Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1979 - 13

Do Not Use A Fixed Railing.
It Limits Flexibility

Do Use A Removable Solid RaIling

forces in the pit. A pit orchestra, to go to the smallest extreme,
could be just a piano, or a piano plus another instrument, or
three musicians, or six, or fourteen. Pit orchestras for musical
comedy must also be kept in mind. In many commercial productions musical comedy pit orchestras are kept restricted in
size to conserve money. A musical comedy pit orchestra
might average anywhere between twelve and twenty-eight musicians, but can, obviously, be more or less than these average forces. The pit should be designed to produce satisfactory acoustical results with all these variations.
The composers' requirements for a group of traditional
"grand operas," should usually determine the physical design
of opera pits. Figure 4 lists all the performances during the
1958-59 season of New York's Metropolitan Opera Company, indicating the number of musicians called for and the
number actually used.

Rule of Thumb?

Extended Seating

You will often find guidelines published in various books
and other reference materials-recommendations that the
size of an orchestra pit should be based on a certain number
of square feet per musician. Avoid using any of these
"square-feet-per-musician" guidelines as they so frequently
lead to inadequate pit design. Why?
In the first place, many of the published guidelines have
been derived from existing pits, believed to be adequate in
size, but which, in fact, do not provide sufficient physical or
acoustical "room." It is important to realize that musicians
who must work every day for many years in a given orchestra
pit are gradually forced to become accustomed to quite in-

Score
Calls
for

Opera

No. of Performances

%of
Total

No. of
Musicians
Used

Figure 3
Single Pit Configurations

directors will normally decide jointly on the number of musicians they wish to use in any particular theatre for a particular
production of an opera or musical comedy. The factors to be
considered include the composer's score and orchestration,
the amount of money available to pay the orchestra, or, in the
case of a volunteer operation, the number of competent musicians available to the production group. This assumes that the
pit has been designed so that the conductor and the director
are not limited by the amount of space available in the pit.
Some opera composers, Mozart for example, have scored
their operas for very small pit orchestras. Others, such as
Berg and Wagner, call for 95 to 105 musicians. In the middle
ground the size of a pit orchestra ranges between these extremes-say 70 to 85 musicians for many opera composers.
In the case of a professional orchestra, the number of musicians actually hired may fulfill exactly the composer's requirements; or, if money is limited, the conductor and director will
often settle for a smaller orchestra. In the case of "free" labor-this would include schools, universities, music conservatories, and volunteer organizations-assuming that the
pit's size is not a limitation, the conductor will opt for the full
complement of musicians called for by the score. Occasionally, to provide more students with experience in the pit, the
conductor will even add extra musicians. In other cases, if the
conductor is not satisfied with the level of competency of the
"free" musicians available to him, he will elect to operate with
a curtailed group. The pit design should give the producing organizations a full range of possibilities in respect to the size of
the pit orchestra they require.
Some lyric theatre presentations call for only very small
USITT /Fall, 1979

Giovanni
Magic Flute

60
62
62
63
63
64
65

Lucia
Fledermaus
Traviata
Carmen
Rigoletto
Hoffman
Onegin

68
69
71
71
71
72

Ballo
Macbeth
Aida
Boheme
Butterfly
Boris

73
74
74
74
74
74
75

Cav/Pag
Gioconda
Manon
Meistersinger
Requiem
Tasca
Vanessa

76
76
78

Lohengrin
Don Carlo
Otello

Wozzeck

6 >
3

6.5

25.6

32.2

23.8

5
4 .
6 ,

9.0

2.9

n
U
~I

17
10
8 1

5
1
12
4

Figure 4
Theatre Design & Technology

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1979