ABSTRACT
In American musical theater, the orchestra serves as an essential indicator of style. Broadway musicals of the mid-twentieth-century’s so-called Golden Age had particular sonic traits, informed by accomplished orchestrators. Since the late 1960s, however, Broadway has undergone numerous aesthetic shifts and become a heterogeneous soundscape, with new orchestral methods developing alongside the continuation of earlier styles and resulting in a melting pot of “Broadway sounds.” By deliberately avoiding direct references to any specific 1970s pop or Asian music, Schonberg expresses his own contemporary popera language infused with exoticism, while intending to broadly sound “a clash between two cultures.” And William David Brohn’s sumptuous orchestrations amplify the musical’s spectacle, particularly with the prominence of electronic music, which helps bridge Miss Saigon’s stylistic gap between contemporary popera and East Asian exoticism. At the musical’s conclusion, J. George has become disillusioned by the stagnant directions of his life and art.
