As I’ve mulled over what I want to do when I grow up, more and more I keep thinking that I would like to be a composer. True, I’ve been writing music for a long time, but for the most part no one’s been performing it. It seems to me that if I want to be an actual composer, then someone should start playing my stuff.
To that end, and having read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, I have started putting out there that I would appreciate the universe’s cooperation in getting my music performed. This is not the same as the occasional competition that I might enter; this is pointblank asking my friends and acquaintances to take a look at my stuff and to keep it in their minds that they have a friend whose music is available for performance: church choirs, high school choirs, community choruses, chamber groups, soloists, orchestras. I’ve done it all, although not at any level of output like a professional composer. As I recently said to an old friend, I’m not untalented, but I’m untrained—I don’t work quickly.
Am I working on anything at the moment? Yes:
A Christmas Carol has to be revamped: reorchestrated and exported into sound files that can be sucked up into QLab for rehearsal and performance this December at Newnan Theatre Company.
“Horsefly Rag”: Mike Funt has asked me to add a slow opening and a slower interlude before the big finish.
Seven Dreams of Falling: I will be getting back to work on the Minotaur’s “Rip me from this darkness” aria. Soon. Ish.
Five Easier Pieces: I’m going to finish that before the end of this year. I am.
So what are you waiting for? Go check out my stuff. And perform it.
My middle-schoolers have been working on their monologs for tomorrow’s performance, using the concept of the “unreliable narrator,” as exemplified by Greg, the narrator of Jeff Kinney’s fun series The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
The opening number, “Dear Diary,” is going to be adorable, you guys. The kids have been pros at making the lyrics their own, and I think you should all show up at Newnan Theatre Company tomorrow, Friday, June 26, at 4:30, to see the results.
There have been changes, of course, since I first posted this last week. I lowered the entire piece a whole step so my singers weren’t as uncomfortable (although they were quite capable of hitting the notes); I added a measure at the opening for choreography purposes; and I adapted the accompaniment at the end to give the cast a stronger cue for the ending.
As we worked on projection and focus, I gave my students someone to whom they could sing: Cthulhu. The concept is that if you sing well, the mighty Cthulhu will eat you first when he arises, sparing you the ignominy and pain of the inevitable suffering accompanying his arising.
I’ve decided that next summer’s workshop will be “The Call of Cthulhu,” and we’ll adapt one of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories to a Story Theatre version, making all the sound effects and theatre effects with minimal props, ending with an enormous puppet of the Great Old One rising from the rear of the stage amidst fog and dreary lights.
So here’s a first draft completed of “Dear Diary: a song for hapless liars,” the opening number for the middle school theatre workshop I’m teaching next week.
The theme of the camp is Diary of a Wimpy Kid, playing off Jeff Kinney’s delightful book, but that’s just a hook. The actual purpose of the workshop is character development, and as I said in the previous post we’ll be creating unreliable narrators who believe they’re telling us one thing but whom we see straight through.
Last summer I was asked to teach a middle school theatre workshop at Newnan Theatre Company. The topic was character development, and its theme was “Villains.” I don’t know what I was expected to do, but what I did was lead the kids through developing and writing their own villain monologues and scenes, which they performed before adoring relatives at the end of the week.
One of the really cool things that happened was that I came home from a meeting about the workshop and was inspired to write an opening number, “Not Really Bad,” which was a hit: the kids loved doing it and the audience went wild.
And so this summer, the workshop’s theme is “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” We’re going to work on the concept of the unreliable narrator: in the books, the main character Greg tells his diary more or less what happens, but the reader sees that Greg is the main cause of all the troubles he gets into—and then others are punished for it! Greg never shows the slightest remorse or even self-knowledge—that’s what we’re going to work on.
Of course I thought right away of writing another opening number, “My Diary,” and so yesterday I pulled out one of my trusty Field Notes notebooks and got to work.
Click to see the full-size image
I finished all but the D2 block yesterday and just ran out of brain. But it all came together smoothly today.
Here’s what I wanted to talk about:
As I worked, I became aware that my brain was thinking along many pathways simultaneously, juggling as each came to the forefront of the problem-solving process. For instance, I kept in mind that I’m writing for middle school voices and that the piece has to be learned in four days—and that everyone needs a share in the proceedings. So I was structuring it so that it’s a collection of solo lines all contributing to the same idea, and the words flow smoothly and cleanly. The eventual melody will be catchy and simple.
I also kept in mind that I’m trying to get across to the audience the theme of the performance: the characters they will be seeing are not to be trusted in their narratives.
Rhythms were constantly in my mind, mostly because the verse is severely metrical. You’ll notice that I’ve notated some in the margins so I don’t forget the barely perceptible finished product that was floating in my mind when I wrote the words.
I also found myself playing with structural elements, starting with the “Dear Diary” refrain that recurs, plus sections of the singers repeating and overlapping “Dear Diary” at junctures in the piece. There’s the opening (A), a steady sequence of phrases the last notes of which the singers will hold to build a chord—which then launches into an allegro ditty (B & C) in which our cast members step up and have their moment in the spotlight. We then get the patter song middle part (D1 & D2), a love song to the Diary and how much it means to the singer to have one friend who will never let him down.
Here’s a thing: right off the bat in the writing of D1, you’ll see the phrase “I can tell you all,” and I’ve notated a non-patter rhythm next to it. I finished more of the verse, knowing that the break needed to come later. In fact, while the photo shows it ending up after the first quatrain, it will actually go at the end of the second, after “…or my mother!”
So that element, the “I can tell you all” break, became a signpost for me as I tackled (D2), i.e., I needed two more quatrains, continuing to develop the self-serving nature of the narrator, yet building up to a phrase to rhyme with “I can tell you all.” What this resulted in was breaking the patter rhythm for the end of the verse (“…calling out my name”) and leading to a secondary break which leads our focus back to the Diary, another -ame rhyme, and then the boffo repeat of the break and the rhyming phrase.
I will probably go back to the overlapping “Dear Diary” idea, and then lead us back to the chipper, chirping opening phrase (E)—oh yeah, I’m all about that da capo—which itself loops back through the layered “Dear Diary” motif to end with a big finish, “It’s not my fault!”
All of these things were circling in my head as I mapped out possible rhymes (you can see a list of -ault/aught rhymes in the margin) and forged ahead.
You can see some erasures on the page. Most were revisions of meter and rhyme, but a couple were structural: the “Dear Diary” motif in (B, C & E) for example, replaced a simple iambic dimeter phrase—which then got shoved out to star in its own quatrain.
All in all, the thing grew organically on its own, practically, almost as smoothly and efficiently as “Not Really Bad” did last year. No, I don’t have any real melody waiting in the wings here; it’s all I can do to keep from stealing “The Reckoning” from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
An interesting aspect of re-jiggering old pieces, as I have done with Christmas Carol at least twice now, is that I have left a trail of modifications and improvements over the last 30 years and I haven’t taken care to go back and update all the previous versions.
This means that even last year’s 11-piece ensemble version is not the same in minor details as the current project. In painting, this would be called pentimento, where the artist made changes and adaptations in the course of work and which can be seen through careful examination or infrared/X-ray/or other technology.
Past novelists of course kept their drafts for the most part, and it’s a cottage business in academia to scour these for the differences in the original artistic impulse, a kind of tracking of Successive Approximation. (Christopher Tolkien has made a career of this.)
Composers, in the past, are the same. Leonard Bernstein famously did an entire program on how long it took Beethoven to get the opening measures of his Fifth Symphony right, based on material from Beethoven’s sketchbooks and papers.
Nowadays, of course, revisions and editing and evidence of crashing and burning evaporate with a shift of the electrons of which everything is made now. This has been a matter of some interest/concern for scholars—and artists themselves: how will the future learn of our creative processes when we leave no trace?
That’s one reason, actually, that I start a Finale file for Abortive Attempts and then transfer things to a “clean papers” file—usually—once I’ve settled on melodies and harmonies. There’s still a lot that evaporates in the process, but I feel as if I have left a little bit of a path to understanding how I did what I did.
I think it’s finished. I’m pretty sure I’ve fixed all the really gross harmonies that were still bugging me. It may or may not have been a problem of voice leading, about which I have little to no clue.
I’m sitting here in my room in the Springer Opera House—yes, that’s a thing—waiting for the first rehearsal of Born Yesterday, the Garson Kanin comedy that closes out the Springer’s season, and I’m being very good, waking at 6:00 a.m. and actually working on Christmas Carol.
I questioned whether to bring my own coffee pot since there’s one in the communal kitchen here, but then I realized that if I open that door before 9:30, I’ll start being sociable with my fellow cast members and never get any work done. So I’m glad I have my coffee set up in my bathroom; I’ve actually been productive this morning.
I’ve picked up where I left off some weeks ago, starting to get “The Cratchits’ Prayer” re-orchestrated. As I’ve said before, none of this process is very hard since most of it is just deciding where to copy and paste the music that’s already there. But there are issues—and always have been—with this piece, in that the harmonies twist and turn and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten them right. I reworked them last year and I don’t think I solved the problem, so this is the time and the place where it all comes to an end. Eventually.
This blog post is, of course, in the spirit of TASK AVOIDANCE, one of the nine precepts of Lichtenbergianism: I got to a certain point in the music and decided to stop working on it for a bit.
Today is Tuesday. The first runthrough of this show is Sunday. And then in another week and a half, we open. Let that sink in: we have fourteen days of rehearsal (Mondays off) and then we open.
Let me be the first to say that, never having done this before, I have some anxiety about my ability to learn these lines in the allotted timeframe. It helps that one of my fellow cast members, an actual professional actor, said the same thing at dinner last night. It’s a matter of age, mostly. Those lines just won’t stick like they used to. In Into the Woods, I flubbed scenes in ways I never had before. Of course, in my defense, most of my scenes began with the line “And so the Baker…,” so it’s no wonder that I couldn’t keep them straight.
Feh. I will not only survive, I will prevail. But I do see a lot of evenings spent chiseling those words into my brain.
So what if I haven’t composed a new note in — let’s just say “a while”? I have been working. Well, I’ve been working this week, anyway, on reorchestrating A Christmas Carol for its new production this coming December 10-20.
I’m a little over halfway through the show, and today I thought I would share some results: the Christmas Present Street Scene.
Street Scene in 1999 production
In this number, we have the chorus just generally being Christmas-y all over the place, with loud, jolly parts interspersed with quieter sections over which touching scenes are played. We hear the Christmas Waltz for the first time, and we end with the Chorale, which brings the mood into a somber reflection on the Reason for the Season, segueing into the Cratchits’ home.
In last year’s production, there were issues involving the inability to repeat sections appropriately, and so the music got chopped up instead of played straight through. If only I had known about the theatre’s use of QLab…
Oh well, things are going to be much better this year. Those who have fond memories of long-past years will rejoice to hear the full orchestration restored.
Behold, Christmas!
Christmas Present Street Scene | vocal score (pdf) | mp3
Whattayathink? I submitted the Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet piece five years ago. Perhaps I should hit them with the Six Preludes (no fugues) this time.
OK, so I’ve not been very productive. But I have accomplished some little bits.
First, you must know that I’ve been working on re-orchestrating A Christmas Carol for next December’s re-premiere. I haven’t shared any of that because it’s not very interesting, but here’s a taste:
This bit of underscoring takes us from the chimes of a neighboring church to the Ghost of Christmas Past’s teasing appearance, to their transportation to Scrooge’s past: the countryside, Martin and Oliver having a snowball fight, and then fading into the schoolroom.
The process of preparing sound files for December is not at all the same as simply re-orchestrating the show from an 11-piece ensemble to a full orchestra. Because I’m not actually working on documents for live musicians, there are lots of shortcuts and omissions. For example, if I transpose a harp sequence up a octave, I don’t bother moving it from the bass clef up to the treble clef because who cares? No harpist is going to have to decipher what I’ve written, and the computer doesn’t care—it will play the notes exactly where I’ve put them whether they look correct or not.
Repeats are another area: many of the pieces have vamps (bits that loop until the scene moves on) or repeated verses/choruses. For live musicians, repeats save paper and are easier to read. But the printed repeat signs are irrelevant to a computer program that I’m going to instruct to “loop this waveform until I tell you not to,” and so I’m leaving those out. In the above sample, there is a vamp on the flute part that you won’t hear because that will be taken care of in QLab, the multimedia sequencer I’m still exploring.
I’m in the middle of pondering whether it is going to be better to try to “slice” the repeat (with varying degrees of smoothness or accuracy) in QLab or to export each section of a piece separately so that the repeated section is clear and easy to click on. This may become critical in rehearsal, of “A Reason for Laughter,” for example, as we try to get Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig in and out of their verses, or in “Country Dance” when we’re trying to learn new sections of the dance.
I also have been taking repeat signs out of pieces like “Country Dance,” where it’s just easier to string all the jumpbacks (from A—>B—>A—>C—>A) out into one long piece rather than deal with all my quirky repeat signs. In fact, I’ve stopped working on the music to blog here because the challenge of untangling “A Reason for Laughter” makes my eyes cross.
Anyway, as far as slicing vs. exporting multiple files for each pieces goes, I have lots of time between now and November, so I can play with all my options. (Who am I kidding? I’ll take the complicated way because it will make life much easier in rehearsal.)
I have gained an assistant:
She is currently trying to keep me from typing—WHAT IS THE DEAL EVEN I SHOULD BE PETTING HER ANYWAY—and did you know that pencils, pens, and erasers make great rolly toys, especially if you knock them to the floor?
She’s been with us for a couple of weeks now but has so far refused to divulge her name, and she is the only cat I have ever met that, when you pick her up, goes limp in your arms and settles in for a cuddle. She’ll shift, turn over even to get more comfortable, but ask to be put down? Nope.
This is not the cat I was looking for—I prefer tabbies—but she is such a sweet-tempered beast that we were afraid to tempt fate by giving her away. I’m trying to get used to cat hair everywhere again. The turbo-purr helps.
Rehearsals continue for Into the Woods. You will have to believe me when I say it is not bragging to claim that my performance will be a tour de force—it would be for anyone handling the roles of Narrator, Mysterious Man, and the Wolf. Generally, the Narrator/Mysterious Man are combined roles, but the Wolf is played by Cinderella’s Prince. My playing all three requires some very quick changes indeed, and so the audience can not help but be dazzled by my facility, speed, and grace. There is one moment where I—as the Narrator—facilitate Milky White’s escape from the Baker’s Wife, only reappear seconds later as the Mysterious Man; I expect it to provoke laughter.
I am quite enjoying the chance to sing “Hello, Little Girl,” however. It’s delicious, nasty fun.
The show opens March 19 and runs for two weekends, Thu-Sun. Details here.
Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy is going well, if by “well” you mean “successfully avoid writing abortive attempts for Seven Dreams of Falling while not accomplishing an awful lot.” I sit in my writing chair—that’s an official thing—and start free-associating on one of the 9 Precepts, and before I know it I’ll have two pages in a minuscule field notebook almost filled. It’s exhausting.
So far, I don’t have any brilliant new insights to share from my writing; I’m still in the “dumping” phase, wherein all those things I’ve said and thought about the creative process over the years are finding their way out of the recesses of my brain onto the page. I’ve also begun collecting relevant bibliographic support, so that’s progress of a sort.
Finally, a look at the labyrinth:
—click to embiggen—
A panoramic shot from the west side looking back towards the entrance—not our usual vantage point. The winter rye grass makes for a lovely oasis of green, although I’m sure I’d be a better hippie if I learned to appreciate Nature’s own withered brownness.
