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.

Here you go: score [pdf] | mp3

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.

“Dear Diary” | score (pdf) | mp3

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.

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.