Interview conducted by Alumni Coordinator Natalie Krevitt ’26

 

Q: What first drew you to music?

I was a pretty typical kid: I played a lot of sports, but I also took piano lessons, which I really loved. By high school, I was involved in musical theater and was bitten by the bug there. When I arrived at Harvard, I joined the Kroks very early on. I had done very little arranging before, but arranging for the Kroks became something I deeply enjoyed, and I’m still doing it today. I also spent summers on Cape Cod performing musical theater with Krok classmates and friends from New England Conservatory. Those summers were where all the fires really started to light in terms of imagining a musical career.

 

Q: You began arranging and eventually directing the Harvard Krokodiloes while still an undergrad. How did you balance that and your academic demands?

I was a music concentrator, so it was pretty organic. The Kroks rehearsed at the end of the day, so I didn’t miss classes or anything like that. I was so enjoying being a part of the Kroks and arranging for them was exciting, not draining. The musical work and the academic work really fed each other.

 

Q: When you moved from a cappella arranging to orchestrating for the Hasty Pudding, where the instrumentation varies year to year, how did that shift influence your musical approach?

This was a real critical point for me. I was hired as the assistant music director at the end of my senior year in 1977 for HPT 129: Cardinal Knowledge, having never even seen a Pudding show. I assumed I’d just be playing piano and helping with rehearsals, but on day one I met Eric Knight, a leading symphonic pops arranger from New York. Very quickly, we both realized I would need to orchestrate part of the show, something I had never done. I had arranged for the Kroks, but that’s voices, not instruments. And then, a few weeks in, I learned I would also be conducting the show. It was truly a baptism by fire. Thankfully, Eric became a wonderful and willing mentor, even under intense deadlines. I was really learning on the job, and it’s really where my career, as it turned out to go, got launched.

 

***

In a moment that felt almost scripted, two current Kroks wandered into the theater mid-conversation. The current Music Director introduced himself to Peter, despite the two having exchanged countless emails over the years, they had never met face-to-face. A first-year Krok beamed as he told him, “I recognize you very very vividly from the top of all of our scores, so it’s good to meet a legend!” The moment was warm and full of admiration, a reminder of how deeply Peter’s musical work continues to shape the group.

***

 

Q: Can you think of any Hasty Pudding productions in the past that were particularly challenging or on the other end of that, a moment or year that was particularly meaningful?

I always return to those first couple of years. I was so inexperienced – the Pudding is a largely professional-quality production, and I was worried that I was not really qualified to do this. I was living in a guest suite in Lowell House alongside Eric Knight because there was simply so much work to do, and there was a huge learning curve. It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time, but during these years, I realized so convincingly that this business is about being self-critical and listening to the work that you’ve done, seeing why it worked or why it didn’t work. I just can’t imagine a better or more nurturing experience than the one I went through, and it was terrifying at times, but gosh on opening night that was the first Pudding show I’d ever seen, and I was conducting it so wow.

 

Q: How do you approach adapting/arranging songs to fit the specific tone or comedic style of a Hasty Pudding show?

When I’m arranging for the Pudding, it really is a completely different process from arranging for the Kroks. With the Kroks, being an a cappella group, every element has to be handled by the voices—the melody, the accompaniment, the rhythm. For the Pudding, or any instrumental vocal arrangement, you suddenly have the band, and knowing what each instrument is capable of and how to build a sound behind the singers is a really tricky skill to learn. You want to support the singing, you want the band to reflect the style of the song, but you also have to make sure the vocal line stays the focus, unless we’re in the middle of a kickline, which is its own beast!

I had a pretty decent, innate sense of how to write for voices because I started doing that in high school, but I knew nothing about orchestrating for instruments. The challenge is learning how to create a backdrop that fits the style, how to keep the focal moments upfront, and how to balance everything so that the song moves along in an orderly, satisfying way. And because no orchestrator knows how to play every instrument in the orchestra—at least none that I know—you really have to learn how each instrument sounds and what the technical pieces are. It’s a big learning curve. You can’t just take a course and read about it.

For me, it all starts at the beginning when I’m doing the piano–vocal arrangements for the Pudding. I take what the composer has done and start building the arrangement so it can be used in rehearsal with just piano and voice. That becomes the template for what the orchestra is ultimately going to play. And there is no textbook that tells you exactly how to do all of that. You really do have to dive into a very cold pool and hope it works out. But the beauty of it is that I had the chance to start learning all of this at the Pudding—that’s where it began.

 

Q: You’ve collaborated with the Boston Pops under conductors like John Williams and Keith Lockhart. What have you learned from them, and has that changed your way of arranging or conducting?

I’m wondering if you could imagine what it feels like to be someone just out of college and suddenly invited to Symphony Hall. I remember walking down the hallway for a meeting about a concert I had arranged for, opening the door, and sitting there were John Williams and Steven Spielberg. I did not go into Symphony Hall with a whole lot of experience writing for a full 90-piece orchestra. I had started getting a sense of it from the Pudding and a couple of other small projects, but this was one of the biggest learning environments you could possibly imagine. In a professional orchestra rehearsal, you don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes and fix them. It’s a union rehearsal—the clock is running, you can’t go overtime, and whatever you’ve written has to work the first time. That is terrorizing.

The stakes were a little higher at Symphony Hall with the Boston Symphony and John Williams conducting. Thankfully, it did work, and I learned so much simply by listening to what I had written, just like I had years earlier with my first Pudding arrangements. There was certainly music I wrote that I realized wasn’t optimum for a number of reasons, but I used all of that as a learning experience. I paid very close attention to why something didn’t work, and if you’re perceptive, you learn quickly what you could’ve done to make it better. It was a really stimulating, sometimes frightening, but ultimately incredibly satisfying environment.

 

Q: In your time teaching music and being a mentor to others, what do you think is really important advice for people who are learning arranging and what advice do you wish you had received?

What my own experience taught me is that having real opportunities to do work at a professional level—and then hear it, see it, and figure out why it worked or didn’t—is absolutely invaluable. During my nearly 20 years teaching at the Boston Conservatory, most of my work was one-on-one mentoring, and the biggest thing I stressed to students going into musical theater was the importance of being the best musician you can be. In the professional world, there isn’t time for remedial training: you need to be prepared. My emphasis was always on musicianship, because being a strong, comprehensive, well-trained artist is what ultimately translates into employment. I just loved watching the arc of my students over the four years and seeing them buy into this notion, especially in a professional theater environment that’s increasingly challenging. 

 

Q: Have you noticed any shifts in musical theater over your career, and how do you help people adapt? With the Pudding specifically, has the style shifted and how has the change in gender of casting shifted the creative product of the show?

When I look back at my early decades with the Pudding, it was an all-male cast, which came with its own charming moments and also some real vocal challenges because we didn’t have the full spectrum of men and women singing together. But it was an often hilarious and really defining kind of time. I think it’s absolutely wonderful that women are now in the cast. It’s opened up such a broader range of sound and an even bigger range of comedy, and I think the level of theater has gone up. I’m sure casting is more competitive now, and that’s a great thing for the show.

Just a few days ago there was a big New York Times article titled ‘The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble,’ pointing out that only two new musicals are currently in the pipeline. Production costs have become so suffocating that there’s been a huge move toward jukebox musicals—Carole King, Michael Jackson—because you don’t have to build a story from scratch. You already have a life story and a built-in score. So we’re seeing fewer traditional story-driven musicals on Broadway.

But what’s happening in New York doesn’t always reflect what’s going on across the country. A lot of regional companies are still doing the core musical theater repertoire. I think it’s still very very important that young musical artists be thoroughly trained in acting, voice and speech, history of musical theater, and knowing how vital it is to be able to deliver a story in the form of a song. I don’t think any of us has a crystal ball to know where this is all going to land, and I know from talking to some of my former students that it is a very challenging environment in New York to land a show as a musical theater artist. My advice would be to get out of New York and go around the country – there’s an awful lot of really vital theater going on. Things are shifting but not disappearing, and gosh I don’t know the forecast — it’s hard to say where it’s all going to land.

 

Q: Looking back, is there something you might approach differently in your career, and then similarly, is there a legacy you hope to leave with the Hasty Pudding?

I think nobody would be truthful in saying there is nothing you wish you’d done differently. There are little things I might rethink: a certain interaction, a piece of work I’d refine. I do still think from time to time, having grown in the Western suburbs of Boston and then winding up living in Boston, whether I might’ve had an even more satisfying successful career if out of college I had moved to New York e or LA or Nashville — one of those big music hubs. That might’ve launched me in a different direction, but then I go back and think about how it all spun out, and here I still am, loving working for the Pudding show. I cannot not mention Alan Feinstein, who is such a dear friend. We’ve known each other and worked together for decades, and he’s just the absolute best. But no, I really don’t have regrets.

The legacy I’d like to leave is that I cared a great deal for the artists that I worked with, on every level. I just wanted them to be their very best and wanted to do what I could do to make that happen and showcase that, be it a great orchestration for somebody on stage or working with students in musical theater or just helping somebody. I don’t care about having a legacy of being thought of as “great,” but I am really really proud of what I’ve done, and I continue to be very stimulated and satisfied to do my work, not the least of which being for you guys, for the Pudding.