The Way You Look Tonight
 

The Way You Look Tonight was written by Jerome Kern in 1936. This copy of my attached score was written in August, 1963. It was my third for this setting, i.e., jazz band w/strings, woodwinds and harp.

Unlike my previous postings, I did make some changes to some of the background segments, to better suit the character of this arrangement. In the earlier pieces, I had decided to let all parts remain as they were written, so this is a departure for me.

The sections at Rehearsal Marks 5 and 6 are intended to be adlib solos by piano and tenor sax, respectively, but I have included the melody line in both sections, so there won't be just background accompaniment. Some Forum members have expressed interest in "playing along with the score", so they can simply delete the melody lines in those sections and have at it.

My scoring for harp is still pretty sorry. The best the harpist could say about it was that, "It wasn't as dreadful as your first two efforts". Writing for harp is going to take some study.

As in Poor Butterfly and The Song Is You, the clarinets and flutes 3 & 4 have separate staves, whereas in reality, they would have been copied out on the saxophone parts for this instrumentation.

As mentioned before, our scores for the Band were handed in transposed, so the copyists didn't have to do the transposition while creating the parts, but I prefer to view them in concert to better visualize the voicings, so I've left the score in concert. Therefore, the tenor saxophone adlib solo at Rehearsal Mark 6 has the lead line in concert key, but the chord symbols, which are in Free Text, are transposed.

I've tried something new in this score. Those of you who have played in jazz groups know what a drop is, but for those who don't, a drop is like a downward glissando with no end point and a diminuendo. The instrumentalist attacks the note and fingers a scalar or chromatic glissando, while letting his/her breath diminish. The saxes in measures 2 and 4 have my attempt at creating a drop that sounds good in midi. I used the note bend feature. If anyone can give me a better idea for how to create this drop effect, I'd appreciate the help. Simply using a 64th-note, diminishing glissando is much too articulated and doesn't sound right.

Again, hopefully you have a good midi instrument to export this to for sampling.

Note: There were some problems with starting and stopping playback in this score, where the sound would disappear. Composer Release 2.6 fixes these problems.

I hope you find some benefit in seeing/hearing this piece.

Ralph Rayner