Pre-recorded Accompaniment

The wav files available from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lPTNbeRUuoO4sBAHXYl2rs97Lod7Qa7u?usp=sharing contain keyboard accompaniments for all the songs and recitatives in “Dewey Eyed.” They depart from the printed score in only one way: As an aid to actors who might not be professional singers, the accompaniment sometimes doubles the vocal line even when it’s not doubled in the score. (The mp3 files on this page contain informal recordings of the songs that singers can use to learn them.)

All the accompaniments are also available by downloading this 69 Mbyte zip file, though compression slightly degrades their audio quality.

The recitatives complicate using pre-recorded accompaniment. A recurring joke is to have these sung in Italian (with a bit of Yiddish thrown in). It’s expected that after each phrase a singer will speak an English “translation” through the fourth wall, an interruption that may also be extended by adding a line of dialogue. The precise length of those interruptions can’t be specified in advance. It’s easy for a singer and live accompanist to resume in sync after an interruption. To replicate that with recordings, the accompaniment for each recitative has been broken into pieces (sometimes in the middle of a cadence). For example, the pieces of Recitative 1 are called, in order,

        Recit 1.1
        Recit 1.2
        Recit 1.3
        etc.

and they can be loaded as successive sound cues. It should be straightforward for the soundboard operator and the singers to synchronize on the start of each cue. These pieces correspond to the pieces of uninterrupted music heard in the recordings of the songs, and their boundaries are marked in the score.

We have also included “Recit 1 [Full],” “Recit 2 [Full],” etc., which contain the entire recitatives as a continuous piece of music — in case supertitles are used or the sound board operator is able to synchronize with the singers simply by pausing and restarting a single cue.

The recordings were made by Alejandro Bernard-Papachryssanthou.