Approach to the topic
Being fortunate enough to work as a Musical Director in the German Musical Theatre industry whilst completing my undergrad degree as a Music Teacher, I had the opportunity to gather insights how Germany handles Musical Theatre as a genre. When I moved to the UK for my master’s degree, I found that the UK as one of the leading places for Musical theatre in the world handled things differently and that the omnipresence led to a very professional approach to the genre, even on university level. Since I only had a limited and non-representative overview of the work of a Musical Director, I have been determined to use my placement as an opportunity to gather a multitude of insights, compare them to my previous experiences and attempt to draw conclusions on how to improve as a Musical Director, wherever my professional career might take me eventually. Therefore, I will outline my personal background and give an insight into the MD work in Germany, that differs in certain aspects from what I encountered in the UK. These experiences will be compared to my placement records from a variety of shows produced at Leeds Conservatoire, where I was involved as a Musical Director. These shows involved working with Musical Theatre performers, actors and actor-musicians, which gave me a variety of challenges and broadened my horizon regarding my profession. The work with performers with diverse training backgrounds has been a key element of working for Leeds Conservatoire productions, given the variety of courses provided at this institution. These circumstances were strongly connected to my working conditions in Germany, as the training of performers in professional productions is strongly connected to the popularity of the genre, which is rooted in the history of Germany as a country and the German art sector, where Opera and Plays are the dominant genres. Training and working in a country, where Musical Theatre is the financially most successful and most prestigious art form has clarified the relationship between Germany and the genre itself and the resulting working conditions for Musical Directors. As my impressions are rather subjective and stem from a limited amount of experience, a second part of my placement has involved talking to experts from the industry. Although there is only a limited number of Musical Directors, who have inside knowledge from working in the industry in both countries and therefore were able to provide me with information, I have been able to talk to a leading expert in this field. Coming from a person with 40 years of working experience, this added a more reliable context to my personal records from rehearsal rooms and helped with understanding the developments of the professional approach to the genre and to the role of the Musical Director over the recent decades.
Previous experiences in Germany
Even before my undergraduate studies of Music and English in Munich, I was drawn to the professional world of Music and Theatre, when I started to work as a personal repetiteur for Opera Singers and Collaborative Pianist for singing recitals of all genres. This job included very detailed work on pieces from operas, operettas and Lied as well as Musical Theatre. From the beginning, I was particularly interested in the combination of scenic elements and music and the work with professionals has sharpened my senses for aspects in pieces that weren’t solely musical. From the first rehearsal, I was able to witness a high grade of professionalism, with which especially the classically trained opera singers approached their work and how much research they had executed on pieces before bringing them into the room, which encouraged me to pursue a career in music. Through a classmate at university, I got in touch with semi-professional Musical Theatre companies and started working on a variety of shows. Here I found myself in a new position: whilst I had mainly worked with individual singers, that had the specific training for their artform, I had hardly encountered any major challenges, and my main role was to play the piano to their wishes. When I started working with big casts, who had different levels of skills and experience, I found myself more regularly in a leading and teaching position, which became a more challenging but also fulfilling role.
During my second year of university, I was approached by a professional touring company from Munich, who sends professional shows on National Tours in all the German speaking countries, as they were looking for an Assistant Musical Director. Drawing from my previous work with opera professionals, I expected a fairly homogenous level of training amongst the cast members, however I was met with a situation, that is still common in the German industry due to its infrastructure: whilst some of the cast members had trained in Musical Theatre in Germany, Austria or the Netherlands, some roles were played by trained opera singers and actors. This resulted in numerous incidents of code-switching strategies I had to apply to guarantee musical success in the rehearsal room and I was forced to amplify my knowledge of the various singing techniques I was dealing with. Since these experiences had left a big impression on me, I wanted to use the placements to compare the work in the rehearsal room with performers with distinct qualities at Leeds Conservatoire to the work in Germany. Therefore, it was particularly helpful that I was dealing with shows, that involved Musical Theatre performers, actors and actor-musicians, which enhanced my experiences and made them comparable to my work in Germany.
Video 1: Extract from a professional rehearsal in Germany with different singer types
The Special Role of MA Company
A major part of my internal placements at Leeds Conservatoire was working with the MA company students. This group of students is aspiring to work in various roles in the Musical Theatre industries such as performing, choreographing, writing. Since we had a lot of classes together, a strong connection emerged between them and the Musical Direction class, and we have been on various of their performance projects together. What makes this group unique, are their various individual backgrounds: whilst some of them have already trained as performers before, some of them have a background in acting, dancing or even opera singing. Therefore, they serve as a prefect test group to compare my experiences in Germany to, since their individual knowledge and skillsets are different and pose a variety of contributions but also challenges to the work of an MD.
A first example would be their ability to read sheet music: whilst some of them were very proficient in reading sheet music, some of them were not able to read sheet music at all. This resulted in the question how to deal with this in a group rehearsal. The usual practice is to hand out scores to the performers and walk them through their parts with the score as a scaffolding for them. Since you usually play the notes on the piano or sing them, most of them will be able to follow individual notes, however it can be challenging for them to follow the piece as a whole and you need to adapt your way of communicating with them. To make sure that your directions are clear to everyone, this leads to codeswitching of a certain degree. This stylistic device, that is rooted in linguistics, is used to communicate differently with people based on their individual requirements. When I knew that I was dealing with a singer, who struggles with note names or technical terms, I would adapt my language and use bar numbers or more descriptive language to ensure a smooth rehearsal process. In a room with only one or two performers, this is easy to handle, since you can ask about their requirements and adapt to them, whilst in a room with a big ensemble, where you don’t know about the individual requirements, this can pose the risk of the Musical Director either not looking after everyone’s needs , which can result in some ensemble members struggling, or slowing down the rehearsal process by overexplaining expressions. Both can lead to an unsuccessful outcome of the show and decreasing morale amongst cast members. In this context, the work on the three Performance Projects was particularly interesting, since they were spread out over the year and people would come back together in the rehearsal room with a further developed skillset every time. This led to more fruitful collaborations and I discovered certain points that require constant and good communicational skills, that will be useful for my future work.
Performance Project 1
The first production, that involved the MA company, was a production of excerpts from the Jukebox musical “Our House”. My fellow Musical Direction students were also part of this project, and we had to divide the tasks of teaching songs, accompanying rehearsals and preparing the show. This was a great opportunity to improve everyone’s collaboration skills and get to know everyone’s capabilities. It also gave me as a Musical Director the opportunity to assess the needs of the performers and how we could improve their rehearsal experience.
From the beginning, it was clear that everybody’s focus as a performer was on different things. Whilst some people picked up harmonies easily and were fond of their vocal abilities, others had their focus on dancing and movement or acting and needed additional support. Therefore, I attempted to be in exchange with everyone and try to figure out how I had to adapt my working style for them. In this context, my background with German performers proved to be very helpful. I had already worked with trained actors, who were fond of dealing with text and therefore it was easier to approach songs via the lyrics. By trying to get them to imagine what they are feeling and how would tell a story with the lyrics, they could intuitively perform the song with higher confidence, which immediately improved the singing outcome. Working that way, the musical accuracy sometimes became less important, since the main goal was always to build something presentable to a potential audience. Working with MA company, I tried to rely on that toolkit, but also to maintain a high standard of musical accuracy. To achieve this for “Our House”, we tried to work very individually with the singers. The fact that four Musical Direction students were there to polish songs helped with adapting to individual needs and overall, “Our House” turned out to be successful and set the tone for further projects. In comparison to my work in Germany and as a lesson learned for future work, I will always try to be close to the people I’m working with and to find a way, that keeps everyone on board with the project, musically and personally, and I learned that working with people from different background can be beneficial for both sides, when you try to learn from each other and pursue a common goal.
Performance Project 2
The second performance project was set up in a different way than the first one. Each Musical Director got a cast of four people assigned to them and we had to individually prepare them for a showing of four different shows excerpts that were put into a big showcase about “Final Act”. I got assigned four female presenting performers from MA Company and we were working on “Ghost Quartet”, a show written by Dave Malloy as an Actor-Musician show for two female and two male voices. This confronted me with the task of adapting the music to female voices only, which was a new challenge. Luckily, I had one singer in the ensemble who could hit very low notes for a female voice, so most of the Tenor and Bass lines could just be put up an octave. However, this sometimes changed the sound marginally, so I had to spend a significant part of rehearsals looking at dynamic levels and make sure that the original sound experience was ensured. In addition, the musical style of the show is very Jazz influenced, with close harmony singing and syncopated rhythms of unnatural feeling. It became clear that some of the singers I was working with were lacking experience in this area of music and I suddenly found myself under a lot of time pressure regarding getting the show ready on time. In retrospective, I must confess that I should have put more time into stylistic training with the singers and try to make them feel connected to the genre. Given the circumstances, I thought that I should rather focus on getting the singers through the songs and rather drop the stylistic accuracy. However, I missed the fact that bringing the style closer to the performers would have made it easier for them to find access to the music and learn their parts. I also did not rely on the storytelling aspects of the music, which probably could have helped them for their own revision. I must constat that they presumably never enjoyed working on the piece, which is a key to success for a Musical Theatre show and therefore did not handle the piece with the required accuracy. This resulted in our part of the show being not as musically convincing as I wished it to be, however it taught me a lot of things, that I will incorporate in my future work.
First, I will analyse more diligently how much stylistic training is required at an early stage of the rehearsal process, by listening to the expressed but also the unexpressed needs of the performers. After that, I will attempt in a second step to individualise the scaffolding techniques required for every performer. This is of course quite challenging with a big cast, but with a few singers, such as in this case, it would have been manageable. When dealing with a bigger cast in the future, the individual elements of scaffolding cannot always be guaranteed, but I will attempt to always put the style of the show in focus at an early stage of a rehearsal process. Even though this might lead to a slower start into learning parts, it will be beneficial and overall saving time, since the number of musical setbacks will decrease whilst the work ethics and learning speed will increase.
Video 2: Ghost Quartet singing rehearsal with rearranged harmonies
Performance Project 3
After dealing with individual, smaller casts, we got all put back together for one big project with the MA Company, working on “Wonderful Town” by Leonard Bernstein. During this project, some organisational tasks arose, which I want to focus on. Being in a double role of organizing and being cast at the same time, there were some obstacles, that the MA Company students had to overcome. This led to occasional communication flaws. Since all the Musical Directors were bound to other projects at the same time, we couldn’t respond quite as flexibly to requests made by the Company members. A few rehearsals had to be cancelled or shortened due to that, which put everyone under more time pressure. Even though this led to tensions in the rehearsal room, it gave me a valuable insight into the role of the Musical Director outside of the rehearsal room. Being focused on the music most of the time, one can forget that being in a leading role in a production can mean a lot of people management. Experiences like these must remind you that you’re dealing with human individuals and that it is human to make mistakes or like in this case, miss out on communicating. During the rehearsal process, I caught myself being annoyed by the incidents but in retrospective, patience is key. Everyone in a theatre environment is determined to give their best and make a production successful, and a major lesson to take away from this process is, not to take things, that go wrong, personally. Whilst this production was stressful at times, we once again got reminded that everyone should try to make up for other people’s mistakes and a production can only be as good as how the people feel about it. On a musical end, the stylistic approach worked significantly better and the approach of focusing on people’s strengths paired with stylistic inputs from the Musical Directors made a hard piece of music manageable. Personally, I also enjoyed the collaborative aspect of playing a piano four-hander, which was the only way to adapt to the difficult piano part in such a short time.
Christmas Concert and London to Broadway
In addition to the performance projects, I had the pleasure to work on two concert projects, which involved the MA Company students. The first one was the Christmas concert at Leeds Conservatoire, which involved a ten-part band, an 80-piece choir and soloists. Since the Musical Direction students were barely involved in the rehearsal process, I would like to focus on the performances. As I was playing the piano part for both shows, I had to play through a lot of challenging pieces. However, there was a major difference in the way, the band and cast were led for both concerts: the Christmas Concert was conducted by our lecturer Aaron Newland-Bentley whilst for London to Broadway, I had to lead the band from the piano. In retrospective, both these scenarios had their own difficulties to overcome:
Playing with a stick conductor holds the advantage that you “only” need to play at the tempo and in the way the conductor shows with his baton. This takes the responsibility off you to find the right tempo. However, since the vision between the conductor and myself was sometimes impaired by the choir and we only had one rehearsal with everyone involved, I found myself in a difficult position to always play in the way requested. Whilst I struggled with this situation during the rehearsal, I could learn very quickly, how to adapt to the situation and as a learning outcome, I will take away that communication is key. To be able to follow the conductor, you need to prepare your part very diligently to be able to adapt quickly to tempo wishes and rely on your playing almost being automatised. Secondly, it is important to ask the conductor about his visions regarding the piece, so you can support them more actively, which is something I will incorporate in my future practice.
For London to Broadway, I found myself on the other end of this issue. The most challenging aspect of this concert was to seamlessly transition between 20 pieces of different styles and conducting clearly so the band could follow me. This proved to be difficult at the beginning; however, it turned out to be one of the most rememberable experiences of my placement. To be able to start the following song at the right tempo and in the right mood, you already need to envision what is going to happen musically during the previous song. Since I had never worked on a show with seamless transitions, this was new to me, and I will incorporate this in my work in Germany. To sum up my experiences with these concerts, I will say that it has reminded me that a diligent preparation with the score at the piano and for the people involved can help to overcome such stressful shows with constant playing and non-verbal communication. In addition, orchestrating songs of so many styles sharpened my skills in adapting technical skills to stylistic needs whilst envisioning the desired sound. This was new to me, since previously I had a lot of time to prepare the arrangement during a rehearsal process and could focus on an individual composer and their musical style.
Video 3: London to Broadway with seamless transition between songs
One Man, Two Guvnors
Along with the MA Company projects, I was offered the opportunity to work as the Musical Director for the final performance project of the third-year actors and actor-musicians, who put on a showing of “One Man, Two Guvnors” by Richard Bean with music by Grant Olding, being the only student Musical Direction student, who was musically in charge of his own show. The music is supposed to serve as transition music between scenes with two songs being sung by the cast in scenes. Since the director wanted less music than in the original version by National Theatre, it was my responsibility to edit the music and teach it to a group of actor-musicians, who made up the band. Therefore, I once again had to prepare very diligently, think about the purpose of storytelling through music and restructure the music to the needs of the show. In addition, since the music relies on the guitar being very important in the band and there were no written out band parts, I had to improve my knowledge about how to play the guitar and how to arrange for it. To achieve that, I turned towards the guitar players from the show for support and even though I was supposed to be in an instructing role for them originally, I found myself in a learning position occasionally, when talking about the feasibility of my arrangement. I am very thankful for this experience and the lesson that I learnt, which is that as a Musical Director, you won’t always be able to be the expert on every musical aspect and therefore it is important to be open to expertise from performers or musicians. This does not weaken your position as a leader in the room, but it strengthens it, since you won’t be spreading superficial knowledge and can communicate more effectively with everyone involved.
Since the musical style was skiffle-band oriented, I wanted to learn from my mistakes from “Ghost Quartet” and work intensively on the musical style from the beginning. I introduced specific style workshops to cast and band and worked with imagery for a cast with mixed singing abilities. In addition to this I tried to adapt the score to the singers’ abilities, especially in ensemble numbers, to make sure that the more confident singers could support the less confident singers on stage by taking pressure of them. This was crucial, since the shows were self-lead by the students and I wasn’t conducting the show itself, which is why I gave an additional workshop on how to lead a band from an instrument to the students in charge.
Overall, the combination of new challenges regarding the music and being responsible for organisational and technical tasks was an intense experience and gave me an insight into the stringency of a six-week production period and how everybody is relying on everyone else’s professionalism in approaching their work to guarantee a successful show.
Placement Learning Outcomes and Expert Opinion
With all these various experiences, I want to return to my initial question on what to take back to the German industry as a Musical Director. The German theatre landscape is highly publicly funded and due to the density of theatres with permanent ensembles, choirs and orchestras (c.f. Zieba et Newman, 2007, p. 3), it could be a major player. However, it seems like the level of professionalism is below the industry standard in the UK. Working on the placement productions has showed me that the key to a higher working standard in Germany lies in the early stages: the UK produces a big amount of highly specialised Musical Theatre performers who then get to work on a variety of shows, that cover all styles, since the popularity of the genre extends Mega Musicals and Jukebox Musicals, which are the only popular show types in Germany (c.f. Horn, 2022, p. 71). To get a professional viewpoint on this, I spoke to the Dutch Musical Director Koen Schoots, who has conducted Musicals in the US, the UK and Germany and who serves as an orchestrator for Frank Wildhorn amongst others (Biography Koen Schoots). The exact findings can be found in the presentation linked to this journal; however, he confirmed my findings from his experience. In his opinion, Germany is trailing behind due to its history of neglecting Musical Theatre as an artform for decades, which is rooted in the Third Reich Era and the tendency to separate “serious” and “entertaining” music (c.f. Küppers, 2011, p. 50). This has led to underdeveloped Musical Theatre courses, which has resulted in roles not being played by specialists of the genre. What this means for the role of the Musical Director is that more flexibility is required and that they need to bring a lot of knowledge into the room.
Summary
After dealing with industry differences over months, I will take a lot of newly acquired knowledge back to Germany. This placement has enforced my ambition of professionalise the way Musical Theatre is produced in Germany by bringing the most advanced skills from Leeds Conservatoire into rehearsal rooms in my home country. Skills such as singing stylistics and strong collaboration between all parties involved make UK productions so successful and the theatre infrastructure in German provides creatives with all they need to become equal. To achieve this, the professionals as well as the audiences need to be educated on the genre, especially regarding its various faces. It is my personal ambition to find a role as a Musical Director or Educator and work on both ends to give Musical Theatre the place in the German arts sector it deserves.
Reference List
•Küppers, S. (2011) „Die Produktion deutschsprachiger Jukebox-Musicals: Ästhetische und ökonomische Strategien” Vienna: University of Vienna
•Schwarz, J. (2026) Interview with Koen Schoots about the European MT industry
•Horn, L. (2022) “Inwiefern steht die Musicalbranche der Stadt Hamburg im internationalen Wettbewerb mit London und New York City?” Hamburg: HAW Hamburg
•Zieba, M. and Newman C. (2007) ‘Understanding Production in the Performing Arts: A Production Function for German Public Theatres’ Dublin: Trinity Economic Papers
