Eli Drews and Isabella Brundage, “Tony Pastor’s Songbook Transcription & Revivification”
Mentor: Gillian Rodger, Music
Performing Arts 9:15am Union Cinema

Much of the popular music of 19th century America has been lost to the ages, rarely performed and a musicological mystery within academia. Last summer, our mentor came across a collection of sheet music that had been used by the orchestra of Tony Pastor – a popular entertainer from the early vaudeville tradition – in the archives of the New York Public Library. With the rediscovery of Pastor’s collection, we were presented with a unique opportunity to transcribe these previously vaulted, “lost” scores for performance by a modern orchestra, for a modern audience, giving voice to some pieces that have not been heard in over a century. To accomplish this, we began by filtering our options based on the availability of lyrics, number of available parts, and historical integrity (avoiding potentially offensive selections). We then used our knowledge of orchestration and the contextual elements of common performance practices of the time (ex. audience interaction and segments of improvisational comedy) to provide the clearest and most accurate arrangement based on the parts available to us. During our research, we found that most of the songs had incomplete instrumental parts, and in some instances, where all parts were available but lyrics were not, we were left with a narrow collection to work with. With some musical materials missing from the archives, we would at times have to fill in voices, infer musical elements like tempi, and add editorial markings to make the 19th century style clearer to a 21st century player. The final goal of this project is to publish these transcriptions along with accompanying essays in a compilation to be consumed by musicians and the general-public alike. This compilation will also provide the framework for performances by contemporary orchestras and vocalists, bringing these pieces back onto the American stage once more.