Recruiting

Today I began the long and arduous process of musician courting. String quartet courting, to be specific.

Out of all the possible instruments that I'll need for next April, the string section should be the most challenging to find. I suppose it's my fault for having been in the Wind Symphony instead of the orchestra all these years, but I just don't know that many string players. The one string player I do know, however, is extremely outgoing and personable, so I've asked her to help me find three others so that we can do some experiments during the fall semester.

I'm scrounging for vocalists, too. The sooner I can get all the songs recorded, the better- because what a real singer does is bring out all the things that I've done wrong. And I don't want to sing on the demo CD.

The third prong of my attack plan involves coming up with a space and time to do a readthrough of the script sometime in November. I'd love to have the luxury of an audition and rehearsal process for the readers, so I'm planning that out in my head as well. I feel as though the lady who works the scheduling desk in the music department is going to get to know me very well in the first few weeks of school.

Out of all the steps of creating a musical, strategizing and human-resource-allocation is easily my favorite part. I finally get to transition from working all alone in the upstairs office to working mostly alone but while sending out lots of e-mails and organizing lunch dates. I'm really excited about the potential for this project, and so I hope that I can put together a good team (I seemed to get really lucky with the Tragedy! team so I'm going to cannibilize a bit from that production) and let them be smarter than me.

I'll probably need Kay to translate everything I say.

And Robert, as far as props go, I'm gonna need a full-sized house that can collapse on itself on a nightly basis. And an ocean. I just wanted to give you a head start on that.