Confusion. Anger. Joy.

Can't go into details at this point, but Andrew Collie is unable to perform on the 10th- through absolutely no fault of his own, but a slight bit of jerkiness that I AM willing to peg on other people.  

THE GOOD NEWS is that within seven hours of getting this news I (and when I say I, I mean my awesome friends Brian Paljug and Lauren Estes) was able to find a replacement singer.  Though Andrew will be greatly missed, the show must go on... and now, with a time constraint, rehearsals will be all the more exciting.  

Yay for Music Being Done!

OK, so the music (at least for this performance- I'm sure I'll revise it another five times) is finished, and I like all but one song.  I'm not going to say which song I don't particularly like, but the good news is I don't particularly hate it either.

I had great fun over the past few days going to the on-campus copy center and getting to know their staff very well while printing out all this music for my performers.  Today I printed out my own personal score that I'll use to conduct (I've decided that things will be a lot easier if I conduct, and Professor Serghi encouraged this).  The result is an extremely thick score, 57 pages of 11 by 17 paper containing 20 songs.  I imagine that with incidental music the final score should run around 65 pages, if formatted correctly.  I REALLY need to go back and format.  Finale, the music program that I use, has so many ways to precision-engineer your score that it actually makes it MORE difficult to make it produce something that looks decent.  

I spoke with Professor Serghi the other day about the paper that I have to write as part of this thesis- sounds pretty easy.  All I have to do is spend 15 pages talking about the process of writing Usher.... so basically I get to go back, read all of my blog posts, and synthesize the information.  Thanks, blogger!

Now... on to that string quartet rehearsal...

Marathon Music

I've been writing a ton over the past week- as of this moment I only have one and a half songs left to finish up.  I'm pretty sure I can do it by sometime tomorrow afternoon... just in time to get things printed off for my musicians.  After that, I can shift my concerns to rehearsals and marketing.  

So far all of the musicians have been amazing.  Of particular note was Thursday, when the vocalists all got together for the first time.  They are the same ones that sung on the original CD, but when that CD was recorded they had each come to the studio separately.  Hearing them all sing at once was completely thrilling (it helped that they already knew most of the music).  I am very excited, especially for the full group numbers.

DC/Rehearsals

First off- we got into the DC Fringe Festival!  This is both a blessing and a curse as it puts us into a position where we have to notify DC of our attendance before we find out about New York.  Fringe shows are not super cheap or super relaxing to put on and we face the potential of having two shows this summer.  It is something we would love AND hate to do.  I think right now we're leaning towards going for it...

In other news, the last piece has fallen into my instrumentalist puzzle: I have a guitarist!  We had our first string quartet rehearsal this evening, and while it was very much a first-reading, they all sounded good and I am certain that they are capable of pulling everything off.  It's always a treat to hear one's own music actually being played... though sort of disconcerting when you have no idea where you are in the music and are basically useless as a conductor.  

Piano rehearsal is Wednesday, and voice rehearsal is on Thursday.  This weekend I put the finishing touches on the three or four songs that aren't yet finished.  After that, we'll have three weeks to put it all together for the WM recital.  Woo-hoo!

Greetings from Disney World!

... I am not working at Disney World ...

Snow Day!

No class today for the first time in my four years at William and Mary.  I was informed of this at 6:30AM when everyone's phone rang to deliver the news over the campus emergency announcement system.  Now, I'm not going to suggest that I wasn't happy to learn about getting the day off, but a part of me feels as though it is abusing the "emergency" notification system to use it for snow days.  Hurricane?  Sure.  Fire?  Of course.  Snow?  When all the power is on and no one has been hurt, perhaps not.  

Enough of that.

I've been recruiting instrumentalists over the past few weeks, and am now lacking only a violist and a second classical guitar player (though I have leads for both).  The pit, as it exists, is comprised of members of ATO (my fraternity), the WM Orchestra, the WM Wind Symphony, and former members of the Wind Symphony.  I had to reach out all over for this project because the instruments are not normally found together.

"My Love" is finished (for the purposes of the recital, but if Brent (Mr. C) doesn't like it I might change it a bit.  Working on "Music of a Dream" and all of the other songs that I wrote but that have been changed to 4-part pieces or written with different lyrics.  Many of these updates are more difficult than I would have imagined, but I am still confident that I can get all of the music to my musicians on the day they get back from Spring Break.  

If I'm not on my computer working on music this week, then I'm either eating, sleeping, or in class.  Or... updating my blog and procrastinating.