I think that in the days when plays sometimes took advantage of the house-minimum requirement, and they were used to play pre-show and intermission music (music that wasn't written for the play), they were sometimes placed in a box rather than the pit. I think often it was a string quartet, although I've read that at the Winter Garden in 1957, the house musicians were two violists and two cellists. So I think that even if wasn't always a string quartet, they were often all string players. I think it was pretty common that the house musicians were not very good. Sometimes they were someone's relative who wasn't good enough to get hired as a regular pit musician.
There's a story I've read that when the West Side Story orchestrations were being prepared, Bernstein, perhaps along with Ramin and Kostal, listened to the house musicians and decided that the violists simply could not be used. The cellists were not very good, but they could be used with limitations. The orchestration was prepared to include four cellists, two of whom would play the tougher stuff and the other two — the Winter Garden house musicians — would play very simple stuff (whole notes). |
