, and us getting to know each other and trying to come up with action items.

I’m excited about the education aspect of it—passing along what it is that I know. There’s this part of me, I feel like, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been slowly transitioning to this age where it’s time to pass along some knowledge. It’s time to mentor people. And I’ve never really fancied myself a teacher, but I realized, “Oh, wow, I have pointers that I can pass along. I have some tips that I could teach people. I’ve learned some things the hard way that I’m happy to let people know about so that they can avoid the mistakes that I had made, etc., etc.” I get excited about the idea of passing that along to the groups that have been historically marginalized in the past and offer them opportunities that they weren’t necessarily given in the past.

I’m surely hoping that, when we get back into business, we make a concerted effort to not have it be business as usual and really question how we go about our habits and keep those issues at the forefront of our minds. I feel energized about that. I feel like this is a time that is really fertile for that. There’s been a lot of attention on it lately because of the horrible events of last year, and now it’s on peoples’ minds in a way that it hasn’t been before. I think Broadway has been taken to task in a way that it hasn’t before, and we’re now going to be held accountable in a way that we haven’t been before. So we really have to rise to the occasion and do the work, and spend the time and, and do the searches and mentor the people—all that stuff. It’s time for us to take some action.