vid of “Women of Troy”
iDreamTV, which documents all of Frank Theatre’s shows, has put up a clip of excerpts from Women of Troy. My, it looks a little gloomy, doesn’t it?
anthropocentrism, reconsidered
I’m writing music for a play by Margo McCreary which prominently features a dog.
I haven’t had many dogs in my life. There was a lovely Bernese Mountain Dog–Bosco–who lived downstairs. He wasn’t the smartest dog, but he was affectionate and kind-hearted.To show you how much he liked you, he sat on your foot. Ah, Bosco. He’s been dead a few years now. Cancer, I think it was.
But now, I’m trying to write songs for a dog to sing, and hence am researching doggie thought and behavior. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes in The Hidden Life of Dogs:
[T]he general assumption that other creatures lack consciousness is astonishing. After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have them. Thought is an efficient, effective mechanism that we, and many other animals, would be hard put to do without. With intellect, which is to say the ability to learn and reason, an organism such as a person or a dog can cope with a variety of problems that would require an enormous amount of hard-wiring if the behavioral solution to each problem were pre-programmed.
When we relegate animal thought to instinct, we overlook the fact that instinct is merely an elegant matrix for the formation of an intellect, a fail-safe device that guides each species to form thoughts. When shaped by education, our thoughts enable us to do what we do, and even to be what we are, not only as members of our species but as individuals.
This idea has merit.
Anyway, below is a picture of the dog for whom I am writing, a puppet by the name of Jack.
summer classes for youngsters
Although snow fell here two days ago, summer is around the corner, and it’s not too early to start enrolling children in summer classes and activities.
Minnesota lake
I do hope that a lot of your child’s summer is also spent in unstructured activities like hanging around with friends, gardening, exploring the woods, swimming and getting bored enough that the return of school is welcome. But if you wait until your child is completely bored before finding a camp, your options may be limited.
So, to spur you on, here are the classes I will be teaching this summer at Children’s Theatre Company:
Bunnicula June 13-17 full day Grades 4-6. This play is based on the popular series of children’s books by James Howe about the supposed “rabbit vampire,” Bunnicula.
Cinderella June 20-24 full day Grades 4-6. The wonderful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, scaled back a bit for kids.
In Your Musical Voice July 11-22 full day Grades 4-6. My playwright collaborator Laurie Flanigan will teach this class with me. Students will create their own musical play with our guidance.
Anne of Green Gables August 1-12 full day Grades 6-8. A stage version of the beloved novel. I’m writing original music. This is a joint project with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where visual arts students will be creating props and set pieces for the play.
You may register online for Children’s Theatre classes. If you have a child who wants to take one of these classes, but is slightly younger than the recommended age, please consult with me. I should be able to tell you whether it’d be a good fit.
Fidgety 3 premiere
The first performance of Fidgety Fairy Tales Part 3 will be this coming Sunday, April 3rd, 1:00 pm at the Saint Paul Jewish Community Center. This is the first in a series of ten performances funded by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, all of which are free and open to the public.
Reservations are recommended, and can be made at the MACMH website.
We have a dynamic and sensitive group of young performers working on this piece. I’ve been impressed by their ability, their imagination and by their willingness to stretch themselves. I’d be very interested in what you have to say about the show after you’ve seen it.
directing music
One of the challenges we face in writing and directing theatrical music is that music tends to crystallize the action. It sets its text and dictates the rhythm of movement and thought almost as though the actor were dealing with a heavy piece of scenery that was being muscled into place in synchronicity with his words. Music can take away the actor’s freedom of thought and expression; it can render him less spontaneous, less creative, less fluent. It can manipulate him, strangle him, fetter him.
All these tendencies must be struggled against, for the sake of theatre and for the sake of the actor.
O Pioneers!
The title of Willa Cather’s novel is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman.
Willa Cather
The story deals only lightly with pioneering, as in moving west, breaking the land, homesteading etc. It opens with the death of a Nebraska pioneer and the assumption of his farm’s management by his eldest daughter, Alexandra. She proves herself a level-headed and prescient manager. In a time of drought when neighbors are selling up, she mortgages the homestead and buys up more land. The narrative then jumps forward, showing us Alexandra in her prime, unmarried, running a prosperous farm with hired labor. Two of her brothers are married and established on their own land, and her beloved youngest brother, Emil, is fulfilling her hopes by attending college.
The story then shapes itself around questions of love, sexuality, marriage and women’s self-determination. It’s a lovely, complicated and tragic story with SPOILER ALERT! a happy ending.
I haven’t read Cather for several years, and I’d forgotten how well she makes you love her heroines and how well she situates them in their social, cultural, sexual and temporal geography. I’m glad I read this book, and I want to read more Willa Cather.
Hercules, My Shipmate
Robert Graves, photo from wikimedia, unattributed
Robert Graves’s novel Hercules, My Shipmate is a retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts. It is a great book. The storytelling is rip-roaring, the writing is direct, lucid and poetic, the characters are well drawn. In Graves’s ancient world, the adherents of the Mother Goddess and those of the Olympic pantheon compete for land, treasure and sexual dominion.
The story is full of incident and I don’t feel the need to summarize. Just read it; it’s a wonderful evocation of a world; quite different from the dry or contradictory or boring chronicles of the heroes and gods one often reads.
In his afterword, Graves explains how he came to choose the cast of Argonauts, their route and their adventures. Some of his choices are based on scholarship, some on common sense, and some (e.g. including Orpheus among the crew, and creating hitherto-unheard-of adventures for several Argonauts) because he just felt they needed to be there. I’m not a Greek scholar, so I have no way to judge the accuracy of Graves’s religious theories or historiography. For me, the beauty of Graves’s writing and the conviction he brings to his story convince me. I apprehended, as I have with Carlos Parada’s work and with Roberto Calasso’s, new ideas about who we are and why we think the way we do.
In other news, I had some unexpected surgery last week and am a little slower than I’d like to be. I’m glad it’s over. Other family members struggle with their health, and I recognize how fragile life is.
Further Fidgety Fairy Tales is now in rehearsal. We have a twitter feed and all!
review: Unformed Landscape
I am reading this book as part of the To Be Read Challenge.
Unformed Landscape, by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Peter Stamm, from the Stuttgarter Zietung site
This short novel is the story of Kathrine, a young Norwegian woman who has never ventured below the Arctic Circle. The unformed landscape of the title is her mind. She lives in a small town whose primary industry is a fish-processing plant. She works as a customs inspector, and thus supports her young son (who never appears in the novel except by reference.) In the process of her work, she meets people from all over the world; sailors who dock at her port.
Already divorced from a drunken thug, Kathrine almost nonchalantly marries a successful local man who turns out to be a terrible liar and a prig, leaves him, and journeys south. In a French fishing town she tracks down a man with whom she has corresponded and together they travel back up to Paris, from whence she returns to her village, resumes her job, and makes a loving relationship with a man who is her equal. Together, they move to Oslo and a new life.
All these things happen, and more. But this isn’t a novel of incident or steamy romance, but one of character and place. Peter Stamm handles it with cool, precise and poetic understatement, and the result is a long, slow crescendo.
Stamm creates a direct, spare picture of northern small-town life–grievances that burst open into hate mail; forgiveness; allowances made; failures; being stuck; kindness that isn’t spoken but shown; the ex you see on the street and try to ignore; an old sweetheart always in the background. Kathrine, young, intelligent and beautiful, engages in friendships–sexual and non-sexual–with men as a way of testing who she can be and exploring the world. When she finds the right relationship, she can become herself. Funny, it’s like a Jane Austen novel that way.
This is a very good book, and I recommend it.
what we talk about when we talk about Walt
I’ve really been enjoying dipping into the Createquity blog by Ian David Moss.
Another old post of his, written a propos the subsidization of art, hit a spot…My Disney Problem. Here it is: I write lovely vocal music for children, and invariably when I write something really pretty and touching someone says, “It sounds like a Disney song.” And I blush and bristle. I don’t think it sounds like a Disney song. I think it sounds pretty and approachable but…not Disney. ( I am actually teaching a class at Children’s Theatre this term for kindergarteners and first graders called “Sing Disney,” and I have listened to dozens and dozens of those songs, which qualifies me, I’ma say, as a Disney music expert.)
What’s a Disney song? Well there are different kinds of Disney songs because many, many composers have worked for The Mouse; there isn’t a particular style associated with Disney, except a slightly lagging style du jour (Goofy’s Flashdance period; Hercules’s foray into secular gospel.) But a certain approach and execution makes a song Disney. Even when I was a kid something bothered me about it and now that I’m a grownup, I can put it into words, maybe.
What are the elements of Disney music?
First: sagging hipsterism. Like I said, Disney tries to stay au courant but it’s hard to pump out product as fast as trends move, and of course nobody can stay ahead of the self-devouring hipster curve. Disney is also crippled by its need to remain family-friendly, so the shocking edge of popular culture will always be a bridge too far. As a midwestern small-town kid, even I knew that Herbie the Lovebug was but a faint simulacrum of swinging Haight Ashbury, and I hadn’t been to San Francisco or put flowers in my hair.
Next: sexism. The princess thing. It’s 2011 and girls still want to be princesses. No. Girls want to be princesses more than they did twenty years ago, because the Disney corporation didn’t fully exploit what it had until the year 2000. And no, having an Asian princess and a black princess and a Native princess doesn’t make it any better. But princesses are only part of the sexism package; consider the vavavoom aspect. Or the simpering preteen thing. To reams of feminist critiques out there I’ll just add that the girls’ music is pretty sexist. Human or animal, yesterday or today, the women pine away for their men and bat their eyes; they’re refreshing, young and sexy and so are their songs.
Yep, you can rent one of these
There are a few exceptions which, interestingly, involve non-white heroines.* So, Pocahontas…she has a bit of a love affair but her big thing seems to be environmentalism. Because, as we know, even in Captain John Smith days, Natives were Close To The Earth and prescient about the depredations that would result from unfettered development of the wilderness…I’m sorry, Colors of the Wind is wrong in so many ways. Starting with the native tomtom beat pentatonic thing and then the sentiment which is mushy generalizations and feel-goodism. What is a listener to do when the following questions are asked:
Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon,
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
All I can do is turn around and guiltily say to Pocahontas, “No, I haven’t done those things. Why does the grinning bobcat grin?”
Which brings me to the most glaring element of Disney style: misplaced sentiment. I have a couple friends who beat up on my anti-Disneyness on the grounds that I just won’t allow myself to have a good, innocent, childlike, happy experience. Well, dang it I love those experiences, and if they come from a Disney song, I’ll take ‘em. But what I usually get is not innocent pleasure but a knowing, very adult take on childhood and a determined push of children into a place they are not. Take an anodyne hit:
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
That’s why a bear can rest at ease
With just the bare necessities of life
Who could argue with this sentiment, which underpins so many great philosophies? Start with your kid, who is begging for a Disney Princess outfit. But seriously, a) it is in the nature of children (and bears) to be greedy, and b) we could also reasonably argue that superfluity allows human beings to be creative and generous.
But let’s agree that we should scale back our consumption…fine. So is the song an upbeat, secular hymn to self-denial? This presents some dramaturgical problems, for it is sung to a feral boy in a loincloth who is definitely not asking Mr. Bear for a Wii. The sentiment–within the story itself–is misplaced. I conclude that the song is there because a) it’s catchy and b) it appeals to grownups, who wish they were less materialistic, sometimes. How this differs in its moral influence from Eric, Or Little By Little, we will leave for future generations to decide.
But the kids sing along with it, right? What’s wrong with that? Nothing. Kids can sing whatever. It won’t kill ‘em. But ideally, we’d like our kids to have a variety of authentic and challenging artistic influences just the way we want them to be challenged in school or sports. The problem (I’m not the first to notice this, I know) is that Disney Has Taken Over the World of Children’s Music. The music might not be challenging, but it’s what passes for authentic. What else is there?
Let’s look around. I’d start with the idea that, until recently, art for children wasn’t a separate sphere. The great myths, fairy stories, folk ballads, were everyone’s. So it’s interesting to see what people other than The Mouse had to say about Cinderella or Snow White. Similarly, there’s more to “classical” music for children than Fantasia, and it’s worth exploring. Kids can love very sophisticated music. I’m not suggesting they should be educated and bored, but they can be exposed to legit music in the normal course of affairs. Too, the whole realm of popular music is much deeper and more interesting than the niche that gets carved out for children. Just give them variety, and see what they like.
Our ears are conservative and nostalgic. After several generations of Disney world domination, people say things like “they don’t write ‘em like that anymore,” and get gooey about how sweet and perfect and wholesome and real this music is. (There’s a youtube comment from a twelve year old who writes how lucky she is that she grew up with the “classics” and not this “Hannah Montana crap.” I don’t even pretend to understand an art form that makes children nostalgic and conservative.)
But I’m not here to argue with anyone’s taste. Bliss is bliss. Now, there are many kinds of bliss. And children could discover their own if we open the world of music to them. Great music shouldn’t be the exclusive province of classes, lessons and field trips. It should just be there.
(Btw, I have found several Disney songs I’ll be teaching, which I really like. Have to do a little judicious editing, though.)
*There could be be a whole sideline argument about whether it’s unfair and racist that Heroines of Color frequently don’t get their man, which I’m gonna dismiss as specious.
p.s. This post is too long but as for Moss’s question: Is Disney World art? Sure, why not? I’d even argue that it’s subsidized; you can bet a lot of imagineers had federal student loans or attended public schools; and I’d guess Disney has a nice tax situation in Florida.
economics
Sometimes, usually late at night when I’m feeling maudlin, I start writing a blog entry about the economics of creation. In the morning I look at it and delete it. It seems whiney or ungrateful or…I dunno, who wants to hear about money? Art isn’t about money, is it? Except when it is.
Creative work is the least lucrative byroad of an artist’s life. Education and performance (or moving your fingers at some function) are where the money is. The situation in theatre is particularly dire (see here.) Although some folks are doing okay…
So I noted with interest an article in the Sunday NYT about Arena Stage’s new commitment to playwrights. Ha! Finally! Arena’s new project will address playwrights’ “enormous frustrations in persuading major regional houses…to mount the second or third production of a new play…” But no. What’s Arena doing? A revival of Oklahoma, a world premiere, a new plays festival, a fancy interactive database, a rooming house for visiting playwrights. Worthy as all these projects may be, I’m not impressed. Seems like more of the same.
Sure, premieres are great, I guess. I want my new stuff to be produced. But I’d like my old stuff to get a hearing too. It’s clear that the nonprofit theatre scene favors in-house development of new work, because there’s grant money attached to those projects. And there’s grant money attached to it because artistic directors and philanthropists want to make a cultural splash. (Note to Arena: Us old folks out in the boondocks don’t need to stay in your rooming house for a year; we just want you to read the stuff we already wrote and produce it from time to time.)
And you know, there’s nothing wrong with making a cultural splash; new drama is exciting; it’s good, the creative fervor and all…but I direct your attention to my second paragraph and ask you to consider, who’s making a living off this enterprise?
Well, enough with the complaints. In fact, I do get produced and audiences like my stuff and I make a living. And I’m saved from the humiliation and tedium of academic work by my lack of a degree. Ian David Moss made some lovely points back in 2008 about the “amateur” status of most composers, which cause me to scratch my head. Do you call yourself a professional if you make most of your money off it? Or if you get a nice fellowship? Or conversely, if you scrabble in the trenches for some time, remuneration notwithstanding?
The only thing I know for sure about amateur composers is that their requirements have caused Sibelius, my notation program of choice, to become so bogged down with realistic playback and an “Ideas Library” that it takes forever to load up. But hey, give the people what they want.
Now to post this before I decide it’s too whiney.
The photo at the top is of Mikhail Bulgakov. I highly recommend his novel “Black Snow, A Theatrical Romance.”
