On "Without You"

     I hold the idea of leitmotifs at arms length. I understand the dramatic appeal, but I often find its execution, as a composer and a listener, overwhelmingly literal. Plus, it's often the case that when I try to assign a given piece of musical material a very literal dramatic meaning, I'm confronted by two issues: one, that in an entirely appropriate moment, I'm instead pulled towards another musical solution, or two, that in an entirely inappropriate moment, I find myself wanting to deploy an 'out of place' motif.

    That said, even though I write intuitively, I can't tell you the number of times a motif takes on a very clear meaning post-facto. I think of it this way: if it's true that musical material carries with it emotional and semantic connotations, even if you use it whenever you want, you only want to use it when it serves the dramatic moment. By looking at when you used it retroactively, you figure out the long way 'round what meaning its presence carries for your story, and the total effect is often much more naturalistic and sophisticated than if you ham-fistedly try and force a meaning onto your material in advance.

    A great example of this is the vamp that forms the accompaniment for much of "Without You". That accompaniment actually started in a song called "Duty", which was ultimately cut when I replaced the Demagogue with the Apprentice. I liked it quite a bit, though, so I used that figure to introduce "You Go", and then again to close "Eternity", both of which I wrote before "Without You". (I further used the RH figure all over the place, from "Ten Suns" to "Jade Rabbit"- have fun spotting it throughout the War Story.)

    When I finally got to "Without You", then, I knew it'd be based off of that musical cell. One, because it's only ever been associated with the Wife's presence, and two, because it's so strong and singular within the palate of the War Story, it would stand out like a sore thumb if it didn't get a 'source song'. So I combined it with the sus2 figure from the bridge of "You Go" and got that AABA figure the Wife, and later the Apprentice, sing. The song in context turned out to run at a clip, as to keep the momentum up at a moment when the story is hurtling towards its conclusion.

    It took until after the first production at Yale that I realized what was going on with the motif. It's slowest when the Wife is sickest and the heat is most oppressive, it's a little bit faster after the suns have been shot out of the sky, and it's finally liquid-smooth when she begins her recovery. That music is her life force, and over the course of the evening, we get these windows into her vitality and hear it return to her bit by bit as the motif loses its sluggishness. I'm certainly not clever enough to plan something that sophisticated, but I'm just clever enough to lean into it, and build that discovery into my process.

    TL;DR: Instead of setting out to write leitmotifs, try developing material more freely throughout your score, then stepping back and capitalizing on the patterns that developed intuitively. You may discover your hindbrain has been smarter than your forebrain ever could be. (Jason knows what I'm talking about.)

"I'm getting stronger here without you/But getting stronger isn't getting better/When you're who all my strength is for..."

On "The Sun Shines on You"

(I almost skipped over this one by accident. Can you believe it?)

    The difference, to me, between an opera (a through-composed form) and a musical (a song-structured form) is a rhythm of expectation. In an opera, at least post-Wagner, you don't have a sense of what musical material is going to come back when. If a motif, or a melody, recurs, it's always a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, when you're working within the context of song form, you can deliver on or subvert an audience's intuitions of what comes next. It's another way of playing them, almost physiologically.

    I'm always looking, then, for new song forms- if you get trapped in AABA/ABABCB for a whole score, it takes on a homogeneity, but without a backbone, the audience loses its sense of gravity, as often happens late in megamusical-style through-sung pieces. Here's an incomplete list of alternative possibilities, some of which I've looked into and some of which I haven't:

• ABAC (As in "The Sun Shines On You", but also "Jade Rabbit (Mercy)", at least subcutaneously.)
• AAAA
• Sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation (Resembles AABA, until you factor in that you're expositing two contrasting melodies.)
• ABA
• ABAB
• Rhapsody: no/very limited repetition
• Half-choruses
• Symphonic structure, mass structure, etc. (See Heather Christian's work.)

    The point is to understand, at root, that you're playing with expectations- if you're not in the business of setting up pins, you can't be surprised when you don't get the payoff of knocking them down. Song form is a hyper-powerful way to do it, and it's one of the reasons I call myself a songwriter more often than I call myself a composer. And that's why I'm campaigning to bring back ABAC*, one song at a time.

"And if I want to write that wrong/I'll have to take what I deserve..."

*Look, I know that if I want to do it really right, I repeat the hook at the end of the C. That didn't happen in this show, womp womp. I'll keep working on it.

A brief lexigraphic note

Here's the standard I like to adopt-

Theatre: the practice

Theater: the building it happens in

-and it hasn't failed me yet.

Range: a call for a sane approach

Look. I get it. I really, really do.

But we have to take a step back from the arms race towards uniquely treble-heavy, throaty voices.

    It's not a new phenomenon- in fact, it's ticked on quietly since the beginning. In 1952, John Raitt took the climax of Carousel's legendary "Soliloquy" up to a high Bb. In 1970, Ian Gillian screamed out an epic, full-throated G in Jesus Christ Superstar's "Gethsemane". What do A Little Night Music (1973) and Les Misérables (1980) have in common? Big fat Bs, that's what, in "Who am I" and "Later" respectively. And that's only the low voices.

    Such athleticism has always been inherently dramatic and deeply thrilling, and while vocal technique may have changed, the reasonable limits and reachable extremes of the human throat have not. Plus, the Mister Golightlys of the world make up their own delightful cottage industry. I'm not against this phenomenon- of deploying superstar notes on superstar vocalists for exceptional theatrical effect.

    What troubles me is when notes that were once extremes become expectations. A decade ago, tenor repertoire regularly topped out at Gs and As. Massively popular, and massively marketed, shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Moulin Rogue pushed that envelope to Bbs and Bs; now, the ubiquity of pieces written like The Great Gatsby, The Lost Boys, and Two Strangers Carry A Cake Across New York (hell, even fucking Paddington is all-in on the arms race) suggest that the genie has left the bottle. All the while, the number of roles for the outermost vocal extremes- basses and head-heavy sopranos- have dwindled dramatically. (I suspect this is because these voices are at their most thrilling when they're most relaxed, which thwarts a contemporary audience's taste for strain. As Sting puts it, there's no such thing as a heavy metal baritone.)

These standards are harmful for three major reasons (though I'd love to hear more in the comments):

1) Few singers can do it. When you write for remarkably virtuosic vocalists, not only do you limit the number of professionals willing to take your work on, you also make the piece inaccessible to amateur spaces. What's to be done: Cap your tenors at a G or A, cap your altos at a C or D.

2) It's unhealthy. No voice is too gifted to be overtaxed. Especially in a commercial context, where performers are singing eight shows a week and not infrequently rehearsing or teaching during the day, the risk for fatigue and damage is substantial, and is its own stressor on top of the score's demands. (I mean, listen to Eden Espinoza post-Lempicka. But apparently she asked for it.) What's to be done: Normalize doublecasting intense vocal tracks, so that no single performer is expected to push their limits eight shows a week.

3) It sounds homogenous. The voices that are, and can be, cultivated to operate comfortably in extreme high registers tend to be timbrally light, even thin. A well-rounded cast counterweights treble, and provides a sense of contrast that keeps the ear more fully engaged. What's to be done: Commit to writing for a variety of voices, not only in range, but in style.

    We songwriters are the job-creators. We have the power and the responsibility to make these changes, for the better of the musical theatre cultural ecosystem. I, for one, am going to do my part.

...right after OVERMAN.

This is a review

Passion is good.*

Jesus Christ Superstar is good, and kicks ass.

The Lost Boys kicks ass.**

--

*Sondheim's best. Fight me.

**I really enjoyed The Lost Boys.

Songwriting sins

 A continuation from these lyrical sins. I'll continue to update this list as I discover more. First recognized, for the most part, in of my own writing...

• The bVII chord.
• Unresolved sus chords and add 2 chords.
• Playing the riff twice, then singing over it.
• Using Latin grooves or an oom-pah beat to signify It's A Comedy Song.
• Complex piano riffs that fill virtually every beat, just because you can play them.
• emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble, particularly repeated mis-emphasis.
• The same groove, song after song after song after song...
• Ending a phrase with a short modulation so we "don't get bored of the key".
• Whatever possessed Billy Joel to write "State of Grace". I mean, christ.

On "Eternity"

    As of 2 minutes ago, I just finished a new lyric for this song. Though the music of "Eternity" has remained almost unchanged from its first draft, the lyric has received more rewrites than, I believe, any other moment in the show.

    For much of its life, it was a solo number for the Archer, who delivered it to an otherwise unresponsive Wife, too feeble to interject. The intent was to show the way he needed to leap over himself to justify leaving, highlighting that the decision was a fundamentally self-interested one, rather than a heroic sacrifice. That didn't land, not only because I wasn't able to make the lyric stick the emotional landing, but because the Wife needed to be engaged in the scene. That meant she would need to sing.

    This had the added benefit of giving the Archer something to respond to. His turn to vulnerability is no longer a neurotic shirking of guilt, but the softening of a brave face; it's much more sympathetic. (Even so, a part of me laments the loss. I enjoy a less-than-heroic Archer.) The issue, though, is that now both characters had very few syllables with which to express themselves. I tried to add in a short chorus, but alas, the austere simplicity of the AABA bound me too tightly. So it's been a continual process of futzing with the lyrics down to the morpheme so all the emotional, and dramatic, information gets deployed comprehensibly and artfully. Hence, the long gestation process.

    This is the sort of song my lyric writing professor would call a "hookless wonder". He warned me they were very difficult to pull of, and I believe him a lot more now than I did when he first told me. What he DIDN'T warn me about, though, was how damn hard these were to title. For a while, the song was called "Make Our Moments Stay", and the Archer sang it in both the first and last verse. When I removed it from the first voice, the title no longer seemed to stick. I settled on "Eternity" because "The Potion" felt too removed, and "Eternity" was a word both the Archer and the Wife end up singing. I'm happy to solicit a better title in the comments.

    Here's the new lyric in full. Let's all pray this is the one that sticks, no?

Archer:

DON'T GET UP.

DRINK THIS ELIXIR AND YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER.

THE EMPEROR FORGAVE ME,

AND GAVE ME LIFE AMONG THE STARS.

YOU TAKE THIS NOW.

I'LL JOIN YOU THERE SOMEHOW.

AND THEN ETERNAL LIFE IS OURS.
I'LL SEE TO IT ETERNAL LIFE IS OURS.

Wife:

LIFE AMONG THE STARS, WHAT A MARVEL.

I'M DEEPLY GRATEFUL, BUT I COULD NEVER TAKE THIS.

WHAT GOOD'S ETERNITY,

IF I CAN'T SPEND IT HERE WITH YOU?

I KNOW YOU'VE TRIED.

NOW STAY HERE BY MY SIDE,

AND FILL MY DAYS UNTIL THEY'RE THROUGH.

WE'LL BE TOGETHER 'TILL MY DAYS ARE THROUGH.

Archer:

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M SAYING.

IF I MUST, I WOULD CLIMB ANY MOUNTAIN, CROSS ANY SEA.
IF I MUST, I WOULD HOLD HEAVEN HOSTAGE 'TILL THEY AGREE.

HOWEVER SMALL THE ODDS,

I'D TAKE THEM OVER STANDING BY.

I CAN'T BEAR TO WATCH YOU DIE.

I CAN'T STOP HOPING

THAT SOMEWHERE THERE'S AN ANSWER.

SOME WAY TO BRING YOU BACK.

SOME WAY WE BOTH CAN MAKE IT THROUGH.

I'LL FIND A WAY

TO MAKE OUR MOMENTS STAY,

OR I'LL COME RIGHT BACK HOME TO YOU.

I PROMISE I'LL COME RIGHT BACK HOME TO YOU.

    Singing them back to myself, I just started crying. I think that's as good a sign as any, no?