Ramping Up

Since Sunday I've been in super-productivity mode.  I've been recording Andrew Collie (the singing voice of William) in the media center for a total (so far) of twelve hours, and I need to do at least that plus another twelve hours with Brian and another five with the girls before recording is finished.  

At the same time, I have a number of tests and case write-ups in my business classes, so that's fun.

Rehearsals start on Monday- while I'm at Woodberry this weekend I'm going to pick up the new Draft V scripts for the actors.  We'll have five rehearsals to make sure that everyone is correctly pronouncing all the difficult words that Mr. C put in the script.  Well, the words that I spared when I went on a difficult-language editing spree in the last draft.  

15 days till the show.

16 songs to record (doable)

5 rehearsals to run (doable)

3 songs to finish writing before recording (sort of doable)

Sleep- not so much.

Readthrough Cast List

I'm going to go ahead and post this before anyone has a chance to drop in the hopes that, because it's such a small cast... no one will.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Ewell Recital Hall

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Original Read-Through Cast

 

Readers:

William Reed- Brian Paljug

Listener/Roderick Usher- Thomas Baumgardner

Madeline Usher- Stephanie Driggers

Annabel Lee- Kay Schellman

Narrator/Doctor- Tim Page

Singers:

William Reed- Andrew Collie

Roderick Usher- Brian Paljug

Madeline Usher- Rebecca Phillips

Annabel Lee- Lauren Huyett

A Good Week

Tonight are auditions for the readthrough, so that's exciting!  Also, I'm going into the recording studios to record Brian today and I'm recording Andrew on Sunday (because I got my male singers).  Very busy.

Kay came by earlier this week to go through all the music and was extremely helpful in her criticisms.  The music is coming along better now, but very slowly as usual.

Psychological Breakthrough

I decided that I've been working under a very dangerous mind-trap ever since I got to school. There are many ways to phrase it: sunk cost fallacy, throwing bad money after good, etc... but it all comes down to the fact that I have been way too protective of my musical ideas.  Over the summer I killed songs left and right, mowing them down in an act of musical carnage.  Since I arrived at school, however, I've had this mentality that I didn't have enough time to arbitrarily throw things out.  

This has caused me a great deal of trouble, but now I can fix it by starting fresh on several of the songs that I was having the most trouble with.  This means that all of the songs will NOT be done by the time of the readthrough, and that some might be sketches, but that, at the very least, there will not be songs in the readthrough that I don't completely believe in.

Songs that I Dislike

"I Cannot Love You"

"Silence"

"Symmetry"

It really can't be this hard to finish three songs, can it?  I know it won't be the end of the world if there are a few incomplete musical numbers during the readthrough, but I'm worried that if that happens I'll have a permanent bias against these songs and they will never get written.  

We're recording some latin chanting in "Mysterium" today.  That, at the very least, should be enjoyable.

Home!

I'm home again, which means I'm getting lots of work done!  Well, a reasonable amount at least.  With the exception of not having a tenor to sing for the concept album, everything is going very well.  

I'm trying to come up with a survey to distribute during the read-through in order to gauge reactions to various things in the music and script.  If anyone has any good ideas for questions that should be on this survey, let me know.

Music Notes

I have four days in which to go through Draft IV and replace all of the dialogue before and after songs with things that musicians might actually say.  Mr. C did a great job of approximating things, but he doesn't really know a key signature from a time signature, so this is my job.

One new song written this week- "Ballad 2"- the song that William plays (along with the ghosts of the past) to introduce the listener (and the audience) to the larger story.

Analysis Continued

Radiant Palace/Lonely Palace-

Radiant the earliest song that I wrote and still have in the show.  The two songs mirror each other- one is near the start of Act I and the other is at the start of Act II.  Roderick and William sing it as a drinking song shortly after they meet each other, and it functions as a transition between the tavern and Usher's house.  Nothing too complicated in this- I just tried to think of a melody that would work for a drinking song.  I chose to write this one early on because I knew it would be one of the easy ones and would not be a song that I would expressly want the audience to remember upon leaving.  Lonely Palace is the twin of this song, and retains the same melody but in minor.  This is the song which looks at Usher's house in a very different light, ten years after William has been exiled.  

My Sister, My Savior-

I think I'd like to change the title of this one, but for now it reflects a few lyrics at the end.  This song is Madeline singing in honor of Annabel Lee ten years after Annabel's death.  I just finished the first draft recently.  It provided a very interesting challenge because it had to be beautiful, but within the realms of Madeline's universe.  I changed keys a lot, but I'm not sure if I really captured her within the song.  The songs near the end of the play, such as this one, are especially hard if they are written by the characters because the expectation is that the character's composition style will have matured by the end.  A lot of me feels as if I blew most of my own compositional reserves on the first act and so it's going to be very difficult to write something up to the standards of the second.  There is a chance I'm over-thinking this.

Mysterium-

This song is almost painful to write about.  After an initial burst of productivity with the musical, I decided to take a swipe at this one sometime mid-June.  I have something along the lines of sixteen drafts for this song.  SIXTEEN.  And a little piece of me died every time I realized that the draft I was on wasn't going to work out.  Eventually the grinding paid off and something came out which I like quite a bit.  It still needs some revision work, but Mysterium is one of my top three favorite songs in the musical.  I'm excited to see how it actually works in context, but I think I will always hate it just a little for being so difficult.

Nothing Beautiful is Simple-

In contrast to Mysterium, and to throw off any theories that I had been developing about how I write music best, this song took me about five hours to write and is also one of my favorites.  It is, ironically, just about the simplest song I have ever written.  

Rat Ratiocination-

Ratiocination is a concept featured heavily in several Poe detective stories.  Poe may well have invented the detective story, in fact.  That reference aside, this song has everything to do with the disintegration of Roderick User's mind.  It swings wildly between childishness and insanity.  It came very easily to me when I wrote it in Italy, and again disproves the idea that a song has to be painful to write in order to be decent in my eyes.  It was recently pointed out to me that the refrain melody is almost an exact copy of a short theme from Star Wars III, which I didn't recognize and haven't seen since it came out.  It's different enough that I can leave it in without any problems.

Silence-

This is the latest of the songs that I've "finished" though I haven't really.  I've been working on it on and off for a few months, and I may or may not have a melody that works.  I do have strong feelings against the song in general, though, so hopefully that means it will go the Mysterium route and turn out well.

Two/Three Songs Left

I've been chipping away and finished off another draft of a song, but I'm reaching the point of frustration once more.  I am never sure when this happens whether to take a few songs and delete them mercilessly or whether it would be better to suck it up and finish them (because probably I'll like them later.)

I'm going to do an analysis (alphabetical) of the songs that I HAVE finished for my future reference.  Maybe the next time I write a musical I'll be able to look back and see which creative processes seem to be the most succesful.  Half will be posted today, and half on Sunday.

A Love That Will Never Die- I like this song very much.  It's very simple and not at all in my style, and was semi difficult to write.  I got the idea while actually holding a guitar (a first!) and made up a nice guitar melody off of two slurred notes that I played while holding it.  The refrain came naturally and quickly, and the whole skeleton may have been written in just a few hours. The vocal melody was a great deal more difficult, and that took a few revisions- I'm happy with it now.

A Vision- This is the song based on some verses from "Kubla Khan" (which was inspired by an opium induced-dream, as I've recently learned).  I wrote this song early in the summer (EDIT: I just checked my blog, and found out that I wrote it in August, so that's a lie.  I have a terrible memory), so I can't recall too much of the process, but if I recall correctly it was very easy to start and very difficult to finish.  There are five drafts of openings that I have stored somewhere.  The one I settled on goes from simple to complex, but I don't know if it does so in any sort of interesting way.  One of the songs, along with Alone and Silence, that I am most uncertain about. 

Alone- I worked up several unsuccessful starts to this song before finally stealing a guitar melody that I had intended for Ballad back in April or May.  I got some minor ideas for a glockenspiel (which I'm not sure I'll keep) after listening to "Spring Awakening."  The refrain was influenced from a french film called "Les Choristes," and is basically just a sequence of scales going higher and higher that I've always wanted to throw in to a song.  I'm not sure about the end of the refrain, because it just stops suddenly at the climax.  It could be effective.  Maybe not.  The vocal melody was easy to write, but it might be a little low.  I need to hear it sung before I make a final judgement.

The Ballad of Annabel Lee-

One of the two hardest songs to write in the entire play.  I struggled for weeks with the awkward rhythm of the verses.  Poe does not lend himself well to musical settings, which is probably why you don't hear about them being done.  There are twelve versions of this song, including three that were completed.  The first was too slow, the second was too evil, and the third I think has finally struck the balance between haunting, beautiful, and urgent that the piece really needs.  The song does everything that it needs to do.  I don't think that it's the best melody in the show, and I don't think that it's the best harmony and orchestration... but I do think that it's perfect for what it needs to do.  

The Ballad of Annabel Lee (Reprise)-

This just steals the melody from Annabel Lee and makes it more evil.  Songs are easy to write when you know what the melody HAS to be and then just have to incorporate a general mood.  It needs to be lengthened for the storm sequence, but overall one of the easier songs to write.

Close to Death-

It's good that I've done this analysis, because I looked back on all of my posts to see if I could find information about these songs, and I have never once mentioned Close to Death.  It's a piece that occurs after Madeline has "died" and is put in the tomb alongside Annabel Lee.  It recaps both Ballad and Alone at the same time, and adds a third melody (which is new) to complement the two.  I have no clue when I wrote this song, though it must have been early August.  I remember having one very productive week back then.  For a very complicated song, the writing came very easily.  It could have been, again, that my melodies were very clear and set and all I had to do was figure out how to put them together.  Starting from nothing is always much harder to do.  I think this is a very cool, epic song.  

That's it for now.  I look forward to Sunday so I can see other ways that my brain has been lying to me about what I did this summer.