On "It's Coming Down"

    This song was, in small part, inspired by "The Western Wall". That number culminates in full-throated rock counterpoint, complete with an electric guitar soloing over not one, but two riffing vocalists. When I first saw the piece, I remember that musical climax pushing me right to my saturation point, and relenting right when I felt I couldn't take in any more information.

    "It's Coming Down" was an exercise in pushing past that point, and accessing total musical overwhelm as a dramatic affect. The counterpoint is too dense with layers for the audience to grasp; the richness and dissonance of the texture makes it impossible to catch anything more than fragments of lyrical and melodic information. Just when the ear has had enough, the counterpoint muscles forward with renewed ferocity as the band slams out huge stabs, a thundering heartbeat. The effect is totally disorienting and overwhelming, and simulates for the listener how Archer is trying, and failing, to "block out the noise". In the heat of the moment, he can't center himself, so neither can the audience's ear.

    If Johann Joseph Fux were alive to hear this, he'd have a heart attack, which delights me to no end. Dramatic music affords the adventurous composer the freedom to pursue musical ideas that wouldn't hold up to standards of clarity and cohesion in a piece of concert or pop music.

    When I was looking for visual references for Magpie's Song, I found this painting of Hou Yi shooting down the suns. I loved the imagery of the Emperor's sons being birds, and the undeniable pile of broken bodies accumulated in frame. This idea never found its way into the show, because the sons being birds gets confusing when Vega is a human woman, but the image has always stuck with me, so I wanted to share it here.

    "Just hold on tighter to keep my hands from shaking..."

Art on Art

In no particular order, a living list of my favorites:

    FICTION

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (particularly Chapter 8), Calvino.

Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, Kafka.

    ESSAYS

The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke.

The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger.

"The Storyteller", Benjamin.

    MUSIC

Lempicka (particularly "I Will Paint Her" and "Just This Way"), Gould + Kreitzer.

"Finishing the Hat", Sondheim.

"Now Feels Bigger than the Past", Stevens.

    OTHER WORKS

Faust, "2. Prelude on the Stage", Goethe.

Ramon Subercaseaux in a Gondola, Singer Sargent.

If you'd leave your favorites in the comments, I'd love to seek them out. I adore art on art.

Dinner with a broadway composer

    The other day, I was fortunate enough to cap a summer spent working as an intern/assistant to a broadway composer I'll leave unnamed with a dinner, where I asked them all the questions I had about life as a professional songwriter for musical theatre. Here are some of the most valuable things they imparted, the sorts of things I'm glad I had someone tell me instead of learning the long way 'round. I write this in the spirit they brought to the dinner: the will to share the factets of building a life in musical theatre it's hard to teach, or talk about.

    A lot of our conversation was them explaining the mechanics of three levels of theatre-making: off-off-Broadway, off-Broadway, and Broadway.

OFF-OFF-BROADWAY.

    The world of day jobs, where everybody starts. There's no commercial producers, and no money. Theatre spaces will pay you hundreds of dollars, at most, to put up your pieces, and they're run by one or two people, so getting them to know you and your work is the way you get your foot in the door.

    These small theatres are good sites to mount productions, but so too are concert spaces- Joe's Pub is on the high end, but spaces like it could entertain concert productions and readings.

    All spheres of theatremaking rely on personal connections, but the preprofessional/early professional space especially so. This is alarming to a strange bird introvert like me, who finds many interactions difficult to navigate and draining. Two things this composer said about their experience reassured me: one, that everyone in the theatre world is a little strange, so any fumbling I would feel inside my skin would get lost in the noise, and two, that it took them years and years to meet his closest collaborators. It was a decade or so into their work in the theatre to meet a director collaborator they've worked with on 3 of their shows, for example. I hope those observations are as reassuring and galvanizing to you as they were to me.

OFF-BROADWAY.

    Off-Broadway is the world of commission work. An off-Broadway theatre, like the Signature or MCC, will pay you a flat fee- a little less than a year's wages for "a year's work" (it takes about a year, if not less, for them to write a show, so their year counts for more than the rest of us). The good news: if your show is a commercial bomb, you're still paid the same. The bad news: if your show is a commercial smash, you're still paid the same. Your revenue comes exclusively from the commission.

    The people who will be securing you these commissions on the institution's behalf are artistic directors; they're who you're going to want to ensure you make a connection with in order to get your work developed and produced at a professional standard.

BROADWAY.

    Usually, getting to Broadway looks like a producer "swooping in" on a show and buying its rights. For about five years, as the show continues to be developed, you don't see money for it, even up through the production process for Broadway. Then, once the show opens, you get a healthy cut of the box office royalties.

    Big productions abroad pay similarly well to Broadway royalties for the duration of their runs. Licensing rights from smaller productions are individually insignificant; a show has to be produced a fair bit for it to be an appreciable source of income instead of a respectable cushion. Fiscally speaking, having a show stay open on Broadway seems preferable to a hit on the community theatre circuit seems preferable to a show that the musical theatre intelligentsia drool over.

BEYOND BROADWAY.

    I was surprised by how open this composer was talking about writing with commercial ambition. Because I characterized them as a more artsy, experimental writer, it was a shock to hear them say they modeled the structure of one of their flagship shows off of Les Mis, and wrote it with Broadway ambitions from the start, though they were still working well off-broadway at its inception. They talked about how a show of theirs with a cast of 4, virtually no set, and low barrier to musical entry was one of their most popular shows on the amateur theatre circuit. They contrasted this with pieces they've written that demanded virtuosic singers and performers, and pieces that were intensely personal and linked to recent events. Those pieces never find the same foothold after their flagship productions, and they don't contribute significantly to this composer's income.

    I'd also noticed this tendency towards actively working to make pieces produceable in Adam Guettel, who originally orchestrated Light in the Piazza for piano trio (though that didn't last), and deliberately wrote Days of Wine and Roses for two and a half singers. It seems to me that the more one's tendencies skew off the beaten path, the more actively one needs to think about steering one's pieces back towards being feasible to perform and stage on the community theatre level. After all, that's the stage on which pieces find their longevity, audience, and sustainable profit, all the things you want as a career artist.

PARTING NOTES.

    An agent shouldn't start your career, but join your career. When you get to the point where it would be useful to have someone to advocate and negotiate on your behalf with institutions and producers, or read contracts with you, talk to theatre artists you admire who are doing what you want to do and ask who's representing them. That'll point you towards where you need to go.

    This composer recommended to me the book "Song of Spider-Man", by Glenn Berger, the second bookwriter hired to fix "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark". We were talking about how quotidian the day-to-day of writing and developing a Broadway musical seems to be, and they said that book described that tension well. When I get around to reading it, I'll be sure to post about it.

I googled the contents of our meal in their entirety; here's the first google result.

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
• "El Sapukai", Tierra Adentro (can't speak to the lyrics; hope there's no slurs, etc.)

    "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...

"That was lesson one. Let's begin..."

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:

"The original version of "Any Way The Wind Blows" is exactly the kind of "poetic portraiture" that Rachel [Chavkin] would have cautioned me against... a concert audience is happy to trance out during three and a half minutes of music and poetry, but a theatre audience demands action from a song. It wants a song to have results, revelations, or both. The "suspension of time" that I find so mystical in the music world has another name in the theatre: stasis, the enemy of drama."

    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..."