In this interview segment, composer/arranger Bill Sherman clarifies the various positions that make up a Broadway music department and how they interrelate. He outlines the composer and lyricist’s creation of songs, the arranger’s job of shaping and completing the piece (including building dynamics and endings), the orchestrator’s translation of the arranged song into individual instrumental parts, the music supervisor’s overarching coordination of vocal and instrumental arrangements, the music director’s role as conductor and on‑stage musical leader, and the copyist’s responsibility for notating and archiving all parts for the pit musicians. Sherman illustrates these functions with a concrete example from In the Heights, describing how Lin‑Manuel Miranda’s demos were sent to Alex Lacamoire and himself for arranging and orchestration. The conversation concludes with a question about how many of these hats Sherman has personally worn throughout his career.
The music department, and we'll talk about Broadway right now. You look at a program and you see there is the composer, there is the lyricist. Those, those ones ring a bell to people, but then you start getting into the arranger, the orchestrator, music supervisor, copyist. What's the relationship between all of that?
Sure, I still get asked that question. My wife still doesn't entirely understand what that is or what I do. Anyway, so the composer and the lyricist write the song, and that can come in many forms. These days it can come in a computer file, or it can come written on a piece of paper, or it or it can come just as like a sung melody to you. Let's take In the Heights for example. Lin would sing songs in his computer and send them to Alex Lacamoire and I, and we would listen to them and sort of try to get the essence of them. And then the arranger's job, I guess— I don't guess, I know— is to take the pieces of the song and arrange them into one cohesive thing. Often, and I do this too now with things I'm working on, I don't write endings. 'cause I just can't get there. 'Cause if you poured it all out for the song, you forget to write the ending. So a lot of what Alex and I did was to sort of create a dynamic to the song and create a build to the song and then create an ending. And that's a lot of what the arranger does. It's in the title. It's moving pieces around and arranging things. And once that's done and we have like a cohesive song that everybody loves and it's great, the orchestrator's job is to take that piece of music and translate it to the band. And so they will write all the parts. The bass part, the piano part, the drum part, the horn parts, and do all that stuff. And then put in front of a band. The music supervisor is sort of this overarching person who is involved in the vocal arranging and the blah blah blah and just makes sure that the music department cohesively works together. The music director is often the guy who conducts the band and is actually playing the show. And then the copyist sort of takes all of this material, be it the vocal part, the cello part, the piano part, and writes it down and puts it on paper so that there's an archival thing that everybody can read. And also, the copyist creates the parts for the people to play in the pit.
How many of those different hats have you worn in your career?
Every single one of them. I've been a composer. I've never been a lyricist. I don't do words. I was a composer. I've been a music supervisor. What's funny is that music supervisor in the theater world means something different than in the movie world. Music supervisor on a film is often the person that takes You know, if you need a song at the end credits, they'll have, you know, hundreds of bands will have sent them songs. It's their job to place the music into the thing, into the movie. Anyway, music. I've been a music director on a TV show, not a theater piece. I've been a copyist really early on in my career because I didn't know how to do anything else, and I orchestrated In the Heights.
