The Orchestra Piano Gig

I have had lucid dreams about the cruise ship orchestra piano job.  Somehow I got stuck with this gig, and it is because there are not many brave enough to tackle its challenges.  While often the position becomes a lame duck spot (because keyboardists simply can't do it), and when this is the case the musicality of the entire vessel sinks to the level of "canned" or "industrial" music.  The music on a cruise ship by default is such.  They have elaborate production companies who design, implement, and produce their shows.  Within this construct is an amazing amount of ship politics, and this political regime is infused with homosexuality.  Why?  What does being gay have to do with producing ship production shows?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I don't care to spend my time thinking about such things.  It is an unnecessary evil, and exactly like the American military (directly from the horses mouths) you better accept it.  It is not spoken about.  It just is.  We have the Catholic Church, their clergy, and their alter boys.  We have the Boy Scouts, their leaders, and their prey.  We have Hollyweird.  We have Bill Cosby.  We have Jeffrey Epstein.  (or we had him until conveniently he leaned against a towel tied to his bed and seemingly suffocated)  We have gay Army generals, of which no one speaks either.  I am beginning to think this Gay Mafia is the new enemy.  I did not intend to write about homosexuality.  I would rather never think about it again, but it has become entwined in every aspect of our lives unbeknownst to us.  Necessarily when you do a ship orchestra piano job, you will be dealing with homosexuality part of the time.  What a drag.  What more it is a total and complete distraction from the job intended.  It becomes manipulated into something other than what the company intends.  The creative or artistic component of society often gets skewed to the gay side.  Why?  There is enough on the plate of an orchestra pianist without being distracted by this.  If the employee who finds himself in this position is not capable of fulfilling its requirements, then the cast and orchestra become a drag show.  This often is one of the slants applied to cruise ship production shows.  If your production singers are not strong, then the easiest methodology is to turn the shows into camp.  It is disgusting.  In one particular show the capable and strong female production lead belted, "I am the Man of La Mancha."  Clearly she wasn't, and it was a tragedy those on the production end were irresponsible enough to ignore the gender identities of the original songs.  This is an issue with which America is faced today.  The idea that human beings have become androgynous amebas, big globs of non gender fat cells with no identify of their own is ludicrous.  It is gender or sexual orientation that makes life interesting.  To regress to the level of earthworms is disgusting, reprehensible, and sickening.  It is a requirement to become gender neutral when working in the cruise industry, but I won't go into why.  Certainly it is easy to control your herd if they are mindless, sexless, amebas.  With that idea in mind lets look at America.  We are Communist.  Our major providers who pay no taxes are Amazon and Walmart.  Legislation was passed by the Donald empowering corporate America and enabling them to take from the coffer but not give back.  We are Communist.  Our rebellious voices have been quelled, our artists and role models have either died, sold out, or become sexually depraved, and there no longer is economic or social mobility.  We are addicted to smartphones and walk around looking at our palms.  What does any of this have to do with America, the orchestra piano job, and the rest?  The answer is you must adhere to these unspoken principles to survive.  Fine.  You know that going in.  There will be little or no creative license in your keyboard performances.  You will do as you're told, and you will try to play to match the rhythmic concept of the "canned" or "industrial" nature of the production music.  In a nutshell this means there is no live feel to the music, because it is prerecorded with a rigid click track, and the 'tracked' performances usually realized through MIDI are generated by a computer sequencer.  These computer programs choose the most base and rhythmically devoid rhythmic concepts in existence.  As you will find trying to match a keyboard track for many cruise companies, the physical motion is stiff, robotic, and unmusical.  This is a musical fact, and never will it change.  It would be far too difficult and costly to ask a producer to provide human musical performances.  Some cruise companies are better than others, and whether you believe it or not groove, musicality, and humanity in the production shows predicate ratings.  For one ship only I was allowed to bring keyboard equipment to my job.  I designed and assembled a small rack of keyboard modules that sounded much better than the stock Kurzweil provided in the theater.  I had worked on the ship before, so I knew the shows.  I brought to the productions a heightened musical sense with keyboard performances to match.  In less than one week the ship was rated number one in the ratings.  Suddenly new enthusiasm emerged for the shows, and they began to renovate the sound and lighting systems in the main theater.  New equipment began to arrive including a sophisticated espresso machine for the crew mess hall.  This is the power of music and a well conceived, produced, and performed musical show.  The majority of ships do not have this.  They have compromises, because the musicians hired do not have the skill or understanding how to articulate a quality performance.  Live music is a thing of the past.  How does a keyboardist confront this problem?  It is not rocket science.  Often I say my compositional collegiate training allowed me to keep the job on the ships.  I spent the majority of my time re-writing the keyboard charts, so that they could be read and played.  Most often they were a travesty of fly specks, gibberish, and compositional narcissism.  If you want the music to be performed, it must be written and copied well.  There is no short cut.  The rules of classical composition apply, and these guide lines allowed me to wade through the ego of cruise ship production politics.  People feared me, because I knew more about music than anyone on a ship.  This meant you had to take this music seriously, study it, practice it, learn it, and perform it each week.  Often it was a major drag, but then again this is work, not fun.  The concept of the "Showband" piano job was it was meant to be a "pick up" gig.  That means that the music should be written in such a way that a new hire should be able to pick up the music in a few tries.  There are no overly complicated sections.  There is little classical fare.  Often you fill in the gaps like most commercial keyboardists playing in bands on land.  Again certain cruise companies are better at this than others.  A keyboard can add a certain dimension to a show if needed, but often the orchestration is rich enough on its own and features the production singers.  One particular company used the piano sounds as the basis for everything, and its content was not unlike the music of J.S. Bach.  It was written in four voice style the way a classically trained pianist often would play.  This is unusual in commercial music.  As such these notes in the piano parts were the foundation of the entire show.  This piano part had to be articulated accurately and clearly, because everyone in the cast relied upon it.  (What a drag!)  The aid to learning a densely composed show was analyzing its content.  A copy of the prerecorded tracks was a necessity.  You had to sit and listen to these tracks (although often they were musically painful) and watch the music go by.  You would be watching poorly notated, computer generated, piano notation with few corrections.  Often the show had been transposed for a needy production singer.  It was your task to organize this music into numbers, put the numbers in the proper order, and learn the sequence of music.  More often than not the transitions between numbers were more difficult than the numbers themselves.  You learn this trick over time, just like you learn how to play Count Basie arrangements for a Captain's Cocktail.  Count Basie was a pianist, and later in his life as his skills waned he created a style of minimalist piano "licks."  He sat and grinned most of the time, and then he would drop in a few tasty piano "licks."  If you were to be successful as the pianist in the ship orchestra playing Count Basie tunes, you had one task.  Before the set you would put your music in order and look through the tunes to find these particular "licks."  Often they would be intros or endings with a few transitions thrown in.  The notes were specific, so you had to learn them cold.  Then it didn't matter if you played much during the arrangement.  What mattered was you feigned Count Basie accurately.  There are many tricks of the trade, and the biggest one is to have recordings of your shows.  If you could listen to an upcoming show ahead of time and get it in your ear, you would survive the rehearsal better.  Rest assured with certain Guest Entertainers the playing field was tilted the pianist.  Taking your written music seriously and designing and setting up your keyboard rig are the two largest requirements for the orchestra pianist.  They will try to divert you, and they will try diligently to make you fail.  Like any college trained pianist, you make the music your own.  That means having a quality digital piano set up exactly the same way with the same sound for every show.  You should program it yourself including the necessary sounds you will use on any commercial gig.  To date I have yet find one simple MIDI module that provides all of these sounds.  Instead you will have to program the given digital piano on a particular ship.  This is a drag and is time consuming, but it is the job.  If you accomplish these things, then the ship's orchestra can function without neurosis.  They rely on you to hold it together.  If you fail to do this, the gig will become a drunken sideshow.  It could be fun, but those who call themselves musicians really prefer to play the music.