On "Archery Lesson"

    This song is built off of one of my favorite lyrical techniques, one I intend to talk about more later (probably with "Light's Returned" or "Follow the Spark"? we'll see), where the one lyric is given multiple meanings by the dramatic context. In this case, the lessons double as Archer mentoring Apprentice through dealing with grief, trying to lead him to a place of stability and peace in a language Apprentice would actually listen to.

    I needed a backbone to structure the action, so I came up with the idea of Apprentice getting one shot per day. Later, I learned of a telling of the original myth where Hou Yi outpaced Peng Meng in a contest shooting geese; I wish I had heard of it before I started writing the song, so that I might have built it around this contest instead of contriving my own variation on the myth, but I'm very satisfied with how it turned out.

     When I was finding the musical material for this song, I built myself a short playlist that captured the world I wanted it to live in. Those songs were:

• "Over", JRB (the acoustic elegy I had been looking for from the start)
• "Morning Dew", Grateful Dead
• "Evol", Adrianne Lenker

    Ultimately, of course, other influences end up sneaking in.

    When I make these sorts of playlists, looking for bricks I'll use to build a song, I try my damndest to avoid putting musical theatre songs on them. I believe that musical theatre is a medium, not a genre, which means that the music that flows through a piece shouldn't merely be beholden to artificial "contemporary musical theatre conventions". (I'm talking about sus chords and noodly piano figures and just enough modal interchange to self-consciously "spice up" simple pop songwriting and what have you.) Those conventions come from musical theatre songwriters failing to expose themselves and their work to sufficiently diverse musical ideas, thus walling themselves off to wider fields of musical experience and pleasure. That's the vital importance of the Yazbeck challenge.

    As another example, here's the playlist for a song I'm working on now for OVERMAN, my Nietzsche rock opera, where Nietzsche and Wagner meet, get krunked out of their minds, and fall a little in love:

• "Rosanna", Toto
• "Hold the Line", Toto
• "Higher Ground", Stevie Wonder
• "Fool in the Rain", Led Zeppelin

    "And every day you keep trying/'cause if you don't, no one else picks up the slack..."

On "Make This World Better"

    For much of Magpie's Song's development, the War Story was a much looser adaptation of the myth of Hou Yi, Feng Meng, and Chang'e. In this early stage, Apprentice was instead Demagogue, who used the reign of the suns to build up a following, Archer among them. Wife was not only sick, but pregnant with the couple's first child. (I've long struggled with how to justify and stay faithful to Chang'e's mythic passivity while rendering her as a full and realistic person. I'll be the first to admit that sickness and pregnancy was overkill.)

    I had early drafts of a song where the Demagogue arrives to town and whips the workers into a warmongering fervor. Here's a taste of of "Too Hot":

BROTHERS, SISTERS, I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL

MISTREATED AND BROKEN, CRUSHED UNDER LIFE’S HEEL

I’M ONE OF YOU, I FEEL YOUR PAIN

LEND ME YOUR EAR AS I SING MY REFRAIN...

WHEN I FIRST CAME TO TOWN I MET A MAN

WHO USED TO MAKE A LIVING OFF MANURE,

WHEN DROUGHT KILLED CROPS, HE KILLED HIS ANIMALS,

SO NOW HE AIN’T GOT SHIT AND HE’S DIRT POOR

    (I ended up reusing that joke in "Ten Suns". Nothing else from this song survives to the show.)

I’VE SEEN HIS KIDS, THEY’VE RESORTED TO CRIME,

STEALING TO BUY THEMSELVES TIME

ARE THESE THE FOLKS YOU WANT TO MEET?

IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT TO SEE?

THE GROUND HOLDS FIRE TO OUR FEET,

YOU ALL ARE LUCKY YOU HAVE ME!

LIKE IT OR NOT,

IT’S TOO DARN HOT!

    This version of the War Story was quite rich, particularly the decision whether to shoot the final sun. On the one hand was the Demagogue, who was exerting fascistic pressure and appealing to Archer's sense of civic duty as a soldier. On the other hand was Wife, pregnant, impelling Archer to confront and empathize with the Emperor's fatherhood. The more I worked with this adaptation, however, the more I was confronted with the essential storytelling question of "why". Nothing beyond fiat drove Demagogue into the story, or motivated his action, and so nothing Demagogue did felt like it had weight or legs.

    One of the reasons I set out to write a mythic adaptation is because I could guarantee that my source material really worked. In a few short lines, myths and fables establish world-sweeping stakes and test the extremes of human emotion and psychology. If I failed to musicalize them, dramatize them, make them compelling, the failure was on mine as a craftsperson. At times like these, when I had written myself into a corner and imposed myself too strongly on these stories, I made pilgrimages back to the stories. Without fail, the answers were always there the whole time, and stripping away my contrivance helped the stories speak in all their compact clarity and infinite depth.

    It was just so with the War Story. Starting virtually from scratch, I made Demagogue back into Apprentice and removed the pregnancy. This made the piece cleaner and gave it a much-needed sense of direction in the Apprentice's psychological transformation. The song spot once occupied by "Too Hot" now became an ideological confrontation between the idealistic Apprentice and the jaded Archer. And once I had that situation, I had "Make This World Better".

    Well, that's not true. I wrote one really shitty, overly abstract and poetic draft at that song spot before this one. But "A Soldier" is long since lost to the back woods of Google Drive, as it deserves to be...

On "You Go"

You don't want to hear a composer sweat, you want to hear a character breathe.

    Woah. That's a beast of a time signature. How did we end up here?

AGAINST SYMMETRY.
    I have some history as a singer, and one of the things I find most uncomfortable to defend with my voice are pauses where the character needs to wait to catch up to the music. I simply don't know how to hold the stage during silences, or broken-up words or phrases, written in to accommodate the needs of a symmetrical and regular musical structure. It feels, to me, like an inversion of my priorities as a singer; in that moment, instead of me using the music as a tool to illuminate the character, I have to use the character as a tool to illuminate the music.

    As masterful songs like Ring of Keys show, it's quite possible to load musical symmetry with dramatic meaning, and give breaks in the vocal flow a forward-pushing dramatic purpose. But when I write, I'm much quicker to consciously upset these symmetrical structures when they impede the flow of the drama. (I'm talking about structures like 4-bar phrases, songs that stay in 4/4 or 3/4 throughout, that sort of thing.) I find this makes for more convincing singing characters, and music that's harder to get ahead of as a listener.

THE VERSE.
    Here's an excerpt from Wife's verse:

    You'll notice that there's no full beat of rests between phrases. A very early... not even draft, but working-through of the verse... had that same melody, with that full beat of rest, in 4/4. When I listened to myself sing it, I always found that hiccup of silence arrested the flowing momentum of the vocal line. By taking out that last beat of silence, the song took on a lived-in lopsidedness and warmth; it, metrically, spoke to an old love weathering its being knocked off-kilter. To better communicate the regularity of this phrasing, I used the compound meter 4+3/4 instead of alternating 4/4 and 3/4 measures.

THE FORM.

    "You Go" has an ABABC form. The verses are expository, in the third person. The choruses are aspirational, in the second person. The bridge is a moment of stability and unity in the imagined space the characters spend the song carving out for each other. The stability of the stability of the bridge suggested the familiar, comfortable clockwork of 4/4.

    The musical story I needed to tell in the choruses, then, was a pull away from the oppressive humdrum of the verse, but not to a place of metrical stability, as to make the bridge maximally satisfying when it finally resolves the rhythmic tension. This suggested to me a double-time groove: a burst of energy that only heightens the pulse's sense of unevenness.

    But what's double 4+3/4?

    In none of these cases was I consciously imposing musical complexity onto the song for its own sake. The point of every musical decision was to shorten the distance between the musical tapestry and the psychological situation of the moment. The songwriting, however intricate (or pared-down), always serves to give the characters the best avenues by which they can express what's happening to them. If the audience ever becomes aware of the musical artifice, the illusion of musico-dramatic seamlessness falls, and the spell the piece is casting is broken.

Or, in short: you don't want to hear a composer sweat, you want to hear a character breathe.

"But time keeps pushing me/and if I lose my grip, then I leave for good..."

On "Ten Suns"

    In JRB's excellent video on his drafts of opening numbers for The Connector, he describes three functions of an opening number in setting up the world of a show:

• The number needs to establish the setting of the story and evoke the community it concerns.
• The number needs to establish the rules of the show. How is music being used to tell the story? What's the tone of the piece- what will and won't be on the table, in terms of storytelling technique?
• The number needs to establish a thematic hook for the audience to follow through the show. Why this story- why is it worth telling, and what's it all really about?

    In Working On A Song, Anais Mitchell talks about the demands of dramatic songwriting:

"[When I get my hands on another copy of the book, I'll find the quote, but it's about how rendering a situation poetically isn't enough for music drama- there's got to be a Situation unfolding]"

    Put these two critera together, and it's clear why an opening number is such a tall task. Not only do you have a lot of musical exposition on your hands, you have to frame it as action, as characters in a place doing things with forward momentum. I struggle a lot with putting these together, and often times, my first draft of an opening number will be word vomit into the vessel of song structure, a mere receptacle of the necessary information, exposited unadorned. Only later, with a better grasp of where the show needs to go and where I need to direct the number's momentum, will I squeeze that information into the corset of dramatic action.

    For example, the first draft of "Ten Suns" started like this (parentheticals sung by the Emperor):

WHEN THE EARTH WAS WILD AND YOUNG,
TEN SUNS WERE HUNG
UP IN THE SKY

AT THE EMPEROR'S COMMAND, (TEN SONS OF MINE,)

THEY SCORCHED THE LAND (THEIR WILL DIVINE)

PEOPLE WOULD DIE

(AND ALL LOOKS RIGHT FROM HEAVEN,

ALL IS RIGHT IN PARADISE,

ALL IS PERFECT FOR MY SONS)

SUNS DON'T CARE IF PEOPLE BURN,

THEY CANNOT LEARN,

THEY CAN'T BE KIND

SUNS BRING HUNGER, SUNS BRING DROUGHT,

THEY KEEP US OUT,

THEY MAKE US BLIND,

SO WE REMAIN YET BLIND...

...and the Archer went on to sing.

    In theory, this lyric contained all the information necessary for the audience to understand the story to come. In practice, its unstructured unpacking led to confusion in test audiences. Who are these characters? Where are these characters? Why should we care that these suns/sons are giving them a hard time?

    While I was trying to find a backbone for the song, another issue presented itself. The song was a lot of naked complaining. It set an unpalatably heavy, dour tone, and it wasn't emotionally genuine; I feel like the harder times get, the more necessary humor, levity, and flippancy become in confronting and enduring them. The song, in dealing with mass suffering so bluntly, robbed the situation of its human edge, and as such its human stakes.

    The eventual final draft of the song has the laborers playing a game of "I have it worse" one-upsmanship with each other. Like magic, that well-defined form of that dramatic framework solved all my problems. By having characters, instead of the omniscient Ensemble, parcel out the information, the audience could digest it more easily, both intellectually and emotionally.

I looked up "suffering olympics" and got this. -Z

"Those unlucky ones/had to brave ten suns..."

Exemplary albums (that aren't musical theatre)

 The Yazbeck Challenge: go a year without listening to any musical theatre. (I'm still trying.)

POP

• Heaven & Hell, Ava Max.
• five seconds flat, Lizzy McAlpine.
• Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Chappell Roan.

ROCK

• Bat out of Hell, Bat out of Hell II, Meat Loaf.
• Terrapin Station, Grateful Dead.
• Ghost in the Machine, The Police.
• Innuendo, Queen.
• The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance.
• HOLY FVCK, Demi Lovato.

SINGER-SONGWRITER

• Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder.
• Mingus, Joni Mitchell.
• Grace, Jeff Buckley.
• The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Ben Folds Five.
• Book of Travelers, Gabriel Kahane.
• Slowmotionary, Ethan Gruska.

JAZZ

• Compact Dizzy Gillespie, Dizzy Gillespie.
• Chet Baker Sings, Chet Baker.
• A Love Supreme, John Coltrane.
• Heavy Weather, Weather Report.

CLASSICAL

• Serenade for Strings, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
• Ein Heldenleben, Richard Strauss.
• Agnus Dei, Samuel Barber.
• Fratres, Arvo Pärt.
• Earbox, John Adams.

OPERA

• Don Giovanni, Mozart.
• Otello, Giuseppe Verdi.
• Iolanta, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
• Akhnaten, Philip Glass.

OTHER

• Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares: Ritual, Bulgarian State Television Female Choir.
• Scratch My Back, Peter Gabriel.
• Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, Lupe Fiasco.
• Aluminum Overcast, Early Gray.
• Toilet, Clown Core.

On "Magpie's Song"

(The eponymous opening number.)

THE OPENING.

    Four years into working into this musical, Magpie's Song, I wrote the first drafts of the opening and closing numbers within the same handful of hours.

    The problem I was trying to solve was one of dramatic action. The evening was already crammed with story, so an opening saturated with unrelated narrative content (which works in the case of, say, "Kesa" from See What I Wanna See, but not for this piece) would overload an audience's attention. The key to unlocking the song was realizing the song's real purpose. In it, Magpie has to create the theatrical, musical environment for the evening. That she may tell her stories, she needs a theatre, and she needs to bring the audience into the heightened space of musical drama. if I could parcel out that space-making act over the course of a song, turn it into a progression of its own, I had an opening number. That structural backbone gave me everything I needed to write a number with development, but without story.

    In this first draft, the opening and first verse were flipped: the song started with Magpie asking the audience to buy into her performance, then she broadened into her meditation on theatre. My director Tomás suggested I write in a stronger opening gesture. Instead of dragging my face through the rusty cheese grater of rewriting, I reversed their order. This had two major benefits. One, grappling with human nature proved to be a much more powerful opening gambit than meekly asking for the audience's generous investment in a musical. Two, it made Magpie into a more potently mythic, theatrical figure, and that power carried with her through the song and the show.

    All this reminds me of Craig Lucas's masterclass- in it, he speculates that opening lines have a fractal relationship to the piece as a whole. This analysis certainly holds true for Magpie's Song. "When we gather in the darkness/one voice calls us all the same..."

THE INSTRUMENTAL.

    Because Magpie lives between the evening's three very disparate worlds, this most exposed song (along with the closing number) had to thread the needle of setting up the evening's musical language without privileging any constituent sound or musical vocabulary. At first, my instinct was to use motifs from each story in equal admixture. Experimenting with this only ever ended up producing abortive fragments that sounded tame and clinical. The opening number needed to be galvanizing, especially because it asks of the audience three stories' worth of attention and investment and investment instead of just one. It certainly couldn't sound like an intellectual exercise when Magpie herself is a force of intuition and subconscious energy.

     I went back to basics, staring at my WWJD (What Would Jeanine Do) bracelet. The music should be reflecting the dramatic action. In the song, Magpie is unpacking the most elemental materials of theatrical storytelling. The music, therefore, should have Magpie unpacking the most elemental materials of music. That, for me, was a major scale, in all its boundless possibility and bedrock simplicity. I took that scale and spun from it two hard-rocking riffs.

    Those two riffs plus a sus chord, all permuted over various harmonizations, constitute the building blocks of the opening and closing numbers. They're also meant to represent, at least conceptually, the building blocks of music itself.

THE BRIDGE.

    Here, having animated the stage, Magpie starts bringing her players to life. They introduce themselves on terms that link the characters they'll play: Vega/the Firework Vendor is "open skies", Archer/Old Hunter is "wise old age". It plants the idea in the audience that these characters, and these stories, rhyme in unexpected ways, even as their forms and styles contrast so strikingly.

    The original draft of the piece had the same actor play Apprentice and Lead Hunter, with Altair playing Young Hunter. When we were holding auditions, a singer came in with such a wonderfully vulnerable presence. I had the epiphany that seeing that person go on the Apprentice's journey would be so much more horrifying, and seeing that person make the Young Hunter's choice would be so much more deliciously ambiguous. That actor ended up not being a part of the Yale production, but the decision to switch made the show and characters richer. "Give me a young man's eyes". 

    I always try to write "tight" songs, reusing material within an inch of its life. In the case of a song like this, whose raw materials are so plain, I was right on the knife's edge of writing something earth-bound. The moment when the harmony on "miracles" cracks open, it's like the ocean of the greater world pours into the evening- it's so magical to me, and that's when I feel the show really comes to life every night I sing it.

THE CHORUS.

    The freshly-animated ensemble joins Magpie, and supports her through the end of the song. Magpie asks the audience for the order in which they'd like to hear their stories, then the show begins in earnest.

"Give us a hand,/'cause now the story must begin."

Words to avoid in songs

At the very least, handle with extreme caution. This list will only grow.

MUSICAL THEATRE CLICHÉS:

More than anything

Welcome to...

My [body part] says...

...is tearing me/us apart

HYPERBOLIC OR ARCHAIC LANGUAGE:

Bear, as in to bear a weight

Erase, as in to erase the past

Shatter, as in to be shattered by something

Fate (see also bad apple rhymes)

BAD APPLE RHYMES:

Strife: Life or wife.

Unfurl: Girl.

Chore: More.