The first step to answering that question for Dabbon is music research he curates a library of songs for each show he works on. For a dance arranger, the question is: “How can I make more enticing and more thrilling as well as help support what we need to feel and learn?” In fact, composing greats like Marvin Hamlisch and Jeanine Tesori started out as dance arrangers. But Dabbon began as a musical theatre student at the Hartt School of Music and found his way to musical direction and composition “A lot of dance arrangers are either composers or pianists who have great ideas,” says Dabbon. This experimentation and expansion of form attracted Dabbon to dance arranging in the first place. So it’s my job to figure out how to make sound like what everyone had heard before, yet create something totally different,” Dabbon explains. “When I did Disaster! there’s that famous Beethoven disco-‘A Fifth of Beethoven’-but JoAnn Hunter, who choreographed it, wanted this section where it’s a tap break. These artists write the music for dance breaks-at the very least-but may also create vocal arrangements and orchestrations depending on the song and the project. “Composers might write a minute-and-a-half song and it’s my job to make it into, say, a three-minute dance number or a seven-minute big production number,” says dance arranger David Dabbon. A necessary part of the team, the dance arranger is actually also a composer, but rather than writing the melody of a song, they write the expansion of that melody. Remember Sutton Foster’s eight-minute tap marathon in Anything Goes? Or Donna McKechnie’s showstopping layouts in “Music and the Mirror”? As it turns out, the music of a trademark splashy production number is often a collaboration between a composer and a dance arranger.
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