Tom McGee's Blog

Con­certs of The Broad­way Bach Ensemble

A few years ago I took on the project of devel­op­ing and pro­duc­ing CDs for the mem­bers of the orches­tra. Because of var­i­ous copy­right and other restric­tions, we only make these avail­able to the peo­ple who play with us, and because of the lim­ited quan­ti­ties we don’t get any kind of econ­omy of scale. Rather than take a beat­ing (or hav­ing the orches­tra bud­get take the hit) I do them myself on a good-quality inkjet printer, using the stan­dard kinds of stock you’d find in any com­puter store.

If you look hard enough, you can find glossy, photo-quality stock for both the labels (easy to find) and the case inserts (hard to find). Print­ing at the best-quality set­ting these ren­der beautifully.

Home-Grown Pho­tog­ra­phy

One of my favorite pas­times is going out to the Great Swamp and shoot­ing pho­tographs. With a pretty good col­lec­tion of land­scape pho­tos on hand, I used a cou­ple of them for the Octo­ber, 2007, con­cert.

Another, con­trast­ing, photo was used for the label.

Win­ter Chill

For the Feb­ru­ary 2009 con­cert, I worked with my art direc­tor friend and cooked up a chilly blue type treat­ment.

The reflec­tions and the “hook” around the right side of the let­ter­ing was a happy acci­dent, and we car­ried it through to the label and back as well.

Mahler and Bach

For our con­cert of Mahler’s Fourth Sym­phony and the Bach “Wed­ding” Can­tata, I used a dec­o­ra­tive piece of a Klimt paint­ing. The pat­tern was extremely strong, so I ghosted it back to 45% or so, in order to get leg­i­ble text over it.

The same image worked just as well on the CD face, so I car­ried it though.

Hal­loween

A few years back we did a children’s con­cert on a Hal­loween theme. With all the music about ghosts and mon­sters I wanted to pro­duce a CD cover that con­veyed a sort of … creepi­ness. Black was called for, but get­ting a solid black that holds up wasn’t going to be really do-able on my inkjet printer. And run­ning it through my laser printer gave me a kind of icky gray.

I tried run­ning it through the laser printer twice, and while I got a sat­is­fac­tory black, the type was com­pletely plugged up. My solu­tion was to run a dif­fer­ent image through on each pass. The white type was “choked” on one of them, so the white showed through cleanly with a very nice ghostly halo around it.

The label and back were a lit­tle trick­ier, because I needed to have more and smaller text. But a lit­tle exper­i­men­ta­tion pro­duced accept­able results.

Scot­land

The pro­gram included the Hebrides (“Fingal’s Cave”) Over­ture of Mendelssohn, the Bruch “Scot­tish Fan­tasy,” and “Orkney Wed­ding With Sun­rise” by Peter Maxwell Davies. Since two of them pre­sented obvi­ous visual asso­ci­a­tions, a lit­tle fish­ing into Google landed some nice pho­tos. The box cover is a photo taken in Orkney, and another two pho­tos of the Hebrides served for the inside and back cov­ers (not shown here).

Fingal’s Cave turned out to be a real place (I’d always assumed it was mytho­log­i­cal or some­thing, I don’t know why), and rather inter­est­ing look­ing, with the vivid crys­talline struc­ture of the vol­canic rock resem­bling organ pipes. So that became the face of the CD itself. The type­face is based on designs by Charles Ren­nie Mack­in­tosh, the great Scot­tish designer of the arts and crafts move­ment.

Old Sub­way Maps

There are sev­eral good sources of repro­duc­tions of old sub­way mate­ri­als avail­able. Unfor­tu­nately, the really graphic 1970s map wasn’t find­able. There were “re-drawings” of it, but they really lacked the style of the original.

But I was able to find a usable map from ear­lier in his­tory for the Octo­ber, 2005 con­cert. A lit­tle tweak­ing in Pho­to­shop let me replace all the sta­tion names with the names of the per­form­ers, orches­tra and reper­tory; the rec­tan­gles rep­re­sent­ing the sta­tion plat­forms were adjusted to fit, and on the back the famil­iar col­ored cir­cles for the A train, 9 train, etc., were adapted to the track num­bers. We per­form on the upper west side of Man­hat­tan, near Colum­bia, so that was the area I focused on.

Early Ele­va­tion Map

This is derived from a beau­ti­ful ele­va­tion map of the Num­ber 1 line all the way from the tip of Man­hat­tan up to the Bronx. Again, I cen­tered in on the area around Colum­bia, which is serendip­i­tously the most inter­est­ing visu­ally because of the Man­hat­tan Val­ley, where the train runs above ground to the 125^th street sta­tion. Not shown here, the map con­tin­ues and wraps around the back of the box.

With a lit­tle retouch­ing, and fonts to more-or-less match those of the orig­i­nal, I made a sub­tle pack­age for an ele­gant pro­gram of Faure, Brahms and Beethoven. The ver­ti­cal labels worked nicely for the lay­out of the label, allow­ing a good read left and right of the pro­gram infor­ma­tion.