I suppose it's time for an update

On Friday Brent and I (it's so hard not to call him Mr. C, but he insists) are talking through ALL of the comments that people gave about the show and we're deciding what direction in which to take the redraft.

Some things I'll be angling for:

1.  More excuses for full cast songs.

2.  Fewer instrumental pieces.

3.  Heavily modified ghost pieces.

4.  Occasional lyric changes from the original Poe.

and 5. (not musical) The cutting of the doctor scenes.

I know he has some good ideas as well.  I'm excited about the new energy we're about to be pouring into this project.  Regular blog updates will no doubt return.

Happy Thanksgiving!

No editing or revising for the next few days- trying to look at everything with fresh eyes when it's time for the redraft in a few days.  Have a great Thanksgiving!

With Many Thanks to Christian Amonson

"Fall of the House of Usher" Read Through

By Brent Cirves and Mike Johnson

 

November 14, 7:30PM – Ewell Recital Hall

Courtesy Recording from http://ChristianAmonson.com/

 

ACT 1 (70MB) – http://ChristianAmonson.com/CBARecording/FallOfTheHouseOfUsher_Act1.mp3

 

ACT 2 (60MB) – http://ChristianAmonson.com/CBARecording/FallOfTheHouseOfUsher_Act2.mp3

 

Enjoy!

Thank You!

Since the House of Usher readthrough is now over, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped out in some way, either by reading or singing or stage managing or critiquing early drafts of songs or encouraging this project.

We got some great feedback from the audience, and I'm hoping to get a recording of the entire show online at some point for those who were not able to come see the readthrough.  I'll let you know when that happens.  In the meanwhile, there's a lot of work to be done...

49 Minutes of Music on the Wall

Sometimes things seem to just work out.  For example, today I had no homework or class to do after 9:30AM due to a field trip which forced me to wake up at 7.  This means that I had from 9:30-3:00PM to work on music, from 3:00-8:00 to record that music, and from 8-11 to rehearse.  

Tomorrow I plan on waking up early and writing as much instrumental music as I can (all of the sung music, with the exception of one song, is recorded) before 11:45.  At that point I will go to the recording studio and do a final mix of the songs.  Afterwards, if I have more time, I'll work on a little more instrumental music and then go to the recital hall to do a sound check at 3.  From 3-6 I will work on organizing the music and putting sticky notes in my script to let me know when the music needs to be played.  If there's time, I'll also try to type up a survey and get it printed out.  If there's still time, I'll come up with introductory remarks. 

The cast had a great rehearsal tonight, and at the end I asked them some of the questions on the survey that we'll be handing out to the audience.  They had some fantastic insights and solutions to problems in the show... I can't wait to see what a full audience can find.

Overall I'm very, very excited.  How could I not be?  If the audience enjoys it, then great.  If they hate it, then isn't it a good thing we had a readthrough so that we have time to change the things to make it great?  There's a little bit of rationalization in there, but not much...

5 Days and Counting

Went to the WFS-EHS game this weekend.  We won by a wide margin, as predicted.  I saw Mr. C but we didn't really have time to talk about the musical.  He did offer to fill out a form for the DC Fringe Festival, though, which is extremely nice of him to do (I think he feels bad that he can't help out with the readthrough in a more hands-on way).

I am currently in Studio 1 in the library waiting for songs to bounce (render, compile, turn into actual music- however you want to say it) and simultaneously trying to finish up some old songs.

There is a lot of work to do between now and Friday, but this should be a lighter academic week than last week (two case write-ups, an exam, and a 45-slide powerpoint presentation didn't help) so I should have time to scramble everything together.  

Sound Check

Ahh! I missed my official window for posting for the first time in 43 posts. Oh well.

I did a sound check today in the Recital Hall- couldn't get any sound out for the first fifteen minutes and thought, along with the administrative assistant who was helping me, that everything was broken. Then I found a small plug that was halfway out, and putting it back in its place seemed to fix the problem.

Also did some more sound mixing today.

Had individual character rehearsals yesterday. They went well, though half of my cast may have inflamed bronchitis. And by may I mean absolutely do. They should be well by the readthrough, though. If not, Annabel Lee may be a little more in character than I would prefer.

Halloween Weekend!

And what a lovely weekend it was.  I'm a little late on my posting, but hey, I haven't eaten dinner yet either, so it's not like I was procrastinating.

Went to Woodberry on Thursday for the weekend- I carved a very cool pumkin out of a pattern that Liza and I found- a barbershop quartet of ghosts.  Even though only four trick-or-treaters came down to her house, I feel as though it was worth the two hours it took to carve.

Saw Mr. Cirves's play- Moby Dick Rehearsed.  This was a play that we had seen about six years ago in a regional theater, and we thought it was great and were in a race to see who could direct it first.  He won.  The production was very cool- a bagpiper took to the stage between each scene change!  They also super-soaked the first four rows of the audience with the "sea," so I was lucky that I knew that beforehand and got a fifth row seat.

This morning before I left, Mr. C handed me seven beautiful black folders filled with draft five of the script.  I'll be handing these out to my actors tomorrow for our first rehearsal.  

When I got back to William and Mary, I went straight to the recording studios so that I could record Brian and Andrew at 5:00.  Brian stayed till 8 and managed to churn out every song that his character sings.  A few of them might need slight revisions, but overall he did a great and very efficient job (which takes a load off my mind since now I don't have to be in the recording studio every day this week).  Andrew stayed till 9:30, which was the point at which I realized I had nothing left for HIM to sing either.  I have a few songs that are almost written that he needs to sing next weekend, of course, but overall he's all finished too.  Now all that's left, for the most part, is the mixing.

I keep forgetting to mention this, but I wouldn't be able to put up this read-through if not for the help of Robert Black, whom I have enlisted as stage manager.  I should have put his name up on the cast list as such.  He's been scheduling things for me so that I don't have to, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing.  

I am still, of course, delightfully behind on all of my actual school work because of this.  I think that I'll go get something to eat and then get to that.

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.

Readthrough!

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but I booked the readthrough for the play.  

November 14th, 7:30PM in Ewell Recital Hall at William and Mary

This readthrough will, if all goes well, consist of four actors representing the four main characters who will read through the script while sitting on stage.  There will be one or two rehearsals beforehand, so they will have had some time to work on characterization.  In addition, there will be music and sound effects playing at the indicated times during the play, and this should provide a pretty good simulation of what the musical might sound like in a full production.  

Met with Cirves to show him the first recording that we've made, featuring Rebecca Phillips as Madeline's singing voice.  He seemed to like it.  All is reasonably on schedule as long as I can get the rest of these pieces recorded before November.

Inspiration of the Day

This doesn't really relate directly to the House of Usher, but I watched this presentation on appreciating classical music (among other things) the other day and thought it was really spectacular.  I encourage anyone to take twenty minutes and check it out.  

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

In musical news, we start recording tomorrow!  I've been working overtime to try and finish at least ONE new female song to hand over so that they can start learning it.

Audio Immersion

I've been having a lot of fun playing with the computers in the media center this week.  They're all Apple G4s with 23 inch screens and the Logic Studio Pack pre-installed.  If you don't know logic, it's basically a sound production tool that lies between Finale (all about the notes) and ProTools (all about the mixing).  It has tons of cool sounds that I can use- pretty much anything you can imagine.  It even has the Chinese Erhu Violin.  Now that's a sound library right there.

What I've been debating myself about is whether or not to use this concept/demo CD to create an immersive audio environment.  What I mean by that is taking sounds, such as ambiant noises, footsteps, gunshots... whatever... and putting them into the songs in order to make them more realistic.

For example, I took the song "Love That Will Never Die" and I first put it through a classical guitar sampler.  This makes it sound like someone is actually playing guitar (or at least as close as I can get with a computer).  After that, I grabbed some ambient noise- a dark city street- wind, rustling, etc- and then some footsteps, as if someone is walking down the path.  A latch to some sort of case opens, and a few seconds later a guitar begins to play.

I think that's much more powerful than just explaining to a listener how the show opens- it allows the listener be immersed in the world without necessarily seeing it on a stage.  

I'm sure I'll be talking a lot in the near future about the G4 computers and the CD creation process in general.  I had my first meeting with my female singers on Thursday, and they were quite good.  It's getting to be about that time when I should start asking my artist and graphic design friends if they can come up with some promotional images...