Marya Hart Music

Category Archives: Compositions

2009

December 31, 2009

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

–Issa, translated by Robert Haas

photo of almond blossoms taken by Michael Favor, from wikicommons

The musical year here:

Twenty Days to Find a Wife enjoyed a successful run at History Theatre, and was named one of the top five dramas of 2009 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Fidgety Fairy Tales had productions throughout Minnesota and in Guam, and we took the cast to Washington D.C. to perform for the conference of the National Association of Families for Children’s Mental Health.

Beaverdance had a very good run at Bedlam Theatre over the holiday season. The cast was amazingly fearless and funny, and I now know I can write a musical in three weeks.

We revived and expanded In Dreams Begin Responsibilities for a showing at Nautilus Music Theater. It is now a piano trio piece with challenging choreography and we are talking about revisiting it in 2010.

I worked with a number of wonderful collaborators: Laurie Flanigan, Matt Jenson, Corrie Zoll, Dan Pinkerton and Nancy Nair; and many fabulous singers, actors, directors and dancers.

Today, the last day of the year, I finished writing the last song for a cycle on the poems of Charles Baudelaire which will be performed in January and February by tenor Brad Bradshaw.

I got my daughter off to college and she is happy there. I’ve been playing piano in churches and dance studios and parties and concerts. Tonight it’s cold outside and it is warm in the house and there are candles burning. Happy New Year!

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she opens soon!

December 2, 2009

It hit me today that I hadn’t really um described Beaverdance. Briefly, it’s a Marxist analysis of the fur trade in Central Minnesota featuring disco dancing beavers, a love story that almost ends tragically featuring a rapacious capitalist named Mr. Blaine and a city boy named Loring Park, a manly voyageur named Jacques Brainerd and his beautiful Ojibway love interest, Bemidji. That’s all clear, right? It opens tomorrow. The cast is looking and sounding great.

Got a little writeup in the Onion AV Club this week, in TC Daily Planet, and in Minnesota Monthly, and MPR will air a drivetime spot Tuesday. For some reason in all these writeups you have to scroll to the bottom to find my show. I wonder why that is…

I’ll be in DC on BD’s opening weekend, performing Fidgety Fairy Tales with a group of six young actors and Matt for a national convention.

One Baudelaire song written, and two more in the works. I actually made myself cry improvising some ideas for one on piano. Now we shall see how it turns out. What I have discovered about setting Baudelaire is that I have to cut, cut, cut. The language is too thick in all the translations I have. Too many adjectives. The song cycle will be performed in February and I hope to have all the writing done by the end of December. The first song I wrote I junked. The second I’m not so sure about but I sent it off anyway.

In any case, it is very promising, and I will have more to say about this project in the coming month. For now, I will only say that Baudelaire is much deeper and cooler than the popular ideas about him.

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Beaverdance? Check

November 19, 2009

Beaverdance is written…I don’t know why I thought my Next Big Project would be something I would take my time over. I believe I wrote all the music in three weeks. Never again. But…it is fun. I stopped by rehearsal last night and the cast is funny and cute, in the Bedlam tradition

That’s Heather, aka Foxy Tann, running the rehearsal there. See what I mean about how cute the cast is?

The show opens December 3rd and runs through the 20th. Dinner-theatre packages are available. A Marxist disco extravaganza about the fur trade is the perfect way to celebrate the holidays. Go see it!

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Beaverdance sneak preview

November 5, 2009

Beaverdance, for which I am furiously writing music right now, will exhibit some of its charms at Nautilus Music Theater’s Rough Cuts works in progress series this coming Monday and Tuesday evening.

Admission is a paltry five bucks and milk and cookies are served at intermission.

I’m so hung up writing the darn thing that I wonder if I will get over to see it.

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new projects

September 26, 2009

A summer of teaching, a long car trip out west, some unstructured time to think and to sew and now…a flood of projects. I’ll be blogging about each of them in future posts, but for now I will simply make a list.

Fidgety Fairy Tales was invited to present at a national conference in DC this December. We are scrambling around (well, mostly Matt is scrambling around) making up a cast and a rehearsal schedule. The piece has also recently been produced in Guam (yes, Guam!) and in Duluth by other companies.

Along with Avedis Manoogian, I am writing music for Bedlam’s Marxist Fur-trade Holiday Fantasy, Foxy Tann’s Beaverdance. We were a little late getting off the ground with this one. Rehearsals begin in a couple of weeks, so I will be writing like mad, like those Hollywood musicals where the composer and lyricist sit at the piano wracking their brains and then bam! inspiration strikes and out pours the song. Hmm, looks like some people still do that.

Bart Sutter is reviving and expanding a poetry play into two acts, to be called Pine Creek. I played music for the original version–Small Town Triumphs–ages ago at History Theatre. Now, a few additional songs. I set one while I was on vacation and am not quite satisfied with what I did.

Then of course, there is Fidgety Part Two. I junked several of the songs I wrote for it after we did a readthrough this past summer, and Matt and I are rewriting quite a bit. The new songs I have sketched out are much better, less generic and more playful and fun.

I’m in the early stages of discussing an adaptation of a novel with a playwright friend. Don’t want to say too much about it for fear of jinxing it, but I feel hopeful. This will be a honking big musical, big cast, epic story, the whole bit.

I’m playing for dance classes at the University of Minnesota and Minnesota Dance Theatre, and it is going better at the start of the year than I feared it would. I am remaining pretty free in my improvisation and lots of good ideas pop up to the surface. My current obsession is pedal tones. I’ll play for the Royal Winnipeg’s company class when they hit town in October. That will be fun.

RWB: still from Romeo and Juliet

Does this sound like enough? There’s more, but I will leave it at that for now.

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on making a living…

July 3, 2009

Today I have been slogging through the Dramatists Guild Sourcebook in preparation for sending queries to theatres about Twenty Days. It’s 4:00 pm, and except for biking down to the library to return some piano music and eating some pasta with chard, that’s all I’ve done all day.

It’s amazing how vague some theatres can be about what kind of material they want to produce, especially theatres that are trying to–somehow–be different. They know what they mean, but I don’t. Well in any case, Twenty Days is not an experimental piece, just a good strong musical told well. I’m feeling hopeful.

Laurie and I received our royalty payments from History Theatre today, so that puts a nice cap on the day. I won’t think about my hourly rate of pay…that does not bear thinking about. Really, I wonder how I stay afloat, but I do.

At times like these I think about George Gissing, and thank my lucky stars.

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if it doesn’t rain pretty soon…

May 29, 2009

If it doesn’t rain soon, I don’t know what I will do. We are near a drought and it is not yet the first of June. I am soaking the tomato plants and okra seedlings and trying to keep the flowers going. It feels wasteful to use the water like this, but there is nothing in the rain barrel.

I am antsy. It’s cloudy this evening, but still no rain.

Twenty Days closes this Sunday. This week I am attending closing night only. I saw it last week and was thoroughly satisfied. The actors are living inside the play. But as I have mentioned, I get a little tense when I watch it.

I’m going to a party at Michelle Kinney’s tomorrow night–she of Jello Slave who, along with Melissa Mathews and Michael Donley, did great justice to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities over at Nautilus last week. Such great justice that I think it is a music-and-dance piece now. Who in the world will ever produce it?

Nancy Nair, who choreographed it, says we should pair it up with an entirely different piece about dreams. I thought about that. Maybe, since she is currently reveling in the world of Merce Cunningham and I in the very different one of Franz Schubert, she should create one short dream piece and I another. Then we’d have three pieces–enough for an evening. And who would produce that? Eh, we’ll figure that out later.

photo by luigistrano from flickr

This afternoon when it almost rained, the scent of Linden flowers was intoxicating.

Hannah graduates from high school next week. I’m sewing sundresses and gearing up for summer teaching.

Fidgety is still going on–three performances last week, one this week. I have several ideas about auditions, rehearsal and scheduling performances for the next round of performances, as does Matt. Keeping a cast together has proven much more of a task than we anticipated. We’ve subbed performers into new roles for almost every show in May. The scheduling and juggling has fallen on Matt’s shoulders. He is someone who copes well with adversity. Thank god.

We play two public performances at Saint Peter Claver church June 14th. They will be free and open to the public.

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improv

May 18, 2009

Creating tight little worlds with music theatre…

Did I go overboard, attempting to make a score which is full of indications?

I find an interpretation of The Solidarity Song which is improvisational, and I find it so inspiring.

Die Arena, by John Heartfield

Notes can only say so much. They say something approximate. Listening to Indian music on KFAI and wondering, how much am I simply putting this into my frame of reference. What am I not hearing because I hear the notes I know?

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watching the run

May 16, 2009

The cast of Twenty Days is really playing with the material now and having a good time. Audiences have been great…laughing and responsive.

I saw it last night, but I am not going to go again for a while. Even though I am happy, I am so tense by the time it is done that I ache. It’s a product of having no control whatsoever. I try to communicate my intentions clearly in the score, and leave it to the performers to make as many choices as they can. Even when their choices are not ones I would’ve made, I find myself pleasantly surprised by what they decide. So, why so tense? It’s just the situation, I think.

I’m going to look around for a few more performance opportunities. I’ve been living in my head.

Three hour instrumental rehearsal for In Dreams yesterday. Wow. Michael Donley on piano, Melissa Mathews on violin and Michelle Kinney on cello. They are really good.

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dreams redux

May 14, 2009

We–Nancy Nair and Mary Keepers and I– will have a presentation of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities at Nautilus Music Theater this coming Monday and Tuesday, May 18th and 19th.

I have rescored for a piano trio and Nancy has re-choreographed for two dancers. I am blown away by Nancy’s choreography, and by MacKenzie, (that’s her on the left) who is a lovely dancer. Mary is our director. Thank god.

It’s only five bucks to get in the door, and they serve milk and cookies on the break. I strongly recommend calling for reservations (651) 298-9913 if you are going on Monday night, because seating is very limited in the Lowertown space. Tuesday night will be at the Foss Center on the Augsburg campus in Minneapolis.

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