Featured image taken by Gecko Net.

Since the beginning of October, the Oliver Band has worked very hard to prepare for the Oliver Musical as the accompanying live band for the music. This was an ambitious undertaking on the part of the music department due to the sheer scale of the music required. As a musical, there is no question that the show would rely heavily on the musical aspects of the show. Furthermore, following the legitimate music score for the Oliver! musical meant that we must learn music at the level of professional musicians. Albeit, many of us in the band played the music in a way that we could to avoid having to play music that we really couldn’t. Moreover, we were obviously not even close to the level of professional musicians in this regard. However, we were still able to perform with substantial musical levels that worked quite well with the production anyways.

Personally, as the only violinist in the band, having the to play the part by myself was an especially daunting aspect of this production. The nature of the violin as a high pitched, lyrical instrument, positions the itself as a very major player in any repertoire. Oliver! was the same is this respect and it meant that my sound was both very exposed and quite necessary for the music to sound the way it was intended to. This gave me a lot of responsibility and, although I have been involved in another musical production in my old school which arguably had harder music, I was the only one who would be playing a vital part of the music in this production. On top of that, I was featured in a solo where I was played without any accompaniment in two of the numbers. It required me to be very excessive in my playing and I needed to play it as extravagantly as possible as per the style of that section. Initially I was quite frightened of this prospect, however as I practiced very repetitively, I realized that I could do it well and consistently. This gave me the confidence to be in my element during the actual performance so that I can play in a calm environment.

Image taken by Gecko Net.

During the beginning, it was clear that, as a group, we were all quite overwhelmed by the repertoire such as Food Glorious Food in the beginning. Something in particular that seemed to be a recurring issue was our ability to cope with the tempo of the music. Some of these numbers were required to be fast so that people on stage can dance and move around energetically with the rhythm. Hence, this required hours of practice on everyone’s part so that we could, to some extent, resemble a functioning accompaniment soundtrack. In the end, everything worked out well as we persevered through hours of work and it finally paid off as we successfully pulled through three shows with the music sounding just right for the occasion. I hope many people enjoyed the show and I’m so glad that the overall production ran so smoothly.