Category: William Blake

Posts about my setting of Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn

Milky Way (Day 317/365)

Posted on by Dale

Ah, the first Saturday of GHP, when everyone curls up into a fetal position after lunch and recovers.

After a brief recovery, and after cleaning up the apartment and putting everything away, I decided to get some work done, and I chose to work further with the way Finale 2007 deals with parts. I found that I could edit the individual parts within the program, and that’s what I worked on all afternoon.

Later, after supper, I put everything away and went up to the dance. Every Saturday night the RAs stage a dance on Langdale Circle for the mouselings. There’s a different theme each week; this week it was the Twins Dance. Dress like someone else and come together.

Many halls decide to come all alike, so it’s not much twins as clones sometime. Still, it’s a very joyous occasion. The children, like us, are exhilarated that they have survived the first week, and they’re ready to celebrate.

Some images:

  • The hall that came as their RA, complete with bushy black philosophy major beard. (Even the RA was wearing a felt version of the real thing.)
  • Another hall that came as their RA, with open white shirt with upturned collar, and a lavender flower tucked behind the ear.
  • The RA who came as Georgia Hall, complete with little red roof hat.
  • Two boys in their hall’s uniform of wife-beater and jams, who did not seem to realize or care that they danced with each other the whole time I was there.
  • The group of boys (again, dressed as their über-preppy RA) in the distance, clearly dancing “in secret”: they were practicing for their entrance.
  • The RA who came as a bag of M&Ms, and all her girls were the M’s.
  • The song “Barbie Girl,” whereupon all the RAs on the steps of Georgia Hall turned their maglites on their dorm director, Barbie, a beautiful petite blonde, who makes no bones about her brains, her beauty, or her athleticism, and who immediately took center stage.
  • The sheer exuberant immortality of youth as what was clearly a majority of the students on campus danced and jumped and sang and hugged and talked their way towards hallcheck and lights out at the end of their first week of GHP.

Technology (Day 313/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would be forgiven for expecting that I would accomplish nothing today, what with ramping up the LotPDM, but such is my foresight, my planaheaditude, that I actually had free time during the afternoon.

And so I got to an item on my TTD list: extract orchestral parts for Milky Way. Of course this is not actually difficult; Finale does it for you. But I still have not done it in a very long time (and even then I wasn’t extracting a whole orchestra).

I dimly recalled that one of the improvements to Finale 2007 was better part extraction, so I was bold and opened the piece in that version. (You may recall that I stuck to the 2006 version because the plug-in that plays the orchestra doesn’t really work in the 2007 version.) Indeed, the management of part extraction is pretty incredible.

For example, the glockenspiel plays pretty heavily, but the timpani plays once, the bass drum once, the cymbals once. Actually I had forgotten I had put the cymbals in there, because I had used the wrong note and so they weren’t playing, it’s complicated, I tell you, and I may take them out, but there they were. It seemed to me that I didn’t need to print three different parts for those instruments when clearly it would take only one bored percussionist to handle them.

Finale allows you to combine those kinds of parts into one sheet, and it was quite intuitive as to how to accomplish that.

What wasn’t intuitive, after I had exported the parts, was how to make the parts show up on 9×12 paper rather than the 11×17 of the score. I could go through each of the nineteen parts and change the size of the paper, but that goes against my rule of repeating an action more than three times without technological assistance. My presumption is that a task like that is embedded somewhere in the software. It should do it for me.

Back to Finale, looking around the Extract Parts bit. It wasn’t there, but it was in the Page Layout area. You can actually set the size of paper for the score and the parts within the score. Apparently Finale 2007 manages parts as an extension of the score, which is cool if I ever have to make changes to the score. Not that that would ever happen.

So I exported them again. Then I noticed that nowhere on the parts did it say what part it was. Shouldn’t that have been automatic? Rooting around in menus and options gave me no clue, so I was forced to resort to reading the manual. I know, but sometimes it it’s necessary.

It appears that Finale 2007 will put the part name on the part automatically, but Finale 2006 did not, so if you’ve converted a file there were extra steps to take. That’s when I found out that you can actually pull up parts within the score file and edit them before you export them. Cool!

So I exported them again.

We’ll see whether that’s good enough. What I probably need to do is to go through all the parts and move all the little bits around (pizzicato markings sitting on top of measure numbers, that kind of thing) and then export them. Again.

Thought and news (Day 310/365)

Posted on by Dale

Two interesting things today, one for Moonlight and one for William Blake.

Having started some actual work on songs for Moonlight, I made a sincere effort to keep the lyrics for “Love Song of Thurgood…” in my head so that maybe others would come. But what I found myself doing was playing with melodies for the words I had.

This is probably a good idea. Hammering out words that fit some metrical scheme (which may not be apparent from the words on the page, actually) to fill out the first verse is a good place to start, and then I think if I can begin setting those words to music, that gives me a rather complete framework to start writing the second verse, the ‘B’ section, and the third verse.

Question: having seen the gist of the first verse, do you think I need to strive for any kind of character development in the song, i.e., we know more about Thurgood at the end than at the beginning, or we see some change in him from beginning to end, or is it going to be acceptable for this to be yet another comedy song? I have a feeling we can fill this show with comedy songs. Is that going to be OK?

In other news, I handed off the score to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” to Stephen Czarkowski, our orchestra maestro extraordinaire, to peruse. Never mind that I sent this to him in April. Never mind that I’ve been on pins and needles since he replied that there were a “few problems” and that he never told me what they were.

You understand my anxiety: I am a total fraud, without a real clue as to what I’m doing when I create an orchestral score of some proportions like “Milky Way.” For all I know, none of it can be played. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have some real knowledge of the woodwinds and sort of for the brass and percussion. Strings, though, I am quite in the dark.

I can look at a score by one of the masters and see that my music is not as “hard to play” as theirs, but I have no idea if there are certain intervals or fingerings that just can’t be done.

So I reacted apparently noticeably when, in a meeting with the GHP music department, Stephen says, “Oh, your ‘Milky Way’ score? There are some parts… Unplayable.”

Geez.

I’m thinking all kinds of horrible things: what if all those arpeggiations in the celli are just not doable? What if whole chunks of the thing cannot be played? That lovely music, everyone’s favorite, just gone because it’s… unplayable.

Geez.

He finally crosses my path again later this afternoon, bringing the score with him. Here, he says, measure 57, these two notes in the viola, out of their range.

And that was it? A part I copied and pasted from the second violins and transposed down, and never checked the range on? And I never heard the note was missing because it’s a complex section and the violas are doubling the violin IIs anyway? And I clearly never ran the plug-in that checks for range issues?

Before I could get too upset at the whole thing, Stephen says they plan to give it a readthrough during the sixth week of the program, i.e., basically after everything is accomplished and things are winding down. That’s as it should be, actually. I have no claim on the students’ time here at this program in this way, although I would like to think that might change after the readthrough.

But “Milky Way” will get at least an orchestral readthrough in late July. I’ll keep you posted.

Some thoughts (Day 284/365)

Posted on by Dale

Here’s a quote from a recent article:

“Any show, however classic,” Mr. Warchus said, “is just a document of where the creators got to in the time they had , after which the process stopped, they crossed their fingers and waited for the reviews. If the response was good, that was it. If not, the process continued. As here.”

Mr. Warchus, unfortunately, is the director of The Lord of the Rings, the musical, which flopped in Toronto for $25 million, and is now in previews in London, for another $25 million. Bless his heart.

Still, his point is valid. In my recent post about what we did and did not accomplish for the backers audition, that was my main point: we ran out of time and assistance. We didn’t finish, we just stopped.

And I know that’s the truth no matter what. It won’t be any different even with the fabulously funded world premiere version. At some point we will simply run out of time to accomplish our ideas, even if they were fundamental to the vision.

The difference between us and Mr. Warchus is that none of us are going to lose $50 million and be revealed as ludicrous visionaries to the theatre world.

81 days to go.

Musings (Day 282/365)

Posted on by Dale

Happy birthday to me. In celebration, I only cleaned up the backyard. The bulk of the William Blake stuff, still in the basement, will have to wait until some other time.

I also read: Unspun, and part of Thinking in Circles, and now I’m delving back into Out of Our Minds. A quote from a research consultant has struck me. Speaking of the characteristics of a creative organization, David Liddle says:

“It is first and foremost a place that gives people freedom to take risks; second it is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence; third, it is a place where there are no ‘stupid’ questions and no ‘right’ answers; and fourth, it is a place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamic, the surprising, the playful.”

Well, I think he just described the Lacuna workshop group. There were only six of us who were there week after week, Marc, Molly, Melissa, Laura, Carol Lee, and me, and I think we did an incredible job of creating the two pieces we staged from nothing. We all contributed, we all took off in different directions, we all built on what the others brought. We took essentially in each case a plotless poem and created a visual staging that I think intrigued and delighted our audience.

Since that was our goal, to surprise and delight our audience, we succeeded wildly. As usual, though, we succeeded beyond anything our audience could expect. It’s like the fact in biology that animals are hardwired to respond to stimuli that go beyond anything they encounter in nature, e.g., a certain butterfly will be attracted to a shade of blue that is brighter/more vivid than any potential mate he might encounter in the real world. Our audience may have been delighted, but there was actually more there to delight them than they were even aware. (Did I just get my analogies inside out?)

The kinds of things we invented, Toast Heads, Ice Sprites, dancing hedgehogs, puppet walls, snowdrifts that turn into banks of flowers, a troupe of traveling sunflowers, stained-glass tortoises pulled by an angel, are truly and totally wonderful. A more polished version of them all will only amaze an audience even further.

This richness is due entirely to the six creative minds who cobbled it all together (with thanks to the other minds who joined in from time to time: Mary Frances, Kevin, Galen.) This bodes extremely well for the workshopping of the entire show, if and when we begin that process.

As Carol Lee said at one point, “This is hard, so much harder than just buying a script and doing that.” But as she also pointed out, what an incredibly enriching experience!

83 days to go.

A logo (Day 280/365)

Posted on by Dale

Mindful of the issues of using the complete title of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, I began playing with ideas today in PhotoShop. (Yesterday I downloaded four or five new fonts to play with as well, although this particular font is one I already had called Fifteen36.)

That’s one solution, although I would want a much fatter (though still elegant) background font.

Looking at it now, here’s an idea: make the A Visit to lengthened, stretched into the distance, like William Blake’s Inn‘s shadow.

I downloaded the video that Jonathan shot last week. The sound is not the best, but our two staged works come across quite well. The music actually stands up to inspection. I can’t wait to hear it for real, one way or the other, with a chorus that has been rehearsed by someone who knows what they’re doing. (Dragging on “never part day from night” there… tsk, tsk…)

Small cleanup (Day 279/365)

Posted on by Dale

Just small stuff tonight: I went through my piano/vocal score that I used in January and last week and made all the corrections in the files that I’d been marking in the score. This included things like the missing word “boots” in the soprano line in Milky Way, or the inexplicable use of the word “mouse” instead of “cat” who guards my doors in Postcard. Others were more subtle, like using a Finale plug-in to add courtesy accidentals throughout Milky Way. (You’re welcome, chorus.)

Otherwise, nothing really strenuous tonight. There are some details from the Arts Commission meeting that I want to track down before discussing them here, but that was about it for the day.

Workshop, 5/8 (Day 278/365)

Posted on by Dale

We met to debrief the backers audition, congratulate ourselves, and prepare for the next phase.

We discussed whether to call the production A Visit to William Blake’s Inn or, as I had printed out in various fonts on the wall, William Blake’s Inn. I pointed out that we were talking three separate works here: Nancy’s book, my song cycle (both entitled A Visit...), and the stage show, the title of which was up for grabs. There was something to be said for separating the stage show from the other two.

Also, I pointed out that it’s nearly impossible to get the entire title balanced typographically. I know, since I’ve had to do it on flyers, post cards, posters, all kinds of things. There’s just no way.

However, Marc suggested making the logo such that William Blake’s Inn was the major visual component, with A Visit to not as noticeable above it. His point was that he hated to lose the idea of “a visit” in the title. We agreed with that. We also thought perhaps a professional graphic artist might have more flexible ideas.

I filled everyone in on what I knew about the Cultural Arts Commission’s role at this point, which is not much. We have a volunteer to head up the project, although whether she has volunteered to be über-producer or just the Scotland coordinator, even I am not clear. The Commission meets tomorrow, so we’ll know more then.

We defined what our role was going to be in this venture: we propose the budget; we workshop the piece and develop the script and visual materials; we work with the designer(s); we cast the show; we rehearse the show; we produce the educational materials for schools (book studies/music).

The organizing committee’s roles: produce the show; find space and resources; organize volunteers; raise money; pay bills; publicize the show; handle the Scotland connection; handle the Willard exhibit;

We think we really need to hire a technical director (TD) to supervise (and perhaps design) the sets and costume construction. We will need to pay the musical director. We should pay the director, though I blush to say it. We will need a real lighting designer and a sound engineer.

I’ve already defined the next three phases somewhere, but I’ll restate them here. During Phase 1 (Aug. 2007-May 2008), Lacuna will workshop the show and propose the budget; the Organizing Committee (WBOC) will begin organizing, raising money, lining up space and resources. During Phase 2 (Jan. 2008-Oct. 2008), Lacuna will design the educational materials and assist with the construction of costumes, etc.; WBOC will continue to raise money, begin to publicize, line up the Scotland and Willard things, start the construction process. During Phase 3 (Aug. 2008-Oct. 2008), Lacuna will audition and rehearse the show; WBOC will publicize and organize whatever needs to be done leading up to opening night.

All of this is a grand, fuzzy outline which we’ll have to clarify in many, many conversations with the WBOC. So off into Limbo we go!

88 days to go.

Still regrouping (Day 277/365)

Posted on by Dale

Now that last week has settled down, although it’s not completely, still, I’m finding it difficult to stop and think about what we did and did not accomplish.

Clearly, we accomplished our main goal, which was to interest someone, anyone, on the Cultural Arts Commission in heading up the organizing committee. And several people told me that they now understood what the possibilities were in creating a stage work from my song cycle.

On a personal level, I was able to impress quite a lot of people with my music. That’s not unimportant. When we set out on this journey, Marc wondered whether my pushing William Blake’s Inn as I was doing would be indelicate. Previously in my life, I would have agreed with him. (Yes, I was actually quite insecure about my music, and we could politely call it modesty.)

But I have come to the realization that self-promotion is what artists do, if they’re smart. All kinds of examples spring to mind: Beethoven’s mammoth concert in which he premiered his 5th and 6th Symphonies and the 5th Piano Concerto; or Schubert a few years later, finally putting some of his stuff into a concert after friends exhorted him to, but not daring to attend the concert himself; or, God help us, Wagner, terrorizing everyone in a 500-mile radius into doing his music exactly as he wanted it. “Art isn’t easy,” Sondheim reminds us in exactly this context.

So one accomplishment is a healthy self-confidence on my part. (It helps when your singers are complaining a week later that they can’t get the music out of their heads. Of course, the same complaint could be made about “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” or “At the Copacabana.”)

A very interesting thing I learned about our process, and I don’t know that this is an accomplishment or a failure, is how wasteful it can be. We wanted eight Toast Heads (three banners, two pennants, and three band members); we built six (ditching the pennants, the fabric for which had been bought); we used three. We made the band instruments, but didn’t get them finished and didn’t use them, or didn’t use them and so didn’t finish them. We replaced the wooden poles at the last minute because of their weight. The angel’s gown went unused, although we worked with it several ways. The turtle lights didn’t really work, and might have if I had thought of the much cheaper battery-powered tealights rather than the Radio Shack-inspired lights/wires/switches.

Have we learned enough in doing this to control more tightly the expenditures associated with the experimentation? Or is this something we just need to build into the budget?

Another thing I learned was that we have to decide how to handle the actual design and construction process. We brainstormed very well, and we came up with all kinds of visual prompts. But when it comes time to build everything, we will have to hand over to someone working drawings, costume plates, blueprints, all those things which will allow someone else to build our vision.

Do we have designers take our visual prompts and turn them into the drawings for the tech crew? Do we do it ourselves? Or is it going to be more fluid than that?

Those are all the thoughts I can force to the front of my head at the moment. I’m sure I’ll come back to this forum soon with more.

88 days to go.

Regrouping (Day 276/365)

Posted on by Dale

When an event like the William Blake’s Inn backers audition roars through one’s life, it’s like the disruptive force of the Marmalade Man: everything is turned upside down with no time nor energy nor focus to set it right.

So for the past week, the house has gone uncleaned, meals uncooked, items untidied. My life has been disrupted, broken apart by one evening, an important one, but just one evening. Now it’s time to put it back together.

I’ve spent some of yesterday and some of today packing away the Inn stuff: Toast Heads, sunflowers, brushes, hardware, etc. Some stuff has to go back to school. Books need to be shelved. Reference clippings need to be put into the scrapbook.

In some way, it’s like the music to the Epilogue: we’ve reached the end of the journey and need to sort it all out, looking back and cleaning away. And that’s part of the creative process as well, just tidying up and thinking about it all, before beginning the next project.

Not that this one is over, by a long shot. Now the hard part begins, taking it all forward to the world premiere. How many ideas will fall by the wayside? How many compromises will we have to make? How many concepts will be executed in ways that do not match our dream?

That’s tomorrow. Today, I clean up.

89 days to go.