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.
April 25, 2009
The
DADA show at Bedlam, for which I am playing piano, is in its second of three weeks. Candy Bilyk wrote the music, and I am enjoying playing her stuff. We’re both fans of seconds, thus doomed ever to be resented by singers. I won’t be playing May 1st or 2nd, as I will be over at the
Twenty Days opening.
It’s on a double bill with Dali’s Liquid Ladies, which is about Salvador Dali, some mermaids and a Nazi youth at the World’s Fair. They are taking the Dali show on tour after we close our run, and will make an appearance at Coney Island.
March 8, 2009
I am listening to and reading other piano trios while writing the trio version of
In Dreams... Now I have some Beethoven going (”The Ghost” with duPre, Barenboim and Zuckerman) so if this post is a little scatter-brained, that’s why.
Today I will try to figure out the “Merry-Go-Round” section, which is a little dance piece centering around major seventh and ninth harmony and depending on repetition for its effect. My tendency is to get bored easily when I am writing, and to want variation for its own sake. I remember thinking when I wrote this piece that I wanted to limit what I said. The point of a carousel is that the same thing happens over and over. As the Father and Mother spin around on the carousel, it seems the music will never stop and they will never get off. Now I will see what I can do with new instruments to make that happen.
This is the photo we used for the Fringe Production of "In Dreams…"
The new version will be performed for Nautilus Rough Cuts on the evenings of May 18th and 19th. It will be fully danced, so on the 18th we will probably be downstairs from Nautilus’s itty little studio, to give it more space. I hope to find a nice dance space for the 19th.
February 28, 2009
Everything has ground to a halt. Heavy snow a couple of days ago and I have no ambition at all. The piano trio arrangements I am working on for a new version of “In Dreams…” are baffling me. The most straightforward of the pieces–which I thought I would whip off–seem impossible to put in any terms but piano. The more outside a piece is, the easier for me to reimagine it. Today I lack confidence. I will let it rest. It will come back.
Arnold Schoenberg
After going to a performance of two Schoenberg pieces, Verklärte Nacht followed by Pierrot Lunaire, I remarked to my companion that VN felt like an exploration of every possible conventional harmony. She said, “I’m pretty bored by Western harmony.” I’m not, but the harmonic cycling-through that happens in classical and romantic era music is starting to bother me. I’ll hear three Mozart symphonies in a row tomorrow afternoon. I wonder what effect that will have.
Played a hilariously varied variety show–Global Hotdish–at the History Center today with Jim Price and Ross Sutter. I don’t think I’ve seen lutefisk and West African drumming on the same program before. Desdamona and Carnage did some hip hop.
Carnage
I got to thinking about how mainstream hip hop has become; from being an outsider art form in the seventies to now being uncontroversial, barring some sour people who say, “I don’t like that rap stuff.” And then I thought about the history of blues music, and Tony Glover’s famous 1980’s remark that Chicago blues is the Dixieland jazz of the eighties. If the pattern holds, we can expect that in a less than half a century hip hop will be performed in crummy little bars across the USA by old white people who have straight jobs as lawyers and stuff.
