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 125th 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.